If you’ve ever looked at your desktop PC and thought to yourself, “I love the power, but this thing is just too darn big!” then you’ll want to housebreak this baby wildebeest of a PC. Intel nailed the code-name when it dubbed its latest NUC-branded desktop, the NUC 11 Extreme Kit, “Beast Canyon.” It’s the largest Intel NUC we’ve tested to date, blurring the line between small form-factor (SFF) PCs and their full desktop equivalents. Sent to us in what looks like a radiation-proof canister, this semi-compact PC practically glows with performance. Our review sample (starts at $1,150; $1,350 plus components, as tested) is impressively kitted out, and the Beast Canyon model has enough potency to contend with desktops twice its size or more, and could be the perfect choice for living-room gamers who need to save space. To bring out the beast in your PC gaming, maybe all you need to do is bring this Beast in. Just be ready to install some of your own parts.
The Design: The Classic Mini Muscles Up
NUC stands for “Next Unit of Computing,” Intel’s longtime brand originally designed to push innovation in small desktop PCs that can employ its mobile processors. When NUCs first hit the scene, they were a way for Intel to proffer and promote mobile processors in a desktop context, bridging the gap between compact Mini-ITX PCs (using full-brew desktop CPUs) and laptops. In the early days, the product line proved best suited for applications such as digital signage, onsite diagnostics, and productivity work in cramped cubicles.
The Beast Canyon NUC 11 is NUC’s farthest cry yet from its original “mini” concept. Laid flat, the bulky body of this NUC measures 14.1 inches front to back, 7.4 inches wide, and 4.7 inches high. This makes it the largest NUC yet and reasonably puts the NUC 11 Extreme well within the range of being mistaken for a full-fledged desktop PC. If it’s the console look you’re going for, though, this box is footprint-comparable but a whole bunch taller.
As mentioned, Intel sent our NUC 11 Extreme tester in a giant, looming hex cylinder made of wood, resembling some component extracted from a nuclear warhead that dropped in from a 1980s action thriller…
Note that this is promotional packaging, and retail units will not ship in the giant black wood enclosure. But it makes a strong first impression.
This NUC 11 is made to stand out, loud and proud, on your desk and not hide, say, in a cubbyhole or behind books on a shelf. Then you’d be covering up that sweet skull logo on the front of the case!
Like the Intel NUC11PHKi7C, the NUC11BTMi9 comes with an engraved skull logo glowing out of one side. (This time, it’s on the front of the chassis.) However, unlike that model, Beast Canyon steps things up a bit, with controllable RGB and some underside “ground effects” lighting reminiscent of auto modding.
The logo has become a staple of high-performance NUCs, and although we’re personally not the biggest fans of the look, the panel displays in any customized RGB pattern you want, including the option to turn it off completely. You can also remove the panel using a hex wrench, if you so choose, and fashion and insert your own cutout logo in light-passing film if you are creative-minded.
Our test model falls under Intel’s “Kit” class of NUCs. (Some of Intel’s NUC PCs are sold as bare-bones Kit models, asking you to supply certain components and an operating system yourself, while others are sold as fully configured PCs, often in volume to commercial customers.) The NUC 11 Extreme Kit starts at $1,150 MSRP, and comes in two variants based on either a Core i7-11700B or a Core i9-11900KB processor. (The i9 comes in at $1,350 for the bare-bones NUC11BTMi9 model, which is the basis for the version we tested.) Though you won’t be able to buy this PC as a preconfigured, turnkey system, Intel sent our test model set up for use straight out of the box, ahem, atomic canister, complete with 16GB of dual-channel DDR4 memory clocked to 3,200MHz, an Asus-branded Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card, and a 500GB Sabrent Rocket 4.0 SSD with Windows 10 already installed.
The Return of the Compute Element
At the center of this PC, and of several of Intel’s late-model Extreme-class NUCs, is its modular Compute Element. Compute Element is in essence the guts of a system in an expansion-card format, allowing for easy interchangeability and upgrades. (See our explainer on the Compute Element concept.) The bare-bones model on which our testing sample is based, model NUC11BTMi9, features the Core i9 version of the NUC Extreme 11 Compute Element, with the Element containing both the motherboard and the CPU soldered into one card that’s connected to the rest of the system via a PCIe x16 Gen4 slot. Here, you can see the Element with the video card removed from in front of it…
Here, meanwhile, is where any video card you install gets parked, in front of the Compute Element in its own slot…
The Compute Element slot is housed on a backplane board, creatively named the “Intel NUC Board Element,” on the bottom of the chassis. Compute Element is a part of Intel’s modular computing push, which has been a pillar of the NUC ecosystem since 8th Generation processors were launched by the company. In essence, the modules released by Intel are designed to easily swap in and out of systems as the years go on, making upgrades faster, easier, and (in theory) more affordable over time.
The Compute Element contains support for up to 64GB of dual-channel DDR4 memory across two SO-DIMM slots, has four M.2 slots capable of supporting up to 80mm (Type-2280) SSDs, with two of those that can be Type-2242 or -2280 PCH-attached NVMe or SATA3 SSDs in RAID mode. The Compute Element also supports Intel Optane Memory M10, H10, or H20, and is Optane SSD-ready. Intel is also selling the Compute Elements separately from the full kit for either $780 or $980, depending on whether you get the Core i7 or Core i9 card.
As noted, our NUC11BTMi9 model came fitted out with the 65-watt Intel Core i9-11900KB, an eight-core/16-thread 11th Generation CPU with a base clock of 3.3GHz and a maximum boost clock of 4.9GHz. This is a full desktop chip, not a laptop one, but it is rated around 400MHz slower on the Max Turbo Boost clocking than the standard Intel Core i9-11900K.
In some ways this NUC reminds us of the “sleeper” community of desktop PC case modifiers, who will restore an old Dell or Gateway PC from the 1990’s, logo and all, only to hide a top-end gaming PC inside.
But unlike those custom jobs, which are often just as large as they were 20 years ago, this sleeper is all about hiding an immense amount of power in the smallest space possible. Intel preconfigured our test model with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, however the NUC11BTMi9 will fit a dual-slot graphics card up to 12 inches long. The included PSU gives you two eight-pin power connectors. This excludes true monster cards like the MSI GeForce RTX 3090 Surpim X 24G from the conversation, but they won’t fit, anyway, and Intel can only do so much to beat the laws of thermodynamics, right?
But this means even top-end cards like the 11.2-inch Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition are on the table, and when you can pair a card with that much power together with either a Core i7 or an i9, you have a serious amount of gaming potential stuffed into a box not much bigger than your average toaster.
Plugging It All In: Connectivity and Ports
As an enthusiast/professional-grade system, the Beast Canyon NUC comes with bevy of connectivity options, most of them hosted on the rear plane of its Compute Element card. Unlike an ordinary desktop PC that would have most of the ports poking through a conventional I/O plate from your motherboard, the lion’s share of the NUC’s ports are part of the Compute Element. As a result, your ports end up on two vertical banks, one for the Compute Element and one for your video card…
The loadout on the Compute Element includes two Thunderbolt 4 ports, an RJ-45 Ethernet jack, six rear Type-A USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, and an HDMI 2.0b-out (the last for use with the integrated graphics on the Core i9 chip). You also get the video outputs on whatever graphics card you install. On the front, under a lip near the bottom, you’ll find an SDXC card slot, a mic-in/headphone-out audio combo jack, and two Type-A USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports.
Above the front USB ports you have your power button, and underneath the matte-black case lid you’ll find chips that enable compatibility with the Wi-Fi 6 AX201 standard, as well as Bluetooth 5.0.
Most of the M.2 slotting is accessed via the PC’s topside, and on the Compute Element itself, but if you flip the case, you will see a hatch in the underside…
You can install one of the M.2 SSDs from down here without pulling the Compute Element or your video card.
Testing Beast Canyon: Itty-Bitty Body, Roaring Performance
With so many premium parts on board, the strong benchmark returns of the Beast Canyon NUC come as no surprise. The relatively new 11th Generation Core i9-11900KB CPU is an odd duck, a “Tiger Lake” CPU that shares a name (but for one letter) with Intel’s 11th Generation “Rocket Lake” desktop flagship, the Core i9-11900K. We’ve never seen that “KB” CPU in action before, so that makes it difficult to compare our test model with anything else current-gen out there on a 1:1 basis. Here are the closest systems we could find to feed to the Beast…
Some of these were bare-bones models; others came to us as full-configured PCs. Note that the NUC 9 Extreme Kit is a larger, unique SFF model that employs an earlier round of Intel’s Compute Elements (based on 9th Generation Core CPUs), in the same vein as the NUC 11 Extreme Kit. (See more about how we test desktops.)
To an extent, testing the NUC 11 Extreme Kit is academic, as the specific aftermarket parts that you choose to install will have a great effect on final benchmark scores, and you can’t buy a preconfigured model from Intel. But the raw scores below that press the CPU to the max will be the most telling in your day-to-day work. Gaming scores, meanwhile, will largely hinge on the video card you buy, as the Core i9 (at least based on our testing of the Rocket Lake Core i9-11900K) should be no impediment to frame rates at any resolution or detail setting.
Our first test, PCMark 10, is a holistic performance suite developed by the PC benchmark specialists at UL. It simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet work, web browsing, and videoconferencing. The test generates a proprietary numeric score; higher numbers are better.
As the most powerful NUC released yet, the regular wins that you’ll see in any tasks that require a lot of computing power should come as no surprise.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Once again, the core and boost clock advantage of the NUC 11 Extreme Kit comes in handy here, putting this mini PC way ahead of the pack in performance.
In the Handbrake test, which measures how quickly (or not, in the case of mini PCs like the MSI Cubi 5 10M) the test PCs can convert a video from 4K to 1080p, the NUC 11 Extreme Kit prevailed again…
Though NUCs or mini PCs wouldn’t be our first choice for heavy-duty video work, the NUC 11 Extreme kit, like the Intel NUC 9 Extreme Kit, fares well when tasked with the job.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image, timing each operation and adding up the total. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here. The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
The Beast Canyon NUC closes out our round of tests with a final win, cementing its place as the most powerful in the category that we’ve tested so far.
Graphics Tests
To evaluate graphics performance, we ran the Beast Canyon NUC through few game benchmarks, as well as synthetic tests under UL’s seminal 3DMark graphics-testing suite and Unigine’s Superposition game simulation. Of course, your mileage will vary according to the card you install…
With so much room under the hood, the Superposition performance we saw in our benchmarks are just the tip of the iceberg for what might be possible if you combine the NUC11BTMi9 with some serious GPU horsepower. Aforementioned cards like the RTX 3080 Ti Founders Edition have proven to be some of the most powerful we’ve ever tested in many cases, and if you can afford to fit one of those in this case, you’ve got one heck of gaming machine waiting to go almost anywhere with you.
Real World Gaming Tests
We then used our staple titles Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider at 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p (4K) to gauge some real world graphics frame rates. To repeat: The overwhelming factor here will be the video card you buy and install. This is an RTX 3060 in action on the NUC 11 Extreme and an RTX 2070 on the NUC 9 Extreme…
These numbers are just a few frames off from what we saw in testing the similar EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 XC Black Gaming 12G earlier this year, and that on our optimized tower testbed with a Core i9-10900K CPU. Given the size of this PC, the platform is no real impediment to realizing the potential of your video card.
Verdict: A Monster in Its Element
While many NUCs in Intel’s lineup could be stashed in the cargo pocket of a big pair of shorts, the NUC 11 Extreme Kit, aka Beast Canyon, sits on the opposite end of the spectrum, and would definitely tear your pants. It’s technically smaller than most desktop PCs we’ve seen before, but still considerably larger than most other NUCs. Thankfully, for all that heft, you get a heck of a lot of power.
The NUC 11 Extreme Kit would be a prime candidate for making the rounds at LAN parties, and its size puts it in the same division as home consoles like the Xbox Series X in terms of footprint. If you’re looking for a console-comparative gaming machine that won’t attract attention (unless you want it to, of course, then flip that RGB skull logo on), it could make a great replacement for a PlayStation 5 or Xbox console, with incomparably better performance hidden under the hood if you shell out for a good video card. (No small investment, these days.) Just know that the retail version of this PC, as the name says, is a kit, and will make you add your own RAM, SSD or SSDs, and video card, as well as load up the machine with an OS of your choice. Factor all those into the final price.
It’s major overkill as a media-streamer-only box, and that applies doubly so for digital signage. (We’d recommend much-lower-profile NUC options like the NUC 11 Pro or NUC 11 Enthusiast Kit for that.) The Beast Canyon is neither understated nor easily camouflaged, two things that advertisers and interactive-experience designers need most when they’re setting up their next public display or kiosk.
No, this NUC is designed for the power-hungry who know they need it, those who want premiere gaming oomph and productivity performance in as small a package as they come. The modular nature of the NUC 11 Compute Element also makes for strong upgrade potential in the future. Not that you would need to upgrade anytime soon, with the kind of power this Beast is pumping out.
