Though public events and tradeshows that call for display kiosks are on ice at the moment, there are still plenty of pertinent uses for Intel’s classic Next Unit of Computing (NUC) family of mini PCs. Newly released models like the NUC 11 Pro Kit NUC11TNKi5 (starting at $450 for a bare-bones model), based on the chipmaker’s “Tiger Canyon” mini PC platform and “Tiger Lake” mobile CPUs, showcase this perfectly.
Petite yet powerful, the NUC11TNKi5 gives you the power of a PC multiple times its size in the palm of your hand. And while diminutive desktops have traditionally attracted very specific customers and niche use cases, the new power budget of options like this one might start to change that narrative for good. While the NUC 11 Pro’s gaming performance is predictably ho-hum (though better than past models’, thanks to new Iris Xe integrated silicon), as a machine made for general work and browsing tasks, it fills its role (and its little chassis) to the fullest. It rates an Editors’ Choice award as one of the best traditional-size small-form-factor (SFF) PCs on shelves today.
A Petite Powerhouse
Introduced in 2013, Intel’s NUC brand revolves around bare-bones kits and preconfigured models of tiny desktop PCs that employ the chip giant’s mobile processors. Dubbed the “Tiger Canyon” NUC during its development and based on the company’s latest laptop-grade CPUs (the 11th Generation Tiger Lake chips), our NUC11TNKi5 came as a preconfigured model ready to run right out of the box, unlike the recently reviewed (and also Editors’ Choice-winning) Intel NUC 11 Enthusiast Kit NUC11PHKi7C, which is meant to be prised open and customized with storage and memory to your power preference.
That said, you can get the NUC 11 Pro bare-bones. Intel sent our sample with a 512GB NVMe SSD and 16GB of SO-DIMM RAM inside. You’ll have to factor these costs (about $80 for that much SO-DIMM RAM, and $50 to $75 for a 512GB PCI Express M.2 SSD) atop the $450 base price if you want to replicate our model, plus the cost of a Windows 10 license.
The body of the NUC 11 Pro unit measures 4.6 inches front to back, 4.4 inches wide, and 1.45 inches high. You can mount it to a wall or the underside of a desk using an included VESA mount, reducing the footprint just about as far as it can go.
Our test model, part of Intel’s Pro line of NUCs, features a Core i5-1135G7—a four-core, eight-thread 11th Gen CPU with base and boost clock speeds of 2.4GHz and 4.2GHz, respectively. For the jobs that this category of machine is made to handle, that kind of power is usually more than enough to get users where they want to go without slowing them down.
As noted above, our NUC11TNKi5 came with 16GB of memory. The SO-DIMM DDR4 memory (in this case, as one module) is clocked to 3,200MHz, although the system can support up to 64GB if you choose to add more RAM after the fact. Windows 10 was preinstalled on our tester model, on a 512GB M.2 solid-state drive. Again, unless you opt for a preconfigured model from a third-party seller, the base kit version of this PC will require you to supply and install these bits yourself.
It’s easy to do it, though, as you can see from the images. Opening the bottom via four screws affords easy access inside. The system allows for two storage drives in two types. The M.2 slot on the mainboard will accept either SATA or PCI Express NVMe drives, as well as Intel Optane Memory modules. Alternatively, you can install an NVMe SSD in the “NVMe Only” slot, so labeled on the PCB.
Note in the images: Our supplied Transcend M.2 SSD is a 42mm (Type-2242) short M.2 module. (Bear that in mind if shopping for a drive for this slot with a bare-bones NUC 11 Pro.) The “NVMe Only” M.2 slot can take more ordinary 80mm-long (Type-2280) drives.
Connectivity and Ports
As a “portability over power” kind of system, the NUC11TNKi5 comes with a surprising number of connectivity options packed into its small chassis. On the front, you’ll find two USB 3.2 ports (with Type-A connectors)…
On the back, there’s an RJ-45 Ethernet jack, two HDMI video outputs (full-size!), another USB 3.2 Type-A port, a USB 2.0 Type-A port, and two Type-C USB4 ports, one of them supporting Thunderbolt 4 and one Thunderbolt 3. The internals of the machine also sport one USB 3.2 on M.2, as well as two USB 2.0 headers, though employing these would be left to very specialized/custom usage cases.
The NUC 11 Pro Kit supports up to four displays in various configurations, depending on the ports you use, the resolutions you’re displaying at, and varying refresh rates. Intel offers a full breakdown of how these possible mixtures play out at this Intel webpage. (We’d reproduce the schematic here, but the allowable combinations are byzantine.) To go to four panels, you would have to connect them via the two HDMIs and the two Thunderbolts.
Next to the front USB ports you have your power button, and beneath the case lid, you’ll find chips that enable compatibility with the Wi-Fi 6 AX201 standard, as well as Bluetooth 5.0.
Testing Tiger Canyon: Keeping Up With the Times
As a midrange choice in Intel’s newest line of NUCs, equipped with Iris Xe integrated graphics, the NUC11TNKi5 is difficult to compare against many of the other mini PCs we’ve tested on a 1:1 basis. But here are the closest systems we could find in the stable…
Some of these choices were barebones, others came to us as full-configured PCs. Note that the NUC 9 Extreme Kit is a larger, unique small-form-factor (SFF) model that employs Intel’s Compute Element modular core component solution. It is a very different animal from this model. (See more about how we test desktop PCs.)
Bear in mind that your performance mileage may vary, depending on the SSD and RAM you install in the NUC Pro 11. Our first performance test, PCMark 10, is a holistic performance suite developed by the benchmark specialists at UL (formerly Futuremark). 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.
Again, we should stress that it’s difficult to avoid apples-to-oranges comparisons in any of these tests, but the NUC 11 Pro Kit easily cleared the 4,000-point mark that shows excellent general productivity pep. It can certainly handle most daily Microsoft Office, video-calling, or web browsing tasks you throw its way.
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, multi-threaded workloads.
Look, if you’re converting giant video files on a NUC, you’re doing it wrong. This isn’t a content-creation workstation and doesn’t perform as one, but we won’t ding it for posting middle-pack scores in this particular category of testing. It holds its own, and the NUC 9 Extreme, again, is in a class of its own (and far, far pricier).
In our Handbrake test, which measures how quickly (or not, in the case of mini PCs like the MSI Cubi 5 10M) a system can transcode a video file from one resolution to another, the new NUC stayed competitive with most of the other options we’ve tested, and did surprisingly well against the NUC 11 Enthusiast Kit…
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.
Here the NUC 11 Pro Kit impressed us a bit, almost sparring with the much beefier (and over twice as expensive) NUC 11 Enthusiast Kit. Go, little guy, go!
Graphics Tests
To evaluate graphics performance, we ran the Intel NUC 11 Pro through a series of synthetic graphics tests, including a pass through 3DMark’s integrated-graphics-friendly Sky Diver and more demanding Fire Strike benchmarks, as well as the Unigine Superposition gaming simulation.
In these tests, the system’s Iris Xe graphics performed as expected—nowhere near competitive with more potent choices with dedicated GPUs, like the GeForce RTX 2060-equipped NUC 11 Enthusiast. If you want a small-form-factor PC suitable for gaming, the NUC11TNKi5 is not your best option. You can see how it is also outpaced by the Radeon Vega 11 integrated graphics processor (IGP) in Asrock’s Ryzen 5-based DeskMini X300.
That said, this is a stronger effort than earlier NUCs based on Intel’s traditionally poky IGPs. Look at the NUC 11 Pro’s graphics results in the 3DMark tests versus those of the Lenovo and MSI minis, which are based on Intel UHD 630 and 620 Graphics, the predecessors to the Iris Xe IGP generation. Intel IGPs are getting better, though you won’t mistake them for dedicated GeForce GTX or RTX chips anytime soon.
Verdict: Hold Onto That Tiger!
While there’s nothing exactly revolutionary happening with the Intel NUC 11 Pro Kit, it’s more about refinement this time around, and we’re perfectly okay with that.
If you’re looking to power some digital signage or just want a reasonably peppy desktop that takes up almost no working space, the NUC11TNKi5 is an aggressively priced entry into a small but important market for both enterprise and professional customers.
Sure, it is not the graphics grinder and gaming machine that the NUC 11 Enthusiast Kit recently proved itself to be. But considering that it’s quite a bit smaller and less than half the price, we commend it for squeezing out as much performance as it does, especially for workday productivity and extreme multi-display scenarios. Consider it a perfect example of what Intel’s doing best right now in the mobile and SFF PC space. While the company may be struggling against AMD in high-performance desktops at the moment, it’s good to see Intel leaning in where it knows it can still win.
