While the guys were looking around the EVGA suite at CES 2020, Luke bumped into Intel who were showing off an innovative new NUC 9 Extreme system with an EVGA RTX 2060 KO GPU being crammed inside, which quickly caught Luke’s attention.
Earlier this week we saw this ecosystem at Cooler Master with the NC100. However, the Intel NUC 9 is an even more compact design that includes an FSP 500W Platinum rated power supply unit that is neither ATX or SFX form factor, it's even smaller, so allows more hardware to be packed into the NUC 9 chassis.
The Intel NUC 9 Extreme which was originally codenamed ‘Ghost Canyon’, is an extremely compact unit capable of housing high-performance hardware. It is quite remarkable to think that the NUC 9 Extreme can contain so much power in such a small form factor. Inside is an Intel 9th generation H-series processor with up to 8 cores, usually found in laptops, SODIMM memory with capacity up to 64GB supported and there are three M.2 slots for SSD installation.
In terms of graphics capability, it is possible to install any GPU that offers the physical dimensions to fit in the chassis. At the EVGA suite, the NUC 9 was equipped with an EVGA RTX 2060 KO GPU, however, Intel has done some internal testing with an Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti installed, so the graphics or gaming performance from the NUC 9 is pretty much on par with some high powered desktop gaming PCs.
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KitGuru: NUC form factor systems have come a long way since the early days and can now offer almost desktop levels of performance in graphics workloads and gaming. What do you guys think of the Intel NUC 9 Extreme? Would you consider swapping out your gaming desktop rig for one anytime soon?