Intel previews NUC 11 Extreme “Beast Canyon” mini PCs with support for full-length GPUs

Intel introduced its most powerful NUC version yet at this year’s Computex keynote. It is called NUC 11 Extreme “Beast Canyon” and comes with an enclosure considerably bigger than anything we have seen up until now. Rather than limiting the system to a square-shape enclosure, Intel is now including an 8-liter chassis that can fit discrete GPUs up to 12-inch long plus an internal PSU, as well as Tiger Lake-H processors via a new compute element.

According to a leaked slide posted on the ChipHell forums, the new NUC 11 Extreme Compute Unit is codenamed "Driver Boy” and supports 45 W i5, i7 and i9 CPUs, including the HK unlocked models for laptops. Additionally, it can be fitted with up to 64 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, up to 3x M.2 SSDs with Intel Optane SSD and Memory support, and the 12-inch GPU support suggests that it may be able to handle high-end models like an Nvidia RTX 3090. However, the enclosure seems to allow only for standard air coolers, so there could be some TGP limitations.

The “Driver Boy” compute element also comes with PCIe 4.0 compatibility, but there is no mention regarding the number of lanes. It integrates Wi-Fi 6 + BT 5.0 and either a 2.5 Gb or 10 Gb NIC, depending on the processor model. Port selection includes 2x Thunderbolt 4 connectors, and 3x 4K video outputs, of which an  HDMI 2.0b port. The lower front of the enclosure appears to be accommodating a full-size SD card reader, as well.

Availability and pricing details have not yet been provided, but this NUC model should be launched in the second half of 2021.

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