Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit Beast Canyon

amazon Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit Beast Canyon reviews

It’s been a long time since I’ve been exposed to a compact and highly customizable mini PC from Intel, and the product in today’s article is the NUC KIT (NUC Barebone) model that can be considered the most typical and latest. In the year 2022: Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit Beast Canyon.

This is a very interesting suggestion for those who are looking for a complete computer case but must have a compact size, not take up much space in use, and still ensure a good performance to solve work, study as well as play games.

The highlight of this NUC 11 Extreme model is that it is configured with a new 11th CPU chip with a very high-performance clock: i9-11900KB, and is specially equipped with a powerful RTX 3080 discrete graphics card.

Change and upgrade the exterior design style

NUC 11 Extreme Kit Beast Canyon has a lot of design changes compared to previous generations of NUCs: bigger, heavier, and more aggressive, similar to the ITX mini PC cases available on the market. Currently. It is no longer the ultra-compact style like a sticky rice box or thick notebook as before, but this new generation still ensures quite well its flexibility and mobility.

The attraction and design appeal of the product come from the details in the form of honeycomb motifs, which cover almost the entire outer shell of the NUC 11 Extreme. Bringing a unique feature to this case, in addition, according to my observations, with the layout of the grille located on the sides and the top, many tiny holes will help increase the dissipation efficiency of heat is better, ensuring that the internal components can operate for a long time with high efficiency, but still retain the necessary stability.

On the NUC 11 Extreme Kit, we don’t have too many RGB LED light strips, but they are arranged just enough to create a striking and impressive impression for the user’s workspace and entertainment: including the Beast Canyon logo with Led edge on the front of the case, and it is in sync with the other LED strips on the bottom of the case.

Easier to disassemble and upgrade components

Larger size, and more spacious volume, combined with an improved modular internal layout design, so the ability to replace and upgrade components of the NUC 11 Extreme Kit becomes a lot easier.

Especially, even those who do not know anything about technology can quickly upgrade the storage hard drive through a few simple steps: Flip the bottom of the machine up, remove a few screws and then plug the SSD into the slot. Plug and install the screws and that’s it, the upgrade is complete! This is also the main hard drive in this machine, in addition, we also have other hard drive slots inside.

Exploring the inside of the NUC 11 Extreme Kit after removing the side panel, we will immediately see the discrete graphics card RTX 3080, this is the Turbo version of the card from Gigabyte, its size is almost equal to the other models. The current popular graphics card model is installed on conventional PC platforms, this can be considered a technological and technical leap for Intel when the NUC mini PC models can now support slots discrete graphics cards are large, and the length can be up to 25 and 30 cm.

Next, we will see a 650W power supply providing power for the entire system, right next to it is the CPU module with the Beast Canyon logo accented. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, the Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit model I have here uses the new 11th generation mobile Intel chip: i9-11900KB with high clock speed, and integrated graphics card Intel Iris XE Graphics, and Intel uses an air cooling system for this processor. In addition to enhancing the best heat dissipation performance for both the CPU and GPU inside, the company has also equipped a set of 3 cooling fans on the top of the case.

Going deeper behind the CPU module, its RAM and SSD, are replaceable and upgradeable components. In this machine, the company has installed two RAM sticks running Dual standard DDR4 SODIMM (RAM type for laptops), 32GB capacity (16GB each), and can install up to 64GB 3200MHz bus. NUC 11 Extreme supports both M.2 and SATA slots, allowing to install of 2 types of storage drives at the same time, with SSDs of standard size 2242 or 2280. In total, we will have 3 slots to upgrade the capacity amount of hard drive storage, so comfortable and abundant! It’s just a matter of whether you have enough money to upgrade to the fullest extent.

Equipped with many versatile connection ports, supporting new technology

Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit Beast Canyon has a lot of expansion ports, adding flexibility and better support for user needs: On the front of the case under the power button, we will have 2 ports. USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, 1 SDXC memory card reader slot with UHS-II standard (Ultra High-Speed II can reach a maximum read speed of up to 312 MB/s), and 1 3.5mm headphone jack.

On the back, we will have 6 USB-A 3.1 Gen 2 ports, 2 USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4.0 (also DP 1.4 and USB4) ports, 1 RJ45 LAN port, 1 HDMI 2.0b port, and a port. PCIe to output to an external monitor from a discrete graphics card. Looking up a bit, we also have a Kensington keyhole and a power port for the case.

Satisfy the needs of high-speed data transmission, as well as connecting to external devices such as monitors, projectors, TVs, removable hard drives, etc. The machine also supports Wi-Fi 6E and wireless connectivity. Bluetooth 5.2 serves the needs of entertainment and online work.

where can you get a Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit Beast Canyon online

Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit NUC11BTMi7 Gaming Barebone System – Mini PC Core i7 11th Gen i7-11700B Octa-core (8 Core): Buy it now

Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit NUC11BTMi7 Gaming Barebone System – Mini PC Core i7 11th Gen i7-11700B Octa-core (8 Core): Buy it now

Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit NUC11BTMi9 Gaming Barebone System – Mini PC Core i9 11th Gen i9-11900KB Octa-core (8 Core): Buy it now

Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit NUC11BTMi9 Gaming Barebone System – Mini PC Core i9 11th Gen i9-11900KB Octa-core (8 Core): Buy it now

Performance

NUC 11 Extreme with i9-11900KB has 8 cores and 16 threads, base clock speed is 3.3GHz, and can Turbo up to 4.9GHz, with up to 24MB cache, combined with 32GB of RAM more than enough for smooth response and stabilize the current popular study and office work, as well as use it for light entertainment purposes: reading newspapers, watching movies, youtube 4K, etc. And depending on demand, we can upgrade more drives’ hard disk storage: download games, download movies, download applications, store data, etc. High-speed standard hard drive slot, providing fast booting speed, using the device, launching application software quickly, minimizing lag or freeze when running multiple tasks at the same time.

Equipped with many connection ports, we can easily connect many devices at the same time, with a day of work related to media and content, I often plug in a mouse and keyboard to use, connect 2-3 external monitors with HDMI, Thunderbolt,… If you cut and merge videos, there is a memory card reader slot.

NUC 11 Extreme has Bluetooth support, so I can connect to external speakers to listen to music, and watch movies, in addition, I can put the NUC anywhere without worrying about connecting to the network due to Wifi 6E, I have tried it takes the NUC 11 and the mobile screen out to the cafe to work, although the case is a bit heavy and the plugs are a bit cumbersome, the overall experience is still quite good.

Through graphic design, photo and video editing software such as Photoshop, Premiere: I designed and edited an image file with a capacity of nearly 40MB on Photoshop 2018, and made a video of about 7 minutes in length, exported. Full HD quality with a capacity of nearly 500MB.

With more text and some transition effects on Premiere Pro CC 2018, the performance of the NUC 11 Extreme, specifically the integrated Intel Iris XE Graphics card and the internal M.2 NVMe SSD, is enough to satisfy. The editing, cutting, video rendering, etc. operations are quite smooth and fast without the power of the discrete RTX 3080 graphics card.

Of course, it is indispensable to test the performance of the NUC 11 Extreme by playing several games, with the combination of the 11th generation Intel Core i9, discrete graphics card RTX 3080 10GB that supports many new technologies, and 32GB of DDR4 RAM. I confidently fight today’s popular heavy offline AAA games. However, because the time to borrow the case was not long, I only had time to test through 2 games, Battlefield 5 and Cyberpunk 2077, here are a few FPS scores I recorded during playing these 2 games on the screen. 4K resolution for your reference about the power of Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit Beast Canyon.

In general, the machine configuration in the article is enough to bring good gaming relaxation time for gamers. I like to look at the graphic scenery and adventure with the atmosphere in the game, so I choose to play on a 4K screen, with high graphics settings, and you can balance the graphics and resolution settings of the screen for the smoothest experience, achieving the most stable FPS.

In the process of experiencing this machine, I also paid attention to its radiating temperature. In the condition of the fan room, the temperature is about 32 degrees Celsius, the case is placed directly on the wooden table, I recorded the average temperature of the CPU when testing the performance through the benchmarks at about 70-75 degrees Celsius, and the discrete graphics card (GPU) around 82-85 degrees Celsius.

When switching to heavy tasks such as rendering videos or playing games for about 2 hours, the GPU temperature remained quite good, rarely exceeding 88 degrees Celsius, and the CPU was quite surprised that the temperature skyrocketed up to 100 degrees Celsius (only when playing games), but the surprise is that the CPU clock level is almost unaffected by this high temperature, it remains quite stable at 4,2-4.5GHz, the performance of NUC 11 Extreme is still ok.