After making fun of its NUC 11 Extreme (Beast Canyon) briefly Computex 2021, Intel officially launched a new NUC kit.With the novelty that Beast Canyon now accepts Best graphics card, Whether it is still regarded as a NUC or more like a small-scale (SFF) system is still controversial.
Beast Canyon of Success Ghost Canyon, The size is 357 x 189 x 120 mm. It is essentially an 8 liter case, which is different from the previous 5 liter case. There is extra space there so that Beast Canyon can accommodate discrete graphics cards with a maximum length of 308.4 mm (12 inches). NUC provides a PCIe 4.0 x16 expansion slot. Although there is enough space to accommodate a full-length graphics card, NUC is only equipped with a 650W 80Plus Gold ITX power supply.
This may not be enough to meet the demand for more power-hungry graphics cards, although it is an upgrade to Ghost Canyon’s modest 500W unit. On the other hand, the supported CPUs are all 65W or lower components.This should leave enough room for the most power-hungry GPU, for example Tencent 3090. It is wise of course to proceed cautiously and stick to a GPU with a lower power consumption, such as Tencent 3080 with RX 6800 XT — And don’t buy models with large factory overclocking.
Intel has released Beast Canyon with three different 10nm processor options, which are located in the NUC 11 Extreme Compute Element (Driver Bay). NUC can be used for Core i9-11900KB, Core i7-11700B and Core i5-11400H.Strangely, Intel decided to choose two Tiger Lake Desktop From the stack, while providing a third option with mobile devices Tiger Lake-H section. The TDP (Thermal Design Power) of Core i9-11900KB and Core i7-11700B is 65W, while Core i5-11400H operates within the 45W limit.
Core i9-11900KB and Core i7-11700B are 8-core chips, and Core i5-11400H is 6-core chips. All three processors use hyper-threading technology. Core i9-11900KB has the highest clock speed, with 3.3 GHz base clock and 4.9 GHz boost clock. It is also the only overclocking chip with an unlocked frequency multiplier.
Intel NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon specifications
| model | Calculated element | processor | Core/thread | Basic/Boost Clock Speed (GHz) | Level 3 cache (MB) | TDP (W) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NUC11BTMi9 | NUC11DBBi9 | Core i9-11900KB | 8/16 | 3.3 / 4.9 | twenty four | 65 |
| NUC11BTMi7 | NUC11DBBi7 | Core i7-11700B | 8/16 | 3.2 / 4.8 | twenty four | 65 |
| NUC11BTMi5 | NUC11DBBi5 | Core i5-11400H | 6/12 | 2.7 / 4.5 | 12 | 45 |
Regardless of the processor model, Beast Canyon is connected to the WM590 chipset designed for Tiger Lake. Thanks to two SO-DIMM memory slots, it can hold up to 64GB DDR4-3200 1.2V SO-DIMM memory. However, EEC memory modules are not supported.
Beast Canyon also offers a large number of storage options. NUC provides two SATA 6Gbps ports for older SSDs and hard drives, as well as four high-speed storage M.2 slots. Two PCIe 4.0 x4 slots are directly connected to the Tiger Lake processor, while the other two PCIe 3.0 x4 slots are through the WM590 chipset. The M.2 slot supports RAID 0 and RAID 1 arrays. A microSD card reader is also provided, which can read SDXC cards that support up to UHS-II.
Naturally, you will want to pair the Beast Canyon with a discrete graphics card. This is the whole point of the extra space. If not, you can always rely on Tiger Lake’s Xe Graphics engine. In this case, you can use two Thunderbolt 4 ports and one HDMI 2.0b port. There is a PCIe 4.0 x4 expansion slot for other add-on cards.
Beast Canyon’s USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports are very generous, six of which are distributed on the back of the device and the other two are distributed on the front. You can further expand the number of USB ports with two USB 3.1 connectors or two USB 2.0 connectors. NUC is equipped with 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet network, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 connection.
Beast Canyon is accepting reservations Simple NUCThe basic configuration includes 8GB (2x4GB) memory and 256GB NVMe M.2 SSD. The Core i9-11900KB and Core i7-11700B models start at $1,599 and $1,399, respectively, while the Core i5-11400H model starts at $1,299. Simply NUC will start shipping in September.
