Exclusive: Inside Intel’s tiny modular gaming PC
Intel's been trying to build small gaming PCs for a while but this is one of the smallest, yet most full featured I've ever seen. This five liter box is afull desktop gaming PC, and one of the most easiest to upgrade computers I'veseen in quite a while. In fact, it's easier to upgrade than today's desktop computers. That's because insidethis five liter chassis, you won't just find a traditional CPU with a heat sink and fan or a GPU board. This is called the Intel NUC 9 Extreme and I'm gonna show youexactly what's inside it and how it might change how you build your next gaming computer. There is a brain inside this computer that contains it's own CPU, memory and storage thatyou can plug in to this PC just like you plug in that graphics card. So to pull out most ofthe main system components to this computer, I'm just gonna disconnect a few cables, attach the main brain module up here, which they're calling the Element. NUC Element Compute module. Still have a lot of headers on there but this is the Element NUC module. And inside of here I'm gonnashow you even a little bit more how modulated this system is. So as you can see inside here, not only is the entire CPUbrain of this computer modular but inside here you canreplace the memory modules and the storage modules as well with no laptop memory sticks or solid state drives as well. It's got support for three NVMe solidstate drives in total, two of them right in this module.
So maybe a couple of years down the road you're thinking of replacingthis Core i9-9980HK with something faster and newer, when you do that you can also replace all of your ports as well. You've got dual gigabit ethernet here, a pair of Thunderbolt 3 USB-C jacks that are multipurpose, HDMI and four USB 3.1ports right on this card. And you can imagine as newer and better port technologies come out, you just swap out this one module. It's like replacingyour entire motherboard of your computer. That's because thiscomputer doesn't really have another motherboard, all it has connecting therest of the computer together is this single baseboard with a couple of PCIe X16 slots and an X4 over there if you wanna add somethingextra like a video capture card, instead of dedicating all16 lanes to your graphics.
So you can see there'snot a lot going on here, this is just there toconnect these main pieces to the computer together. All the rest of the I/O, all of the rest of the processing power, it's all here in thismodular replaceable card. Theoretically this all makes for one of the smallest future-proofgaming PCs we've ever seen and if you're worried aboutthat future-proof thing, Intel says it's planning to ship at least a couple generations of this NUC Element CPU brain. The company also says it's500W power supply is designed to handle any graphics card on the market for the next couple of years, as long as it fits into this frame which means it needs tobe under eight inches and fits into a dual slot chassis. In addition to that, it says that you shouldn't see any kind of performance detriment from the fact that all of this is happeningover an X16 PCIe slot. And if you don't like thisexact five liter design with it's prominent skull, they will be some otheroptions on the market. Intel is planning to shipthis as a Barebones kit, meaning you need your own storage, your own memory, operating system and graphics card if you wanna make it a gaming system.
From between $1300 and $1700 and i5, i7 and i9 configurations but there will be other manufacturers building their own chassisaround the NUC Element as well, including Razer and some other companies I can't talk about quite yet. Those will be shipping this year with the Barebone systemfrom Intel shipping in March. I've been a fan of Intel'stiny NUC computers for a while but I've never seen enoughgraphical oomph in there for me to buy one myself and it looks like that's changing here. I'm also a big fan ofsmall modular computers, I've tried to build them but I've never been ableto make them this small. So if this works out, I'm gonna be a customerfor this actual box. For now, I'm gonna waitand see how it plays out. We're in Las Vegas all this week for the Consumer Electronics Show so you can check out our other videos of intriguing gadgets as well, including laptops, foldables and more.
So maybe a couple of years down the road you're thinking of replacingthis Core i9-9980HK with something faster and newer, when you do that you can also replace all of your ports as well. You've got dual gigabit ethernet here, a pair of Thunderbolt 3 USB-C jacks that are multipurpose, HDMI and four USB 3.1ports right on this card. And you can imagine as newer and better port technologies come out, you just swap out this one module. It's like replacingyour entire motherboard of your computer. That's because thiscomputer doesn't really have another motherboard, all it has connecting therest of the computer together is this single baseboard with a couple of PCIe X16 slots and an X4 over there if you wanna add somethingextra like a video capture card, instead of dedicating all16 lanes to your graphics.
So you can see there'snot a lot going on here, this is just there toconnect these main pieces to the computer together. All the rest of the I/O, all of the rest of the processing power, it's all here in thismodular replaceable card. Theoretically this all makes for one of the smallest future-proofgaming PCs we've ever seen and if you're worried aboutthat future-proof thing, Intel says it's planning to ship at least a couple generations of this NUC Element CPU brain. The company also says it's500W power supply is designed to handle any graphics card on the market for the next couple of years, as long as it fits into this frame which means it needs tobe under eight inches and fits into a dual slot chassis. In addition to that, it says that you shouldn't see any kind of performance detriment from the fact that all of this is happeningover an X16 PCIe slot. And if you don't like thisexact five liter design with it's prominent skull, they will be some otheroptions on the market. Intel is planning to shipthis as a Barebones kit, meaning you need your own storage, your own memory, operating system and graphics card if you wanna make it a gaming system.
From between $1300 and $1700 and i5, i7 and i9 configurations but there will be other manufacturers building their own chassisaround the NUC Element as well, including Razer and some other companies I can't talk about quite yet. Those will be shipping this year with the Barebone systemfrom Intel shipping in March. I've been a fan of Intel'stiny NUC computers for a while but I've never seen enoughgraphical oomph in there for me to buy one myself and it looks like that's changing here. I'm also a big fan ofsmall modular computers, I've tried to build them but I've never been ableto make them this small. So if this works out, I'm gonna be a customerfor this actual box. For now, I'm gonna waitand see how it plays out. We're in Las Vegas all this week for the Consumer Electronics Show so you can check out our other videos of intriguing gadgets as well, including laptops, foldables and more.
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