Not much is known about the development of Intel NUCs. But 3DMark listed a NUC 11 Extreme device in its public database. This unit has a quad-core/ eight-thread Tiger Lake-U processor. Impressively, it is paired with a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics card. It is paired with 8GB memory, most likely an LP-DDR4 in a SO-DIMM slot. The unnamed CPU has a base/ boost clock of 2.3/ 4.4 GHz. This CPU is expected to have a 28-watt TDP. Clearly, it is good enough to make an overall score of 5335.
The NUC will be apparently divided into two segments. The NUC 11 Extreme (Phantom Canyon) can be paired with a discrete graphics card. Obviously, Intel plans to cater this towards gamers. The NUC 11 Performance (Panther Canyon) is for a wide variety of mainstream purposes.
Intel NUC 11 Extreme’s PCIe 4.0 Support?
It is not sure if PCIe 4.0 will be supported on this. If one is to speculate, I’d seriously doubt this is achievable without having an increase of the TDP rating. Maybe NUC 11 Extreme caters to a low budget but a very capable 1080p mid-end gaming machine. This will favour mostly for those who play older and eSports titles. So it’s likely to have enough PCIe 3.0 lanes to drive such cards with no bottleneck.
The NUC 11 Extreme is promising, based on what’s known from this 3DMark benchmark’s report. The 2.3/ 4.4 GHz base/ boost clock is nothing short of impressive compared to 4.1 GHz compared to previous offerings. It is not known if AMD will do something to compete with Intel NUC family. For now, Intel has that dominance and advantage.
More information as the story progress.
Source: Hardware Leaks
