Intel has announced its first “gaming grade” NUC. We’ve seen many company’s try and make small form factor gaming machines, but this is one is a bit different. Codenamed NUC6i7KYK, this new Skull Canyon NUC is about double the size of a normal NUC, but has sufficient hardware for sub-1080p gaming, but the most exciting thing is that it is ready for external graphics solutions like Razer’s Core.
The Skull Canyon NUC is powered by an Intel Core i7-6770HQ Skylake processor. This processor is a quad core chip with HyperThreading meaning you have 8 logical CPUS, 6MB of L3 cache, 128 MB L4 cache, and Intel Iris Pro Graphics 580. The CPU runs between 2.60 GHz and 3.50 GHz, while the iGPU runs at 950 MHz. The iGPU has 576 execution units, 72 TMUs, and 9 ROPs. This will allow for gaming at 720p and 900p resolutions.
Now if you want serious gaming power the Skull Canyon NUC features a 40 Gb/s Thunderbolt 3 port, which will let you use external graphics card solutions like Razer’s Core. Other connections on the device look to be four USB 3.0 ports, HDMI, mini-DisplayPort, Gigabit Ethernet, and optical audio.
The barebones version of the Skull Canyon NUC will be $650, which is a pretty good deal considering the OEM channel price of the i7-6770HQ is $435. A fully-loaded version of the NUC with 16GB of DDR4-2133 memory, 256GB SSD, and Windows 10 pre-installed will be priced at $999.
Source: TechPowerUp! | News Archive
