Table of Contents 64q43
Assembled by the company Simply NUC, which uses Intel's NUC kits to create mini PCs, the Intel NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon. We had the opportunity to use one and rate it for you. 14r1v
The version in question here is one of the most powerful in the gaming lineup of PCs pre-assembled from Intel's NUC kits. It contains one of the best processors on the market and a dedicated graphics card with 12 GB. That said, it is worth mentioning that in this same line, the Simply NUC also has more basic versions that do not even have a dedicated video card — which indicates a cheaper price and a less powerful product.
The NUC itself is a kit created by Intel that already contains a processor and integrated motherboard to optimize space and create super-compact PCs with traditional desktop performance.
Design and construction 5k2i6f
The Intel NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon starts with an amazing first impression: its appearance. The cabinet chosen to house the mini PC Gamer is one modified by Simply NUC itself, which is a length of one mid-tower traditional – most common size among cabinets.
However, the big difference is in height and width. At just 19 centimeters tall and 11 centimeters wide, the PC is super discreet and fits in any room in the house. The chassis also has a hollow top and sides to allow better air circulation, which is necessary in such a small case with such powerful equipment.
At the top, in addition to the hollow grid, the PC has 3 fans positioned for exhaust air. As it is a NUC Kit that assembles the PC, some components, such as the processor, cannot be exchanged, nor the motherboard. Even so, it is very simple to open the chassis, especially for simple maintenance, such as removing the top to clean the fans. to move the hardware, which we'll talk about in a moment, you'll just need a philips screwdriver.
Despite being practical to open the PC, the idea of the version is precisely that it is not changed much by the consumer, which is the whole concept of the NUC, a motherboard integrated with the processor.
So, the big highlight of the Intel NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon assembly is its appearance. The model's proposal is to be a replacement for consoles, which also has as a bonus the ability to perform functions such as rendering 3D models, video editing and any activity that requires the use of multiple processor cores.
So with a front featuring an LED-lit skull and more LEDs on the PC base, Beast Canyon is perfect to be placed just about anywhere, whether setup of an office, bedroom or even the living room to serve as hub games and home media.
Hardware 5l4oe
Of course, a gaming PC that goes by the name of Beast would have to own hardware powerful and top quality. Here's the case here: the Intel NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon has everything and a little more than any casual gamer and even enthusiast could want to have.
Let's start with the NUC itself. What is a NUC anyway? It is a kit that includes the union of a motherboard, proprietary by Intel, with a processor from the company. The name of the kit used in Beast Canyon is NUC11BTMi9.
This kit includes the processor. Intel Core i9 11900KB. For PC enthusiasts, this nomenclature may seem wrong at first glance, but it is correct. Intel's KB line includes precisely processors made for NUCs.
This type of processor from Intel is something of a hybrid between the company's common desktop line and the company's line of notebooks. He even has a chipset unique and already soldered on the motherboard — just like the notebook ones. But the performance — which we'll talk about in a moment — is more similar to desktop processors.
The Intel Core I9 11900KB is super powerful, having 8 cores and 16 threads, with a base speed of 3.30 GHz, reaching up to 4.90 GHz with overclocked.
Talking more about the motherboard and the connectivity it proposes, it is worth mentioning that, as it is proposed to be 'mini', the NUC only s SO-DIMM RAM memory, reaching, with overclock (XMP), the maximum speed of 3200 MHz.
Similar in size to a mini ITX motherboard, the Intel NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon still has connectivity to spare. The PC has Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, both with internal antennas and, in of LAN, it has an input for 2.5 GB.
From physical connectivity, the PC has:
- 8 USB 3.2 Type-A inputs
- 2 Thunderbolt 4 Type-C inputs for video output (without GPU)
The evaluated version has 16 GB of RAM e 512 GB NVME SSD storage connected to the slot M.2 directly on the motherboard. Besides this slot, the NUC has a slot Easy-access extra M.2 at the base of the case, making it easy to expand your PC's storage at any time.
As for what will do the gaming magic, the Beast Canyon can be customized, but its base version has no graphics card other than the processor graphics — which aren't great for gaming. But like most parts, you can customize it at the time of purchase with a graphics card. The one from the model we received is a RTX 3060 from ASUS.
The big advantage here, aside from the 12GB GPU, is that it's the desktop version of the card, despite the majority of the NUC's parts being notebook. It is worth mentioning that if you want to buy a Beast Canyon without a graphics card and wait for their price to go down, you can very easily add a graphics card at any time.
To close, the source that powers this entire machine is one of 650w, with 80+ Gold certification. At that voltage, there is still room for a possible an RTX 3070 – at most.
game performance 2l463a
Of course all these names and hardware weight are worthless if it doesn't run the games you want to play. The parts that assemble the Intel NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon are, theoretically, what is needed to run any Full HD game at maximum quality for the next few years, always reaching the magical 60 FPS.
To prove this, of course, I tested the NUC with the most demanding recent releases from a PC Gamer: Call of Duty Vanguard, Battlefield 2042 and Forza Horizon 5.
Most of the tests were focused on pushing the RTX 3060 to the limit at maximum gaming quality, with rendering at 1080p, Full HD, which is the targeted quality of the 3060 models.
Forza Horizon 5 663g3d
To get started at full speed, let's talk about the performance in the latest release and one of the top titles of 2021: Forza Horizon 5. Anyone who knows the franchise knows that the games are extremely beautiful and graphically demanding.
Therefore, the game serves as one of the main tests to understand if a machine is strong for the new generation of games. So, sparing nothing, we tested the game with all settings maxed out at 1080p. The result was as expected, an average of 62 FPS, without any crashes or loss of frames.
The result with Horizon 5 is relevant for being a title that demands a lot and serves to summarize the potential of the NUC, a powerful machine to deal with tranquility all titles for the next few years at most, in Full HD.
Call of Duty: Vanguard 3p2l5t
Another recent release is the Call of Duty: Vanguard and I was able to play more than 20 hours of the game on NUC to do the game review. Of course, I also had the opportunity to analyze the performance of the machine running the game.
The game, as expected, ran smoothly in Full HD with everything at maximum quality, including the Ray Tracing. With these settings, the average was around 80 FPS without any crashes or big drops, keeping the 99% of the frames up to 67 FPS.
As a multiplayer-focused game, you are expected to focus on achieving maximum FPS for greater competitiveness. However, going out of 1080 resolution is a big impediment for this video card. Going to 1440p it's still possible to hit the magic 60 FPS.
Vanguard even has for DLSS, which I made use of during the campaign mainly. In order to achieve 1440p quality with the same 80 FPS, it was enough to put DLSS in performance. The technology of Upscaling from NVIDIA is very well optimized in the title and, for the video card used, it is essential to reach higher resolutions with acceptable performance.
In competitive modes, it's better to lower the texture quality to medium at 1080 and enjoy the average of 100+ FPS. The game is very beautiful graphically even with lower qualities and you won't miss the textures at most if you're with more performance, right?
Battlefield 2042 6d3e2h
Another game released now is the Battlefield 2042, which is also an extremely dense game with natural catastrophe events, 128 people on the same giant map, all of which makes it heavier.
In BF it is still possible to keep all settings at the maximum of Full HD, quietly reaching 60 frames per second. The problem is activating the Ray Tracing, which makes the game almost unplayable, with many frames Frozen
The game is still very poorly optimized and due to the demand of maps and special effects, it is better to also make use of DLSS to reach 1440p. The same competitive game rule I mentioned in Call of Duty applies here: in this type of game, the more FPS you achieve, the better your experience will be.
Unlike the other tested games, Battlefield is not worth lowering the quality for more performance. Decreasing the texture quality to the minimum didn't give me more than 10 FPS on average, which is quite worrying — mostly because of the game and not the tested system.
Still on the DLSS, it is worth being very careful, since the presets extremes can generate visual noise, by rendering the game in a quality much lower than that displayed in the . Again, this is a matter of PC game optimization, which is still not so good. Even so, the experience with some changes is amazing at NUC.
synthetic tests 634x2u
To close the analysis of the Intel NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon, we carried out synthetic tests focused on measuring the performance points of the mini PC gamer. The focus of the tests is, in general, on the I9 11900KB processor and the RTX 3060 graphics card. To understand how to analyze the results, the rule is clear: the higher the score, the better!
Cinebench 1x2t6n
Cinebench is a testing tool focused on rendering heavy scenes to test and stress mainly the processor cores. There are two stages, in the first the PC renders the same scene for 10 minutes using all 8 U cores and then the same thing, but using only a single core.
The NUC achieved 11134 performance points with all cores and 1566 with only one core being stressed.
3DMARK 342810
Already 3DMARK contains numerous types of tests, of which we performed 3. In general, all of them serve to measure the power and performance of the machine in different stress situations that the PC can face when running a game, from tessellation, 1440p quality, Ray Tracing and everything.
We start with the Time spy, an apartment by the bay, for its easy access, free parking, and larger space for our group of XNUMX people. The house was great for a large group like ours, the host was very attentive, and the location was excellent; it was quiet and quick to walk to the old town. benchmarking using DirectX12 and focuses on using the multiple threads processor and graphics card and render scenes with 1440p quality. Here the objective is to calculate the performance and capacity of the system when dealing with tessellation, volumetric lighting and other technologies common in games.
O Port Royal was the second test performed and aims to calculate the performance of the system in dealing with lighting techniques such as dynamic reflections, ambient occlusion, post-processing effects, tessellation, depth of field of view, procedural generation, physics, etc.
To close the synthetic tests, we performed the Fire Strike Extreme. It focuses on testing the graphics card in more extreme situations rendering more demanding situations like smoke simulation and dynamic particle lighting. Also, the test tries to overload the U with physics and post-processing.
Verdict 62424m
The Intel NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon is still considered a mini PC, but its performance is extremely competitive with any other traditional desktop machine.
Despite the technical specifications of the hardware being top of the line, it's clear that it's a setup unbalanced. For gaming, the I9 turns out to be a little over the top; it is common in most games that the bottleneck is the RTX 3060 or even the 16 GB of RAM.
It has also become common to have at least 24 GB of RAM on the PC for dense games, even more so for those who like to take screenshots, streaming and video editing. The video card is amazing, but it ends up being a notch below the processor, leaving the PC a little unbalanced.
But the big problem with this equation is not the optimal hardware or the amazing design, it's the price and availability. At the moment, Beast Canyon can only be purchased via import by Simply NUC itself. The price of the version we tested is around R$14.970,47, but you still need to consider possible import fees, which can make the purchase much more expensive.
So, if you can invest and like mini PCs and games, this is a great choice, with impeccable design and performance that clashes with new generation consoles. But because it's a pre-built PC, there are still limitations, mainly caused by the NUC kit and available case space.
For most people, building a PC is a nightmare. That's where models like the NUC come in. However, the vast majority of pre-assembled ones are infinitely worse than the model tested here today, a divine exception in the market.
Intel NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon Technical Specifications 6j2t63
| Product | Intel NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon |
| Processor | Intel Core i9-11900KB |
| Motherboard | Intel NUC 11 Extreme Kit – NUC11BTMi9 |
| Video card | ASUS RTX 3060 |
| RAM | 16 GB |
| Storage | 512 GB |
| Audio | compatible with 7.1 surround audio via HDMI or Displayport signals 3.5mm stereo input |
| Expansion slots | PCIe Gen4 x16 and x4 Gen4 slots2 DDR4-3200 SO-DIMM Sockets1 M.2 – PCIe Gen42 M.2 sockets – PCIe Gen3 orSATA SSDs |
| Interfaces and Connectivity | Intel 2.5Gb LAN 2 Super-Speed USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A 6 Super-Speed USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A 2 Thunderbolt™ 4 ports Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX210 2.4GbpsIntel Bluetooth 5.2 |
| Cabinet | Customized by Simply NUC |
| Price | R$14.970,47 |
See also:
