Intel Launches NUC 9 Extreme Ghost Canyon Small Form Factor PC Platform (hothardware.com) 80
MojoKid writes: Intel unveiled its NUC 9 Ghost Canyon platform back at CES earlier this year, but the company has just announced general availability and lifted the embargo on full product reviews. An array of NUC 9 systems are launching today, with the top-end Intel NUC9i9QNX featuring a Core i9-9980HK Comet Lake-H 8-core CPU. The NUC 9 is built around Intel's NUC Compute Element, which essentially places the CPU, chipset, IO, and cooler onto a removable add-in card in a chassis that measures only 9.37 x 8.5 x 3.78 (WxDxH) inches. The Intel NUC 9 Extreme is a different sort of animal than traditional small form factor PCs though, and the version of the system that was tested at HotHardware is quite powerful, thanks to the inclusion of 16GB of RAM, an Intel Optane 905P boot drive, a secondary Kingston SSD, and an ASUS GeForce RTX 2070 discrete GPU, though the NUC 9 does have integrated graphics as well. A barebones Intel NUC 9 Extreme (model NUC9i9QNX), without any components or accessories will sell for about $1,639, but fully configured like the one in the review will retail north of $2000. It's not cheap, but Intel's NUC 9 Extreme is a very compact, robust, reasonably quiet and capable little machine.
$1649 for a NUC. (Score:3, Interesting)
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Take a look at the ASUS ROG STRIX X570-I board, which takes the new AMD Ryzen Zen 2 chips and is mini-ITX form factor. You can come damn close to NUC size at 1/5 the cost.
For more serious gaming, look at their ROG Crosshair VIII Impact, which they call "mini-IDX". That's mini-ITX with a little extra room for a double-wide, 10.5" long graphics card. That one is $459 minus CPU, but that still much cheaper than Intel's toy.
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ROG Crosshair VIII Impact seems to only be a motherboard. The trouble is find a case big enough that it can still fit a mid-length GPU card but also small enough that it has no place for legacy hardware (optical drives, mechanical drives, ATX power supply).
There's a serious lack of choice for mini-ITX, M2. drives only, 10" double-slot wide GPU, SFX power supply cases. And those that are available cost an insane price, usually up to five times the price of a case that's four times bigger. It's just metal and
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Honestly, I've been eyeballing an open case like the Hydra Mini [hydra-shop.com]. I know that isn't going to be for everyone, but it solves the airflow problem. :-)
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I suggest you hand out a bit in r/sffpc on Reddit. They are really making some wicked gaming rigs that fit your description and may give you good case inspirations.
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Good to know, thanks.
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Gamers Nexus did their usual thorough testing and found it to be lacking. Poor noise and thermal performance, way overpriced for the spec unless you absolutely have to save a few square centimetres.
An ITX Ryzen is a much better choice for most people.
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YouTube: https://youtu.be/CCoLJeUbZTc [youtu.be]
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yea why, its more or less a mini itx sized box with pussy laptop components soldered on a pcie card and costs 2x as much, oh and it sucks thermally as well
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Just keep in mind that it doesn't come with a GPU and only has a 128GB SSD and 8GB of RAM. You're going to need to replace the RAM and SSD and buy a GPU on top of that, so the $1,799 i9 model will end up costing $800-1000 more by the time you're done.
Re:$1649 for a NUC. (Score:5, Informative)
Not going to trust Intel's long-term support again.
Just today I needed to upgrade the BIOS on an x97 mainboard to take a new graphics card, only to discover that I should pay more attention to news releases - Intel ended all support for consumer desktop boards in 2019 - they've withdrawn all driver/BIOS/utility downloads for desktop boards. It wan't even on the wayback machine. I had to visit some questionable sites to get the BIOS upgrade.
So I'm not confident a NUC would be supported for very long.
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So I'm not confident a NUC would be supported for very long.
I assume you mean X79, there is no X97. It's quite a statement on the modern times that we don't consider 8 full years of support "very long" for computer hardware. I still have fond memories of "It's all about the Pentiums":
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away man it's an antique!
Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great,
If you could use a nice heavy paperweight.
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I didn't expect full support but I thought it a bit rude to pull *all* BIOS and driver files from the download portal. What harm does it do to keep the files there, available for people to download?
"We only do NUCs and server boards now, so screw all you people who bought one of our desktop boards".
That's not going to happen again. In fact, it's one more argument to not buy an Intel processor next time. Fuck 'em if they're going to screw over long-term customers.
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HP did the same thing with their older stuff, for no reason I can see.
I was pleasantly surprised to see Dell still had BIOSes, drivers, and documentation up for the 11 year old Optiplex I just pulled out of storage as a spare, though. Heck, I just checked and the ancient Optiplex GX260 (released 2003) sitting in my attic still has everything hosted on Dell's support website.
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Makes you wonder what they will do with the next crippling security flaw. Last time they put the BIOS updates on their site, but now the site is gone.
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We've yet to see a crippling security flaw. I mean so far they've basically been irrelevant no-shows to the point where major vendors and even Linux kernel maintainers made the patches opt-in.
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I didn't expect full support but I thought it a bit rude to pull *all* BIOS and driver files from the download portal.
Yeah I know. We covered this on Slashdot when Intel made the announcement.
Re:$1649 for a NUC. (Score:4, Insightful)
But this...it's well into the decent-laptop arena
Yeah but then you have a laptop.
and it's portable...
And that is desirable why? Sounds like a device that is longer, wider, has far worse cooling system and lower performance due to aforementioned cooling system, a superfluous monitor, all for the benefit of a feature you may not desire. NUCs take far less desk space than a laptop.
Different device, different purpose.
Re:$1649 for a NUC. (Score:4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Look elsewhere for more reviews if you don't believe me. Or another good review:
https://www.tomshardware.com/r... [tomshardware.com]
It really comes down to the CPU, and the 4900HS is more than a match for Intel's HK chips. I wouldn't even consider Intel's consumer chips right now unless I had a very specific application that needed AVX512 (and even then, you'd have to get a chip that supported AVX512, which are still rare in Intel's consumer lineup). If you need a dGPU that's better than the RTX2060 "with ROG boost" then so be it. I can't fault anyone for that. But the cooling system on that Asus is not going to be a problem. The performance is stellar. And the price for the ENTIRE LAPTOP is less than the barebones Intel 9980HK unit featured in the main article.
At that point, I have to agree: why get the NUC?
Takes more desk space? You must be kidding, you can just stand the thing on its side or whatever. As long as you don't block the fan ports it'll be fine.
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You still have a laptop. And yes it takes more desk space, propping a laptop up with a book end isn't a neat professional solution. It's the kind of thing you come up with when you shouldn't have bought a laptop in the first place. I mean if you want to build a ghetto system you could just strap it under the desk with duck-tape.
Again not everyone needs a laptop. There's a reason SFFs are a thing, a big (well actually a small) thing with a very active community. The NUC is just Intel's attempt to get into an
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Or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Seriously, don't mess with the 9980HK.
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Because, of course, all the engineering and manufacturing required to make that new computer only happened in the last four months. Idiot.
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Could be worse.
This guy is selling a bag with a handle made out of a child's spine [indy100.com].
That's just the fashion scene in LA these days.
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Ethically sourced!
Laptops are cheaper (Score:4, Interesting)
What's the point of a small box that will barely fit a single mid-ranged GPU for $1600?? If you want portability buy a laptop. If you want a low end desktop get an SBC for like $100.
Who would even buy this and why? The PSU isn't even powerful enough for current high end GPUs.
You can do way better for way less.
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You seem a but obsessed with GPUs...
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why, its already larger than most mini itx systems that are not proprietary or restricted in power
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RTX 2070 is a mid-range GPU now?
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What's the point of a small box that will barely fit a single mid-ranged GPU for $1600??
That "mid-range" GPU seems to annihilate all but the 2 most expensive gaming laptops in the quite a large sample of testing and comes in cheaper than both.
If you want portability buy a laptop. If you want a low end desktop get an SBC for like $100.
What if you don't want portability or don't want something low-end. You seem to be under the delusion that there's no market for a high-end but small desktop PC. You'd be wrong. Very wrong. There are whole form factors that cater to this market and a very active community https://www.reddit.com/r/sffpc... [reddit.com] that loves building them.
The PSU isn't even powerful enough for current high end GPUs.
I guess you're one of tho
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If you want a high-end CPU, why choose something that comes with a 9980HK? Hell it doesn't even have a Comet Lake.
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If you want a high-end CPU, why choose something that comes with a 9980HK? Hell it doesn't even have a Comet Lake.
Who said anything about a high end CPU? Not me or the OP I replied to.
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The CPU is looking kind of weak also. It loses to the 4900HS which is a 35W notebook APU.
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I'm not surprised a one year old chip loses to a chip that hasn't hit the market yet. Also not sure why you're fascinated by the 35W bit. The 9980HK is a 45W part and doesn't need to run from a battery, and both are well and truly more than suitable for even heavy gaming workloads.
We're not building number crunching workstations here.
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I have the "Hades Canyon" NUC (NUC8i7HVK), with the AMD GPU and there is significant difference between that and a laptop; in power and cooling.
The laptop (XPS) is limited in how much power it takes in (~130W) and how much heat it can dissipate (even lower). The NUC has two very large (and relatively silent) fans which can sustain performance for a long while.
The laptop is limited to a few seconds of top speed. Then it is throttled significantly. So if you are doing work, like compiling a single file, or a
I don't quite understand what these are for (Score:2)
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The ASUS Zephyrus G14 (a 14" notebook) with the Ryzen 9 4900H is dramatically faster than this thing in the CPU category, has twice as much RAM, eight times as much storage space, includes an RTX 2060, and still costs several hundred dollars less than the NUC, which does not include any GPU at all.
The Intel NUC might be interesting at half the price, but as it stands right now, by the time you upgrade the RAM, SSD, and put in a GPU, you're looking at a $2,700 NUC losing badly in benchmarks to a $1,500 slim
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That notebook is much less volume than this NUC, and the cooling is probably better considering this NUC just has a tiny little blower fan on the CPU that gets starved by having a GPU and its hot backplate almost blocking the CPU blower intake.
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I'd actually eyeball this for some embedded industrial machine vision workloads we have. Depending on the thermals, having a compact case + RTX board lets us run our DNN vision algorithms in a box that'd fit inside an industrial control enclosure. That'd save us on either larger enclosures, or running streaming video back to a server rack on premise.
And IP65 (or IP68 preferred) enclosures get hefty expensive quick.
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why not just buy a decent gaming laptop?
Why spend more money for a laptop when you don't need portability and want do use a desktop monitor and accessories? A laptop with this performance will likely cost more. Note I said performance, not specs. Laptop GPUs are woefully underclocked due to the sub par cooling systems and a typical RTX 2070 laptop barely outperforms a RTX 2060 and gets absolutely annihilated by the desktop variant of the same model number. They don't even use the same chips in them.
The price point is an issue for Intel but it's n
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More money? The barebones NUC is $1600!
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The bearbones one yes, the fully configured one is $400 more and comes with specs that would be incredibly difficult to match with a laptop at that pricerange.
You're freaking out about minor cost differences for quite high end hardware. We're not comparing Chromebooks to Raspberry Pis here.
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No, it isn't $400 more.
Read the summary/article.
"but fully configured like the one in the review will retail north of $2000".
They didn't fully kit out the review sample for only $2000!
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The fully configured one still does not include a GPU. You can get a fully configured Ryzen 4000 series laptop with a gaming GPU for less than the GPU-less NUC and the laptop will destroy it in benchmarks.
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These get used a fair amount in the home lab scene for creating multi-node computing clusters on the cheap, at least the models that are cheaper. The lack of a second NIC was an annoyance, and I've seen hacks that add second NICs via PCIe or even M.2 expansion. But even VMware has a useful USB3 NIC driver for lab-type environments.
This specific model seems to an attempt to expand the use case to more intensive desktop use, where I'd guess the benefit is mostly small size and the ability to piggyback onto
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Because they look nice on your TV console next to your PSwhatever or XBox whatever. They also have VESA mounts so you can sandwich them directly between your stand and monitor and turn whatever fancy monitor into an all-in-one.
I've got two systems at work in the our lab using the atom-based and i3-based cheapo NUCs like this (IIRC the atom based one was ~$120 for the barebones, I put in a 256gb SSD and 4gb of memory for a total cost of about $220, the i3 was ~$300 and I put a 256gb SSD and 16gb memory for a
Obligatory... (Score:1)
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
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I don't really see a benefit to this, especially if you have to replace the backplane every couple generations.
If you're into upgrading components then you wouldn't see the benefit or sense in *most* of the form factors you've just listed. Also I question your use of "desktop format". Most of what you have listed are not desktop PCs (heck FlexATX is a U1 rackmount form factor), and most of them are also dead or very niche and thus don't really impact anyone.
If you want standard and upgradability stick to ATX, mATX, or mITX. Everything else has a single special purpose. This thing is overpowered and expensive for any
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The worst is EATX. There are lots of EATX boards but it's not actually a standard. Different manufacturers use different sizes. Cases that claim to be EATX compatible might not take a particular EATX board.
Basically it's the same as ATX but wider. It's just that no one can agree how much wider.
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I see you saw Gamer's Nexus's rant on the topic recently :-)
But TBH if you're buying a EATX board you're doing something very special purpose already and matching the board to the case isn't the only very careful compatibility consideration you'll be doing. :-)
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I agree that there are far too many "micro" form factors and no real coalescing around any of them. You almost are better off looking at a whole system (board, PSU, case) because once you try to find just one of that trio you're often highly limited in the rest of the package.
I'd wager part of the problem is that so many of these are built around SoC-type setups where nearly everything is soldered down, so it's not really a "PC" with discrete components. At best there's memory slots and maybe some kind of
How much better than Hades Canyon (Score:2)
I've been running 6 UHD video screens off the Hades Canyon, but you can tell it is pushing the limits. I'd love to get my hands on the Ghost Canyon to see how it handles the load.
Had to get USB-C to HDMI cables to get it all running.
Bring back PIO! (Score:3)
Instead of this, I think the industry should go for the PIO motherboard format for SFF. .. and it would allow for more arrangements of motherboard and GPU without having to make as many sacrifices.
The only difference from mITX is that the PCIe card slot is on the opposite edge and pointing sideways. This it is compatible with a lot of things out there
* Without a PCIe card, it is the same as mITX, so it works in existing PC cases. ..
* If you want a slim computer with GPU, both cards have components on the same side, so all cooling is on the same side.
* If you want a GPU in single compartment airflow with large slow fan, you could use an angle bracket, and
* If you want a sandwich of motherboard and GPU like this "NUC" has, you could have a backplane board, just like this "NUC".
And you could make it just as small.
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The only difference from mITX is that the PCIe card slot is on the opposite edge and pointing sideways.
So what's the benefit then? It sounds like the current SFF options of using a riser cable is infinitely more versatile and provides far more compatibility with cases and more varied arrangements and the only sacrafice is the cost of the riser cable. The downside is that you need a very specific case whereas an ITX case fits in all cases larger than ITX.
I don't see much sense in this NUC, but I also don't see much sense in the PIO form factor.
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This has been advocated before. I used to be involved in acquisition and testing of desktop systems for a government body. One vendor (probably no longer in business) offered an architecture that had a CPU daughterboard, touted as how you could upgrade your PC without replacing it. I didn't buy it, both figuratively and literally.
Any removable component is going to be more expensive and less reliable than anything soldered down. The build cost of a field upgrade on a Canadian desk was way higher than a huma
Its Extreme (Score:2)
You can only using while sitting on the edge of your seat, its that extreme. The only thing that looks extreme is the price.
Niche Market: Designers (Score:1)
The new NUCs are perfect for design firms (Architecture, Engineering, Ad Agencies, Studios, etc.) looking for a powerful, small desktop that can be deployed and centrally managed. Part of the allure is that Adobe, AutoDesk, and other design software makers have already approved the hardware for use with their products. This might be one of the only products that Intel has left where they've taken the time to understand the needs of their market - which doesn't include anyone who actually reads Slashdot or c