Slashdot Mirror
Intel Teases Skull Canyon Gaming NUC: Core i7, Iris Pro Graphics, Thunderbolt 3 (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Intel first hinted at their upcoming Skull Canyon NUC small form factor PC at CES 2016 in January, but the company is now ready to give this slightly bigger, badder NUC its official debut. Skull Canyon manages to cram high-end Intel silicon within an enclosure that measures just 8.5" x 4.6" x 0.9" and has a volume of just 0.69 liters. Inside, there is a sixth generation Intel Core i7-6770HQ processor with 45W TDP and integrated Iris Pro Graphics 580 with on-board eDRAM. On the memory front, up to 32GB of 2133MHz DDR4 is supported, while storage duties are covered by two M.2 slots that support the latest NVMe PCIe SSDs. Also on-board is Intel 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, and GbE and even a consumer infrared sensor if you want to use Skull Canyon as a media box. For external ports you'll find a full-size HDMI 2.0 port, Mini DisplayPort 1.2, four USB 3.0 ports, an SD slot which can accommodate up to 512GB, and support for Thunderbolt 3 (40GBps) and USB 3.1 using a USB Type-C connector. Intel says that a barebones Skull Canyon NUC (NUC6i7KYK) has an estimated street price of $650. Preorders for the NUC6i7KYK SKU will begin next month and shipments will commence in May.
order in the next 10 minutes and they'll send you two NUCs, just pay an additional $2000 S&H. Operators are standing by, call now !
Nullius in verba
I am glad to see they keep pushing the boundaries for small form factor computers. Just wish they do something about all these damn cables!!! E.g. Are we ever going to get combined power and data?
:T:R:A:N:S:
It would make a nice micro home server / VM box, though with those specs and dimensions it'll probably be a noisy bugger.
Also, TB 3 opens the door for an eGPU...
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I've got some NUCs sitting around. There's one behind my TV at home and we use them in my office for presentation systems and the like. They range from Celerons to i5s (mostly i3s) and they're all Haswell or newer, with the latest having M.2 for storage.
So here's what I want to say: NUCs get hot. M.2 SSDs also get hot. There's almost nothing that can be done inside the NUC enclosure to cool the damned things down. You can point a box fan at one or put it on a large block of aluminum and it's not going to have much impact for the internal temperatures. Almost every NUC does a certain amount of thermal throttling, so there seems to be very little difference between an i3 and an i5. Putting an i7 in the same space with the same basic cooling options really isn't going to help.
All the arguments that apply to trying to claim that a "gaming" laptop with a high end CPU and no discrete GPU are also going to apply in this case. I understand that Thunderbolt in theory brings some options to the table in that regard but in practice I'd rather have an Expresscard given how limited (and expensive) support for Thunderbolt is on Windows and how well I know external Expresscard PCIe bridges work.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
It does Solitaire very well.
I can see about using this for a general purpose desktop. Gaming performance is "meh"... but good enough. Two M.2 cards means decent SSD ability, or if the NUC supports it, RAID.
For something to toss in a cabinet and work as a VM server, similar. Disk performance for small VMs would be decent from the M.2 SSD, and with USB and Thunderbolt, one has many options to pick one's poison when it comes to additional storage, be it a USB HDD, a NAS, or if one wants to spend the dough, go for more TB3 external stuff. Plus, even if it did make noise due to a fan, the NUC could be stuffed somewhere ventilated, but out of the way.
This might be great for a music workstation. If the Thunderbird port can support low latency audio interfaces like the Focusrite Clarett series you could have a really nice compact set up that would be workable for performance or studio use.
Bleh. Oh, go back into your basement and shut the hatch. As if low-performance gaming and high-performance gaming is all there is to do. This may come as a shock to you, but there is software development, remote administration, self study and self education on the web, and a myriad of other things that non-couch-potatoes do.
The simple fact is that this is perfect for just about everything EXCEPT heavy-duty gaming and massive 3D work, and allows replacing massive ATX cases with a box the size of a paperback book in a tiny corner of the desk.
You can even do pretty heavy-duty gaming and 3D with an external graphics unit connected to the Thunderbolt, and the whole assembly is only a tiny fraction the size and weight of a bloated ATX box.
I've looked at NUCs a few times now for various situations and every time I've been turned off by the requirement for 19V PSU. Not 12V not 24V, but 19V. Nice and non-standard, and exceptionally non-standard in situations where you may need a tiny computer (i.e. not somewhere where a wall socket is available).
19V / 19.5V seems to be a very common input voltage for laptops. It is related to the Li-Ion chemistry and also how the voltage converters and regulators are set up in most laptops. I suspect they are leveraging this technology and didn't bother improving it for NUC applications. Laptop power bricks are common enough and NUC type devices are niche products, even if they are very useful in certain applications.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
For anything BUT gaming in the living room, this machine is expensive and inflexible. It simply does not represent a good set of engineering tradeoffs in a cutthroat PC market where alternatives are legion. There are alternatives in all shapes and sizes including laptops of various sizes multiple desktop form factors.
This includes slightly larger and dramatically cheaper Steam machines that can be put to any use you like.
It's not like Apple products where you're pretty much a captive audience.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The simple fact is that this is perfect for just about everything EXCEPT heavy-duty gaming and massive 3D work, and allows replacing massive ATX cases with a box the size of a paperback book in a tiny corner of the desk.
No, it's massive overkill. I got my parents a small NUC, slapped another 8GB RAM in there for 10GB total and with a small 64GB SSD it's also perfectly fine for everything EXCEPT heavy-duty gaming and massive 3D work. And it was something like $300 total, not $1000. If I'd have to throw a bigger disk in there, add $50. I never understood the (small, powerful, non-portable) market. Sure, if you change one of those:
big, powerful, non-portable = gaming/workstation PC
small, low-power, non-portable = HTPC/casual use
small, powerful, portable = power laptop
Those all make sense to me. But cramming it all into a tiny box with heat and noise issues and paying a huge premium for saving a cubic feet of space? I just don't see it. I guess there's a market for it, but I'm not in it...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Here's an easy trick to remember the CGA palette: which are the four primary colours you see in vomit?
And you're completely missing an apostrophe.