- Some people will go to any lengths to make their gaming PC smaller. But only a select few of them
have the engineering expertise to ensure that the system will still work. Fortunately, Intel is one of those few. And I'm really excited
to take a look at their newest, Enthusiast NUC, Phantom Canyon, featuring an 11th Gen Tiger Lake processor and discreet RTX 2060 graphics. Cause, here's the thing guys, normally a high-performance NUC like this comes at such a hefty price
premium that most people would rather just have
a full-sized computer. Except, look at this. An RTX 2060, is gonna cost
you as much as $600 today. Okay then, NUC. Let's see what you can do. Ridge Wallet is celebrating
the eighth anniversary of their successful Kickstarter campaign and launch of Ridgewallet.com. So get 15% off site-wide
at ridgewallet.com/linus. (upbeat music) Intel has been selling NUCs or Next Unit of Computing since 2013. And this Tiger Lake variant
is interesting to gamers for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, is that you can actually
buy the bloody thing. Now, as Jarrod'sTech pointed out in this excellent comparison,
we'll have it linked below, an RTX 2060 mobile GPU
isn't quite as performant as one of these. But, it's also not that far off. Meaning, that we can expect
a solid gaming experience at up to 1440p resolution,
even in AAA games. Well, that's reason number two. The first NUCs were small but they came with a
significant performance penalty. By contrast, our unit here is equipped with a 10
nanometers Core i7-1165G7. Now, that's only a quad-core and it turbos to a mere 4.7 gigahertz, but architecturally it's more advanced than Intel's 10th Generation
Desktop Processors. Meaning, that in moderately
multi-threaded workloads like games, it shouldn't be
a performance bottleneck. To test this, we started with
Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Now we know, most people aren't
playing this game every day but what we also know,
is that if a machine can deliver a smooth 1440p
experience in Shadow, it'll handle most pretty recent AAA games. As long as you don't try to flip on RTX. I mean, it's nice to have
the option to turn it on and admire the eye candy, but the truth is the 2060 was never really fast enough for smooth ray traced lighting. CS:GO though, is a game that runs well on just about anything
but needs a fast CPU to run at extremely high frame rates for the best competitive experience. Our Phantom Canyon NUC kept up well enough that no casual player would complain but given the general rule that you want two frames per second, for every one Hertz of your monitor, competitive players with
high refresh rate displays might find it a little lacking. Finally, F1 2020, drives home the point that you gotta be realistic. Okay? It's a 2060. You won't be cranking everything
to max at 4k resolution. But, when you consider
that the size of this thing is not that different
from just an RTX 2060 for the whole system, there's not a lot to complain about here. Even thermal stayed well within reason. We both benchmarked the
Enthusiast NUC in our studio and took it home for some
extended gaming sessions and the GPU never passed 70 degrees as long as we kept the vents unobstructed. The CPU though, is a
more complicated story. It's clear that Intel has
done some careful tuning to squeeze as much as
possible out of this machine. So curiously, during a long Blender render we were hovering in the 80 degree range but at relatively low clock speeds. And then, we fired up Cyberpunk 2077, saw turbo speeds in
the 4.6 gigahertz range and then even though the
CPU wasn't fully utilized we saw temps as high as the low '90s. Thankfully though, even
while the whole machine is being hit hard like that it never gets intrusively loud. On the subject of cooling by the way, we're gonna be stripping a PlayStation 5 and water cooling it. So, make sure you're subscribed
so you don't miss it. Of course, the last big compromise for anyone looking at a NUC is what they give up in
terms of expansion and IO. But this one is looking pretty good. We've got plenty of USB
10 gigabit ports, HDMI 2.0 and Mini DisplayPort 1.4,
an SD card reader, WiFi 6 and this is really nice,
2.5 Gigabit Ethernet. That's fast. Almost as fast as you can
cable manage your home setups with the help of lttstore.com cable ties. And if that footprint is still too big for your minimalist lifestyle, you can also mount it to the back of any VESA compatible monitor
with the included hardware for a nearly cable-free experience. So that's already enough connectivity that most people won't feel limited by it. And for a compact device,
it's pretty upgradable too. The CPU and GPU are soldered.
No swapping out those. But, you get two M.2 slots for SSDs and two SODIMM slots if
you wanna add more memory. And the Dual 40 Gigabit
Thunderbolt 4 ports mean that anything from
external capture devices, to high-speed fiber optic networking, to even a graphics card upgrade is in play if you're willing to pay the premium for an external enclosure. Bringing us to the question of, what kind of premium will you be paying? This guy starts at 1339, but 128 gigs of storage and
8 gigs of DDR4-3200 memory is less than a decent phone these days. So realistically, you're gonna
be spending around $1,600 by the time you've got enough NVMe storage for War Zone and another game or two. Now, normally the premium that comes with using mobile hardware in a desktop has made NUCs extremely
difficult for us to recommend. But, as we alluded to before the current landscape makes
it look a lot more competitive especially considering the
quality of life benefits of having a super
compact and quiet machine for your work or play. Now, one use case that
we can imagine for these is actually classrooms or
other large-scale institutions. All you gotta do is, swap
out the flashy skull logo, put it on the included stand
for optimal airflow and boom, you've got a discreet
looking, little workstation with a great balance of
CPU speed and GPU grunt. For those who don't need GPU power, we also got our hands on the
new 11th Gen Performance NUC. It is louder than the Enthusiast model and it doesn't have quite
as much connectivity. But, it's also less expensive,
uses Intel's new Xe graphics, if you only plan on light gaming and it even has an included
phone charger thing on the top. Just like, okay, I guess. You know what else is, okay, I guess? Blinkist, takes the best insights and most important information from thousands of non-fiction books and condenses them into just 15 minutes. You can either read or
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to blinkist.com/linustechtips are gonna get unlimited access
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get special pricing on that up to 65% off the regular retail price. Are you guys trying to
decide between a NUC, a gaming laptop, or even
a full-sized ATX build? Let us know in the comments below, and if you like small form
factor gaming stuff like this, make sure to watch our smallest
gaming PC build ever video, where I literally cram
the computer together in order to screw it in. It's pretty bad. And it's a lot bigger than this.
I wanted to buy a AMD-H notebook, then I saw 8PCIe 3.0 Lanes to the GPU and basically no IO. TigerLake-H it is ! basically when cooled well enough a desktop CPU.
I'd wait until the tiger lake-H cpus come out before buying an intel nuc