MAY 2020 PCWorld 79micro-ATX, or ATX PC is like assembling Lego,
Ghost Canyon is like playing with Duplo.
PRICE, SPECS, AND PORTS
Price
As with all other NUCs, Ghost Canyon is sold
as a bare-bones kit. You get the chassis, a
preinstalled 500W power supply with
prerouted cabling, and Intel’s Compute
Element (which, as mentioned above,
contains the CPU and its cooling, system
ports, and wireless connectivity module).
Storage, RAM, any expansion cards such as a
discrete GPU, and the operating system must
be purchased separately.
Our review unit is the top-of-the-line
version: the $1,700 NUC9i9QNX, which
features an 8-core, 16-thread Core
i9-9980HK. This 45W CPU
runs at a base clock speed of
2.4GHz that boosts up to
5GHz. It’s technically
overclockable, but Intel
doesn’t recommend it, as
doing so will void your
warranty.
You also have the option
of the $1,250 NUC9i7QNX,
which comes with a 6-core,
12-thread Core i7-9750H
(2.6GHz base clock,
4.5GHz turbo); or the
$1,050 NUC9i5QNX, which
has a 4-core, 8-thread Core
i5-9300H (2.4GHz base clock, 4.1GHz
turbo). These chips are both 45W parts, too.
Intel spared no expense in outfitting our
NUC9i9QNX. The company has constantly
pushed the idea of these high-end NUCs as
gaming machines, and that approach
continues with Ghost Canyon. Our review
unit came pre-equipped with an Asus Dual
RTX 2070 8GB Mini, 16GB (2x8GB) of
Kingston HX432S20IB2K2 RAM running at
2667MHz, an Intel Optane 905p 380GB
M.2. NVMe SSD, a 1TB Kingston KC2000
M.2 NVMe SSD, and a Windows 10 Home
license.
All told, you would shell out about
$3,050 at today’s street prices for an
equivalent system—the 380GB Optane drive
alone goes for a little over $500. For context,The new NUC 9 Extreme models come with a preinstalled 500W
power supply. Note that while the PSU uses a special 10-pin connector
to power the system, it’s unrelated to Intel’s new ATX12VO spec (go.
pcworld.com/12vo.