80 PCWorld MAY 2020REVIEWS INTEL GHOST CANYON NUC9I9QNX
that amount of cash far outstrips the $1,100
and $1,550 outlay for Skull Canyon and
Hades Canyon, respectively. Instead, it
reaches heights similar to that of expensive
gaming laptops like the $3,250 Alienware
Area-51m (go.pcworld.com/area), which is
also semi-modular.
You can whittle down our Ghost Canyon
NUC’s price, of course—the two storage
drives inflated Intel’s bill considerably. Still,
the potential for sticker shock lingers, if you’re
only minding dollars and cents.Specs and ports
Turn your attention to the technology you get
for that money, though, and the outlook
improves considerably. These extreme NUCshave always been
about bleeding-
edge technology
and more ports than
most people know
what to do with, and
Ghost Canyon packs
that in.
The Compute
Element itself carries
most of the weight.
Inside are two M.2
SSD slots that
support NVMe or
SATA drives—one
accommodates
drives up to 110mm
in length, the other up to 80mm. An
additional NVMe M.2 SSD up to 110mm in
length can also be installed on the chassis,
but if you want to set up a RAID 0 or RAID 1
configuration, you must install the two M.2
drives within the Compute Element. The
Compute Element also supports Optane
Memory (M10 and H10 series) and Optane
SSDs.
All versions of the Compute Element
accommodate up to 64GB DDR-2666MHz
RAM, but only the Core i7 and Core i9
variants support overclocked RAM via XMP
profiles.
For ports, you’ll find four USB 3.1 Gen 2
(10Gbps) Type-A ports, two Thunderbolt 3
ports, two gigabit LAN ports, one HDMITo keep the components housed within the Compute Unit cool, Intel uses a
CPU vapor chamber and 80mm fan.