JUNE 2022 PCWorld 83“NUC is now taking on
shrinking bigger and bigger
boxes,” said McCarson.
He admits that
enthusiast NUCs are
growing in size and power
requirements, and this is
likely to continue in the
future. But he points out
that larger NUCs still
deliver an improvement
over conventional PCs
when they, too, are also
growing in size and power
consumption. “You can
have more sustainable, have smaller, higher
quality, and not trade off on performance,”
said McCarson. “But it takes exquisite
engineering.”
That engineering takes the form of
modular design centered on a baseboard
with a PCIe x16 slot. This idea, which arrived
first in the Ghost Canyon NUC, works
alongside Intel’s Extreme Compute Elements,
which connect over PCI Express. This can be
found not only in enthusiast NUCs but also
third-party desktop PCs, such as Razer’s
Tomahawk (fave.co/3FY8Is4), and cases, like
the Cooler Master NC100.
“We don’t necessarily care about NUC
being visible if we’re helping to drive
innovation for our partners, or the industry,
that’s awesome,” said Bruce Patterson,
marketing communications manager. “A
consumer may not know that a chassis has a
NUC Element in it. They just say, oh, this has a
Core i9, it’s a cool-looking chassis. I’m happy.”
Even a standards-based approach has
risks, however, as standards change over
time—and Intel has plans to alter the
baseboard used for recent enthusiast NUCs.
“We expect change to come soon.
There’s been a lot of feedback from customers
about what they want to see better,” said
Habib. “A lot of the conversations we are
having right now are about how we can
reduce the number of cables in this box, and
we’re wondering if we can run more of this
through the baseboard.”
Intel’s Arc discrete graphics (fave.
co/3lf4i6Q) is also on its way, though the
details on how it might be implemented in
the NUC remain sparse.The ever-increasing size of PC graphics cards is a challenge for NUC’s
enthusiast group.