Intel Announces Powerful Skull Canyon NUC Barebone

Intel has announced a new NUC. The Skull Canyon NUC6i7KYK is Intel’s most powerful mini PC yet, featuring a Core i7-6770HQ processor with Iris Pro 580 GPU. There is a thunderbolt 3 port for connecting an external graphics card.

Measuring 211x116x28mm, the Skull Canyon-NUC is slightly larger than the square barebone cases that Intel previously released. In terms of hardware, the new barebone is also a lot more powerful. The Core i7-6770HQ is one of the fastest CPUs for mobile devices from Intel. The Skylake processor has four cores and eight threads. The basic frequency is 2.6GHz and in turbo it goes up to 3.5GHz. The chip has a TDP of 45W.

The processor contains an Intel Iris Pro 580 GPU with 72 execution units and 128MB edram. Although this is the fastest GPU from Intel, avid gamers will probably need more graphics processing power. This can be added to the NUC by connecting a video card externally to the Thunderbolt 3 port. This requires a housing such as the Razor Core, which fits a video card. AMD introduced its XConnect standard for external video cards over Thunderbolt 3 last week and Nvidia has added beta support for the technology in its drivers.

Memory and storage must be added yourself. There is room for two ddr4-sodimms, the maximum amount of ram that can be used is 32GB. There are also two m2 connections for SSDs. The connectors support NVME SSDs and provide PCI-E-4x speeds. The case has gigabit ethernet, 802.11ac WiFi, four USB 3.0 ports, a full-size HDMI 2.0 port and a mini displayport 1.2 connection. Intel provides two cover plates for the housing: a variant with the Skull Canyon logo and a neutral plate in matte black.

Intel will sell the Skull Canyon-NUC in the US from May for a suggested retail price of $650. Converted including VAT, that is about 700 euros. Intel also states that complete configurations will be available at retailers. A NUC with 256GB SSD, 16GB DDR4 RAM and Windows 10 will cost $999, the manufacturer expects.