Upcoming Intel NUC PCs can be expanded with a separate video card

Information has emerged about the Quartz Canyon, a workstation kit from Intel in the NUC line of compact systems that can accommodate an additional video card. The upcoming Ghost Canyon for gamers and the Phantom Canyon also seem to contain separate video cards.

Intel supplies the Quartz Canyon with a Xeon E or Corei i7 vPro processor. The system also has two Thunderbolt 3.0 ports, two Ethernet ports, 802.11ax WiFi, six USB ports, an SD card reader and a 3.5mm jack for audio. This is apparent from a brochure from the Russian website Softline and information from the Chinese site Chiphell. According to Twitter user momomo_us, which often brings correct processor news, Quartz Canyon gets a Xeon E-2286M or i7-9850H. Special for a NUC is that Quartz Canyon has an integrated power supply of 500W and offers support for an extra video card.

Intel would also like to release the gamer-oriented Ghost Canyon with a similar housing this year or next year. This would be the successor to Hades Canyon, with a Core i9-9980HK and slot for separate video card. Phantom Canyon should appear in 2020 or 2021, of which Intel showed a concept, according to Chiphell. Intel is considering equipping this NUC with a Tiger Lake-U processor, PCI-e 4.0, HDMI 2.1, 802.11ax, Bluetooth 5, USB 3.1 Gen 3 and Thunderbolt 3, and a separate video card can also be inserted into this PC. Intel’s Hades Canyon already has a dedicated GPU, the AMD Vega RX M, but this is part of the Kaby Lake G chip where the GPU is combined with the CPU. In addition, there are NUCs with dedicated AMD Radeon 540 GPU on the motherboard. For the concept of Phantom Canyon, Intel mentions the presence of the GeForce 1660 Ti and 2060 from Nvidia, but it is not clear whether these are just examples of a possible configuration or whether Intel is actually working with Nvidia instead of AMD.