Intel Launches Skull Canyon Gaming NUC

Late last year, we got the earliest hint of Intel’s Skull Canyon NUC. Based off of the popular NUC or Next Unit of Computing series, the super small form factor PC was set to provide enthusiasts the perfect PC for HTPC and light gaming. Today at GDC, Intel finally revealed the specifications, availability and more importantly the pricing for the NUC.

Size, of course, is one of the biggest considerations with the Skull Canyon NUC (NUC6i7KYK) coming in at  216mm x 116mm x 23mm. To put this in perspective, it is nearly twice as long but somewhat thinner than regular NUCs which are 115mm x 111mm x 32mm. Due to the lack of a 2.5inch drive, it is also significantly thinner than the NUCs which support HDDs that are 115mm x 111mm x 48mm.

For the system itself, it runs an i7 6770HQ with 4C/8T and 2.5Ghz base and 3.2Ghz turbo and 2 DDR4 DIMM slots. The chip only has 6MB of L3 but does have the all important Iris Pro HD 580, sporting 576 ALUs, 72 EUs and 9 subslices with the usually massive 128MB eDRAM cache. This will be enough to surpass AMD’s APUs due not only to the eDRAM cache but also the masive iGPU size. Storage is provided by 2 M.2 slots with more possible over the 4 USB3 ports and 1 Thunderbolt 3/USB 3.1. There is also one each of HDMI 2.0 and mDP 1.2 out and SDXC port.

A barebones system will set you back $650 and adding an 256GB SSD, 16GB of ram and Windows 10 bumps that up to $999. Overall, the NUC seems like a decent set of kit and with external Thunderbolt 3 GPUs picking up and being available, future GPU upgrades are within the realm of possibility.