Thursday, March 17th 2016
Intel Debuts the Skull Canyon Gaming NUC
Intel announced its first "gaming grade" NUC. As if the very concept of NUC wasn't disruptive to the small form-factor desktop segment enough, the company is upping the ante with one that's prepped for gaming. Codenamed NUC6i7KYK, the new Skull Canyon NUC is about double the size of the average NUC. It has sufficient muscle for sub-1080p gaming, but is also prepped for external graphics solutions, such as the Razer Core.
To begin with, the Skull Canyon is driven by a Core i7-6770HQ processor based on the "Skylake" architecture. This quad-core chip features HyperThreading, which enables 8 logical CPUs, 6 MB of L3 cache, 128 MB L4 cache, and Intel Iris Pro Graphics 580. The CPU cores run at speeds between 2.60 GHz and 3.50 GHz, while the iGPU ticks at 950 MHz. With 576 execution units, 72 TMUs, and 9 ROPs, the integrated graphics core is good enough for gaming at sub-1080p resolutions such as 720p and 900p.If you absolutely need more pixel-crunching power, then the Skull Canyon features a 40 Gb/s Thunderbolt 3 port, letting you use external graphics cards. The barebones version of the Skull Canyon will be priced at US $650, which is a bargain if you consider that the OEM channel price of the i7-6770HQ itself is $435. A fully-loaded variant with 16 GB of dual-channel DDR4-2133 memory, 256 GB SSD storage, and Windows 10 pre-installed, will be priced at US $999.
To begin with, the Skull Canyon is driven by a Core i7-6770HQ processor based on the "Skylake" architecture. This quad-core chip features HyperThreading, which enables 8 logical CPUs, 6 MB of L3 cache, 128 MB L4 cache, and Intel Iris Pro Graphics 580. The CPU cores run at speeds between 2.60 GHz and 3.50 GHz, while the iGPU ticks at 950 MHz. With 576 execution units, 72 TMUs, and 9 ROPs, the integrated graphics core is good enough for gaming at sub-1080p resolutions such as 720p and 900p.If you absolutely need more pixel-crunching power, then the Skull Canyon features a 40 Gb/s Thunderbolt 3 port, letting you use external graphics cards. The barebones version of the Skull Canyon will be priced at US $650, which is a bargain if you consider that the OEM channel price of the i7-6770HQ itself is $435. A fully-loaded variant with 16 GB of dual-channel DDR4-2133 memory, 256 GB SSD storage, and Windows 10 pre-installed, will be priced at US $999.