Value and Conclusion

Let's address the elephant in the room first. The Skulltrail is a high-end desktop (HEDT) platform, while the Skull Canyon is a NUC on steroids, and the two are hence completely different machines. The logical comparison would be comparing today's 8-core X99 machines to the Skulltrail, or the very first dual-core NUC to the Skull Canyon. What we set out to do was to compare a maxed out Skull Canyon NUC with the HEDT platform, which was an envy of every PC enthusiast worth their salt about a decade ago.

Intel's Skull Canyon NUC is a miniature beast. It is truly an example of how far technology has come in less than a decade. It beat out the legendary Skulltrail setup in every single test at less than a third of the original MSRP (when fully configured), not to mention the drastically reduced size and power draw. From media production to gaming, the NUC impressed us on all levels. We put together a price comparison table as many people have told me the NUC is just too expensive and that they would rather build a full desktop:


Oddly, we ended up with exactly the same cost. What is important to keep in mind for both the NUC and the desktop system is that the specs we decided on for our system are on the higher end. For casual gaming, you can get away with a single M.2 SSD that is not an NVMe drive and 2x 4 GB @ 2400 MHz of DDR4 memory instead of the much more expensive 2x 16 GB @ 3000 MHz we went with. If you are not worried about using a dedicated GPU with the NUC, which you should not be since it does just fine without it, you can build a whole system for less than $800.

Either solution is perfectly acceptable, and as with most things, each has their respective benefits. The NUC is portable, small, and does not draw a lot of power. The Skylake desktop has a slightly better CPU, is more flexible for future upgrades, and can be customized anyway you want with products such as liquid cooling. It all depends on what works best for you.

Coming back to Skulltrail, we remember how pairing these chips with anything short of an 850W PSU was considered blasphemy by the community. This was, of course, at a time when 80 Plus ratings were just gaining popularity. Yet the Skulltrail remains a power-hungry beast that requires liquid cooling to keep ticking. The Skull Canyon, on the other hand, draws as much power as the average yuppie's laptop, and gives you performance rivaling the best business desktops money can buy if you can make do with reasonably powerful integrated graphics, and the skull.