Intel announces first NUC mini-PC for gaming
It is the first system of Intel’s NUC family to be specially designed for gaming.
As in code NUC6i7KYK, the new NUC Skull Canyon will be characterized by higher dimensions of about two times compared to a traditional NUC. It also has a sufficient hardware to play most games at sub-1080p or 720p and 900p. Users can still connect box for installation of external graphics cards as Razer Core.
The Skyll Canyon heart we find the Intel Core i7-6770HQ processor-based architecture Skylake. We speak of a quad-core processor with HyperThreading Technology and 8 logical cores with 6 MB of L3 cache and 128MB of L4 cache and 45W TDP.
As for the graphics, the new NUC relies on chip Intel Iris Pro Graphics 580. The CPU core operating frequency range from 2.60 GHz to 3.50 GHz in the basic mode in Turbo mode, while the GPU operates at 950 MHz.
With 72 execution units and 9 ROP the integrated graphics chip, as mentioned, can render games at sub-1080p resolution. Users who like superior performance in games can install an external graphics card via the port Thunderbolt 3 which provides a transfer rate of 40 Gb/s.
The system also offers two M.2 connectors and is capable of exploiting the bandwidth with four lanes PCIe 3.0. We also have HDMI 2.0 and Mini DisplayPort 1.2 outputs, four USB 3.0 ports, SD card reader and Gigabit Ethernet port.
The barebones version of the small size of Skull Canyon will cost $650, a very competitive price when you consider that the OEM price of the CPU alone is $435, but to which we must add the cost of the HDD or SSD is not included.
According to Intel’s estimates, a more armored version with 16 GB of dual-channel DDR4-2133 memory, 256GB SSD and Windows 10 pre-installed will cost $999. Intel Skull Canyon arrive on the market in the month of May.
- 6th Generation Intel Core i7-6770HQ
- Intel Iris Pro Graphics 580
- Up to 7.1 multichannel digital audio via HDMI or DisplayPort signals
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