Intel NUC 11 Extreme ‘Beast Canyon’ is now available to pre-order

Intel has now finally launched NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon which comes equipped with the latest 11th gen Tiger Lake CPUs and supports a full-length (up to 308.4mm) graphics card, it was first teased at Computex 2021. With the consideration that ‘Beast Canyon’ accepts the best graphics cards, there’s still confusion that it is a NUC or more like a small form factor (SFF) system.

Under the Hood of Beast Canyon

As reported by Tom’s Hardware, Beast Canyon measures 357 x 189 x 120mm and it’s essentially an 8-liter case. There’s extra space for discrete graphics cards with a maximum length of up to 308.4mm. The NUC feautres one PCIe 4.0 x16 expansion slot, with sport for only a 650W 80Plus Gold ITX power supply. And as the supported CPUs are all 65W or lower parts which leave enough headroom for the most power-hungry GPUs like the RTX 3090.

Intel has provided three different 10nm processor options inside the NUC 11 Extreme Compute Element – Core i9-11900KB, Core i7-11700B, and Core i5-11400H. The Core i9-11900KB and Core i7-11700B come with a 65W thermal design power whereas the Core i5-11400H operates within the 45W limit.

The Core i9-11900KB and Core i7-11700B are 8-core chips and the Core i5-11400H has a 6-core chip and all three processors feature Hyper-Threading technology. Being the only chip with an unlocked multiplier for overclocking endeavors, the Core i9-11900KB has the highest clock speeds of 3.3 GHz base clock and 4.9 GHz boost clock.

Beast Canyon is connected to a WM590 chipset which is specifically designed for Tiger Lake. There’s a space for up to 64GB of DDR4-3200 1.2V SO-DIMM memory due to the two SO-DIMM memory slots but EEC memory modules aren’t supported.

The Beast Canyon offers plenty of storage options as well which includes 2x SATA 6Gbps ports for SSDs and hard drives, along with 4x high-speed storage M.2 slots. The 2x PCIe 4.0 x4 slots are connected directly to the Tiger Lake processor and the other 2x PCIe 3.0 x4 slots are connected to the WM590 chipset. The M.2 slots mainly support RAID 0 and RAID 1 arrays. 

Addtionaly, it comes with the USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports with six distributed at the back of the device and another two upfront. The number of USB ports can be extended through the two USB 3.1 headers or two USB 2.0 headers. NUC also comes with 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet networking, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.2 connectivity.

The Intel NUC 11 Extreme ‘Beast Canyon’ Core i9-11900KB, Core i7-11700B, and Core i5-11400H models starting at $1,599, $1,399 and $1,299 respectively can be pre-ordered at Simply NUC with orders start shipping in September.