Yesterday, October 10, at the TwitchCon event, Intel employees officially presented their new Intel Raptor Canyon NUC 13 Extreme gaming PC, but they can no longer be called compact. In the past, NUC computers were really tiny, giving the potential buyer the opportunity to free up their workspace from a giant computer case – those days are probably gone. On the other hand, the performance of the new computer should be large enough so that the potential buyer does not compromise when choosing between compactness and power.

For example, a user can choose an Intel Core i9-13900K, Core i7-13700K, or Core i5-13600K processor as the basis for system performance. Yes, these are all processors of the Raptor Lake generation – the Raptor Canyon name appeared in his honor. Accordingly, all existing processors for installation in the new NUC support overclocking by the multiplier – with high-quality cooling, this allows the user to free their hands when trying to get more power. In addition, and most interestingly, the new NUC supports full-size graphics cards – of course you can’t fit an RTX 4090 in this case if you really want to, but more compact models are quite suitable.

To implement high-quality cooling and support for full-size video cards, Intel decided to create a new NUC in a 13.9-liter chassis, which is 50% more than the previous generation. Thanks to the increase in internal space, the company’s engineers were able to fit three video card slots into the chassis, which allows you to fully use the Intel Raptor Canyon NUC 13 Extreme with Intel Arc video cards. This is definitely a big step forward for the “blue team” – you can now offer compact gaming PCs with your own processor and graphics card.

However, the company has already announced that there will also be video card options from AMD and NVIDIA, so no restrictions are planned in this regard. The user also gets the opportunity to install a solid state drive, the case even has room to install case fans that need to improve the temperature inside the computer. Although 90% of the side panels are made of mesh, there should be no temperature issues.