Intel NUC 11 Extreme Review – Ultra-Compact High-End Gaming NUC

BIG GPUs – Why the NUC 11 Extreme Exists

The core driver behind the NUC 11 Extreme’s design is its support for large graphics cards. This kit’s enclosure can easily accommodate GPUs that are 300mm in size with room to spare, allowing this case to fit graphics cards like Nvidia’s RTX 3080 Founders Edition and AMD’s reference RX 6800 easily. 

So long as your graphics card is two slots wide and isn’t too long, it will fit inside this system’s enclosure. This makes Intel’s NUC 11 Extreme kit a great baseline for a compact gaming system. 
  

  
Our Intel NUC 11 Extreme review sample featured an ASUS RTX 3060 Dual graphics card. Interestingly, Intel supplied this NUC with a graphics card that is the same size as their NUC Extreme Compute Element card, which fails to utilise this enclosure’s additional length.

When the main draw of this enclosure is its support for longer graphics cards, it is strange to see Intel ship this system to reviewers with a graphics card that doesn’t need the extra space.  Even so, the image below should highlight that longer graphics cards can be used with this barebones NUC. 

  
Below we have mounted AMD’s Reference RX 6800 graphics card inside Intel’s NUC 11 Extreme. As you can see, there is more than enough room to mount this large graphics card, and this unit’s 650W power supply can provide more than enough juice to power it. 

For our testing, we reinstalled Intel’s pre-installed RTX 3060 graphics card.