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

Gaming – Days Gone and F1 2020

Intel’s NUC 11 Extreme is a barebones system, which means that end-users are able to configure the system with whatever graphics card they want. In a sense, this makes gaming tests pointless, as you can simply install a faster graphics card to achieve higher performance levels in most titles. 

That said, we needed to put the NUC 11 Extreme through its paces, so our testing revolves around multiple games and various resolutions. Our aim is to see if Intel’s NUC 11 Extreme is a capable gaming machine, and whether or not we can overheat the graphics card within the system. 

To make a long story short, Intel’s NUC 11 Extreme delivers enough GPU airflow to prevent any major thermal issues. GPU thermals remained at reasonable levels throughout our tests. GPU thermals in this sense depend more on your graphics card and its heatsink than the NUC 11 Extreme chassis itself, as GPUs inside it can access plenty of airflows. 

Days Gone
  
While it can be argued that these game tests are analysing Nvidia’s RTX 3060 and not Intel’s NUC 11 Extreme, it cannot be denied that Intel’s i9-11900KB processor is what’s powering this gaming workload. More than that, this game is GPU-limited, not CPU-limited. 

If we added a stronger graphics card to this system, we would be able to achieve stronger performance levels. It’s as simple as that. Nvidia’s RTX 3060 is the limiting factor here. 

For some added fun to our tests, we decided to try to get a playable 4K 60 FPS experience from the games that we tested. And for Days Gone what we needed was an 80% resolution scale and high game settings. Even with these settings downgrades, the game looks great on PC. 

  

F1 2020

With F1 2020, Intel’s NUC 11 Extreme continues to be GPU-limited. The game poses no major challenges to Intel’s NUC 11 Extreme. Intel’s i9-11900KB is ready for high-refresh-rate gaming, at least for this racing title. 

For 4K 60 FPS gameplay at all times (we test using F1 2020’s demanding Singapore track in the rain), all we needed to do was enable Nvidia’s DLSS technology.