Intel NUC 13 Extreme Review – A BIG Upgrade for Intel NUC

Looking inside Intel’s NUC 13 Extreme

As usual, Intel has supplied their latest NUC inside a very fancy box, ensuring that their latest compact system is ready for transport and practically immune to shipping related damages. The foam layers protecting Intel’s new NUC 13 Extreme are almost as thick as the NUC itself, making this box super overkill.  

Intel’s NUC 13 Extreme has an understated look, being a black monolithic affair that makes little noise and takes up little space. There are no RGB lights, no tempered glass windows, and no cray design elements. This PC is designed to be well suited to gaming spaces and office spaces, offering users a style that could practically fit in anywhere.

At the front out NUC 13 Extreme had a simple i9 badge, a few USB ports, a power button (2x Type-A 5Gbps ports, 1x Type-C 10Gbps port), and a headphone jack.

The rear of Intel’s NUC 13 Extreme is also a simple affair, with a wide range of I/O options though Intel’s NUC 13 Compute Element board and though the system’s connected graphics card. 

The NUC 13 Extreme Compute Element card supports 10Gb ethernet, WiFi 6E, 

At the rear of the NUC 13 Extreme we can see the back of the 750W FSP ATX12VO power supply that powers this system and the ports that are available though Intel’s NUC 13 Extreme Compute Element card. These ports include two USB4/Thunderbolt 4 ports, Six USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) Type-A USB ports, an HDMI 2.1 output, a 2.5 Gb Ethernet port and a 10Gb Ethernet port (Marvell AQtion AQC113C). The WiFi is delivered through the system’s WiFi 6E Killer 1690i internal WiFi chipset.   

Below we can see the rear of the ASUS TUF Gaming RTX 3080 Ti graphics card that was supplied with this system. As you can see, this system supports triple-slot graphics cards.

After taking off a few panels, we can see the NUC 13 Extreme Compute Element card and the RTX 3080 Ti graphics card that is contained within this system.

Below we can see the other side of Intel’s NUC 13 Extreme system, where we can see the intake fan for the system’s SFX power supply, two 120mm fans (which are designed to pull air though the system’s extended NUC Compute Element heatsink and the system’s graphics card), and a plate where two 2.5-inch (or one 3.5-inch) SATA drives can be mounted. This allows users of Intel’s NUC 13 to support multiple storage drives that are not M.2 SSDs. For users that need a lot of excess storage, this area is a godsend.   

  
Intel’s NUC 13 Extreme system can support graphics cards that draw up to 450 watts of power, which means that this system can support Nvidia’s RTX 4090 graphics cards. Intel’s NUC 13 Extreme chassis is large enough to accommodate an RTX 4090 Founders Edition, and the system’s power supply can power GPUs either though a 12VHPWR connector, or three 6=2-pin PCIe power cables.   

  

BIG GPU Support – Can the NUC 13 contain an RTX 4090?