Benchmarks have been spotted online for one of Intel’s upcoming NUC 11 Extreme devices and the results look promising. These results were spotted by HardwareLeaks and one of the models in question sports a quad-core Tiger Lake U processor alongside an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics card.
These upcoming NUC 11 devices are going to be split into two main categories by Intel. There will be the NUC 11 Performance category which will cater towards mainstream users and the NUC 11 Extreme category which will be tailored towards gamers, enthusiasts, and power users. These are set to come with discrete graphics card options and could be built on a 10nm+ process node if leaks are to be believed.
What Did The Benchmarks Show?
The benchmarks that were spotted came from 3DMark, a popular benchmarking platform. The Tiger Lake-U chip inside the NUC 11 Extreme was listed as a quad-core, eight-thread design which has a 2.3 GHz base clock and an impressive boost clock of up to 4.4 GHz.
Better still, this is likely to only be an engineering sample and these figures could be set to further improve in the future. With this already outperforming the maximum 4.1 GHz boost found in the Ice Lake predecessors, this looks like a promising piece of hardware. Additionally, there were a few leaks last year that pointed towards a 28 W TDP and support for PCIe 4.0.
One of the main selling points of the Tiger Lake-U is that it is rumored to feature a discrete Gen12 Xe graphics card. Although there isn’t too much information about this just yet, it will be an added positive to an already impressive chip. The benchmarked unit sported a mobile variant of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti which has slightly slower clock speeds to allow it to run inside an 80 W power envelope.
Final Word
Overall, this looks like a very promising piece of hardware that could easily fall into the same territory as next-generation consoles. However, we don’t see them matching up too well against the power of the AMD Navi 2x GPUs that the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 are set to use, especially by only running a GTX 1660 Ti.
There is still time for this to change however and with most leaks and rumors, it’s worth taking this with a small pinch of salt. Could we see a higher-performing card switched in? How much higher will the base and boost clocks get? We’ll have to wait and see for those answers for now.
What do you think of these benchmarks? Would you be interested in picking up one of Intel’s NUC 11 units? Let us know down in the comments section below.