some people will go to any length to make their gaming pc smaller but only a
select few of them have the engineering expertise to ensure that the system will
still work fortunately Intel is one of those few
and i'm really excited to take a look at their newest enthusiast nook phantom
canyon featuring an 11th gen tiger lake processor and discreet rtx 2060 graphics
cause here's the thing guys normally a high performance nook like
this comes at such a hefty price premium that most people would rather just have
a full-size computer except look at this
an rtx 2060 is going to cost you as much as 600 today
okay then nook let's see what you can do ridge wallet
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Intel has been selling nooks or next unit of computing since 2013 and this
tiger lake variant is interesting to gamers for a couple of reasons first and
foremost is that you can actually buy the bloody thing
now as jared's tech pointed out in this excellent comparison we'll have it
linked below an rtx 2060 mobile GPU
isn't quite as performant as one of these
but it's also not that far off meaning that we can expect a solid gaming
experience at up to 1440p resolution even in aaa games
well that's reason number two the first nooks were small but they came
with a significant performance penalty by contrast our unit here is equipped
with a 10 nanometer core i7 1165 g7 now
that's only a quad core and it turbos to a mere 4.7 gigahertz but architecturally
it's more advanced than Intel's 10th generation desktop processors meaning
that in moderately multi-threaded workloads like games it shouldn't be a
performance bottleneck to test this we started with shadow of the tomb raider
now we know most people aren't playing this game every day but what we also
know is that if a machine can deliver a smooth 1440p experience in shadow it'll
handle most pretty recent aaa games as
long as you don't try to flip on rtx i mean it's nice to have the option to
turn it on and admire the eye candy but the truth is the 2060 was never really
fast enough for smooth ray traced lighting
cs go though is a game that runs well on just about anything but needs a fast CPU
to run at extremely high frame rates for the best competitive experience
our phantom canyon nook kept up well enough that no casual player would
complain but given the general rule that you want two frames per second for every
one hertz of your monitor competitive players with high refresh rate displays
might find it a little lacking finally f1 2020 drives home the point
that you gotta be realistic okay it's a 2060 you won't be cranking everything to
max at 4k resolution but when you consider that the size of this thing is
not that different from just an rtx 2060
for the whole system there's not a lot to complain about here
even thermals stayed well within reason we both benchmarked the enthusiast nook
in our studio and took it home for some extended gaming sessions and the GPU
never passed 70 degrees as long as we kept the vents unobstructed
the CPU though is a more complicated story it's clear that Intel has done
some careful tuning to squeeze as much as possible out of this machine so
curiously during a long blender render we were hovering in the 80 degree range
but at relatively low clock speeds and then we fired up cyberpunk 2077 saw
turbo speeds in the 4.6 gigahertz range and then even though the CPU wasn't
fully utilized we saw temps as high as the low 90s
thankfully though even while the whole machine is being hit hard like that it
never gets intrusively loud on the subject of cooling by the way we're
going to be stripping a playstation 5 and water cooling it so make sure you're
subscribed so you don't miss it of course the last big compromise for
anyone looking at a nook is what they give up in terms of expansion and i o
but this one is looking pretty good
we've got plenty of usb 10 gigabit ports HDMI 2.0 and mini DisplayPort 1.4 an sd
card reader wi-fi six and this is really
nice two and a half gigabit Ethernet that's fast almost as fast as you can
cable manage your home setups with the help of lttstore.com cable ties
and if that footprint is still too big for your minimalist lifestyle you can
also mount it to the back of any vasa compatible monitor with the included
hardware for a nearly cable free experience so that's already enough
connectivity that most people won't feel limited by it and for a compact device
it's pretty upgradeable too the CPU and GPU are soldered no swapping out those
but you get two m.2 slots for ssds and two sodum slots if you want to add more
memory and the dual 40 gigabit Thunderbolt 4
ports mean that anything from external capture devices to high speed fiber
optic networking to even a graphics card upgrade is in play if you're willing to
pay the premium for an external enclosure bringing us to the question of what kind
of premium will you be paying this guy starts at 1339 but 128 gigs of
storage and 8 gigs of ddr4 3200 memory is less than a decent phone these days
so realistically you're gonna be spending around sixteen hundred dollars
by the time you've got enough NVMe storage for warzone and another game or
two now normally the premium that comes with
using mobile hardware in a desktop has made nooks extremely difficult for us to
recommend but as we alluded to before the current
landscape makes it look a lot more competitive
especially considering the quality of life benefits of having a super compact
and quiet machine for your work or play
now one use case that we can imagine for these is actually classrooms or other
large scale institutions all you got to do is swap out the flashy skull logo put
it on the included stand for optimal airflow and boom you've got a discreet
looking little workstation with a great balance of CPU speed and GPU grunt
for those who don't need GPU power we also got our hands on the new 11th gen
performance nook it is louder than the enthusiast model and it doesn't have
quite as much connectivity but it's also less expensive uses Intel's new xe
graphics if you only plan on light gaming and it even has an included phone
charger thing on the top just like okay i guess you know what else is okay i
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regular retail price are you guys trying to decide between a nook a gaming laptop
or even a full-sized atx build let us know in the comments below and if you
like small form factor gaming stuff like this make sure to watch our smallest
gaming pc build ever video where i literally cram the computer together in
order to screw it in it's pretty bad
and it's a lot bigger than this