crammed into this 5-liter chassis is a full-fat rtx 2070 making the ghost
canyon nook9 extreme as far as we can tell the smallest mass-produced desktop
gaming pc or that is mostly desktop Intel did take one
shortcut here they used a core i9 9980
hk mobile processor so then
what is this thing is it a slim and trim
desktop or a fat ass laptop
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if you take a couple steps back the ghost canyon nook actually looks really
similar to the original nook just a lot
larger and with more mesh than a european nightclub to accommodate the
much more powerful internal components and the loads of airflow that they
require unlike the original skull canyon neck there's no option to switch out the
skulls but i don't think they're that offensive and i don't think most people
will care the i o is one notch below perfect the lack of onboard two and a
half gigabit Ethernet is a bit of a downer for me on a machine with no pci
express expansion but in fairness there are cheap usb dongles to add it after
the fact and having dual Thunderbolt 3
ports means that if you've got the money you can plug basically anything you
could want into this but how does it game tldr
darn well we faced it off against a
desktop equipped with a core i9 9900k
and a chunky rtx 2070 and then we also
put it up against an ASUS scar 3 gaming laptop armed with a mobile core i9 9980h
and an rtx 2070 as well and
the nook landed almost squarely between them it looks like the only thing
holding it back from desktop grade performance is of course the mobile CPU
our graphics card actually you can see it right there through the mesh stayed
nice and cool only reaching 70 degrees under load and surprisingly actually
even managed to outperform our desktop
GPU in the GPU portion of 3dmark time spy i was never really concerned about
performance though it was the cooling that worried me and impressively the
nook managed to remain relatively quiet while gaming with the only minor
acoustic annoyance being that sometimes the fans will quickly ramp up and down
while doing little things like opening programs that should be fixable with a
fan curve adjustment in a BIOS update though Intel outside of gaming CPU performance
was initially honestly pretty disappointing the results in single
threaded applications are as expected slightly better than the laptop worse
than the desktop and then in multi-threaded workloads the nook not
only got crushed by the desktop 9900k
but it also managed to lose out to the ASUS strix scar 3 laptop with that said
during the test the nook was much quieter and cooler than the strix
and Intel was nice enough to provide some fun dials to twist in the BIOS so
then what would happen if somebody went in there and cranked the numbers up a bit
turns out that by simply changing the sustained package power to 90 watts the
limits of this poor computer's thermal solution we were able to nearly match
the i9 9900k with its 95 watt TDP so if
you were to put some liquid metal in there not that i'm recommending that it can cause problems and give it a bit
more juice you could probably beat a stock 9900 and fortunately getting
inside the nook is surprisingly easy for a small form factor computer just like
it's easy to buy comfy shirts at lttstore.com the journey inside begins
by loosening these two captive screws at the back and removing the top cover
which includes two 80 millimeter cooling fans powering the fans with plugless
contacts like these isn't required but it does show the engineering that went
into making this small machine reasonably user friendly to both take
apart and put back together there were a few comments on my unboxing on our short
circuit channel asking oh who's the poor sod who has to put it back together it
was me and it only took me about 15-20 minutes the mesh side panels then come
off to reveal some very weird internals
on the bottom is a 500 watt flex atx power supply courtesy of fsp making this
one of the only gaming systems this small to not rely on an external power brick
then above that our review unit was equipped with a 197 millimeter long rtx
2070 mini from ASUS that barely fit then four screws and a
bracket reveal a second hidden eight pin pci express power connector meaning that
theoretically you actually have the power leads available for an rtx 2080
super or maybe even a 2080 ti if one
small enough to fit in this thing was ever made behind the GPU though we find
the real star of the show all of the core components of the nook 9
extreme are on this motherboard of sorts that Intel calls
the compute element to be clear it is
still a motherboard like you're not able to plug a compute element into another
motherboard and you know yo dog i heard you like motherboard so i put a
motherboard in your you know you get the point because the pci express logic is
on the CPU so those slots on the baseboard that it plugs into are are
dumb in the sense that removing the compute element would render them
completely useless now there is some logic on the baseboard though it can
operate in two modes either delivering 16 pci express gen 3
lanes directly to the GPU or cutting
that down to eight lanes and splitting off four each for a four by pci express
slot and an m.2 SSD slot Intel provided
a large 110 millimeter optane boot drive for our review unit but i suspect that
most people would actually end up using the other two m.2 slots that are on the
compute element itself so that their graphics card will get its full
bandwidth the main idea behind the compute element aside from making the
system super small is to make upgrades basically plug and play now on the
surface that looks like just more e-waste
because then you're throwing away your motherboard every time you want to
change your CPU but the thing is in many cases a
meaningful CPU upgrade requires a motherboard swap anyway so as long as
memory and storage aren't soldered so they can be carried forward which
they're not it's basically the same thing i do find the ease of
upgradability a bit more convincing on razer's tomahawk chassis though since
access to the compute element doesn't require any tools like it does on this
one with that said if you've ever worked on a laptop swapping storage and RAM on
the nook is going to be a cakewalk now that we're in here we've got a good
look at the cooler which is basically a little aluminum fin stack attached to a
vapor chamber it's really impressive that this tiny heat sink allows our CPU
to hit 5 gigahertz turbo if this was a desktop chip i don't think it would have
a chance but the ghost canyon nook has two big
things going for it first of all mobile cpus are generally binned more
selectively for power efficiency than their desktop counterparts that's
because increasing the power consumption of a laptop by even 5 watts could be
catastrophic whereas on a desktop it probably doesn't matter second the nook
CPU cooler is in direct contact with the
CPU die because it's a mobile chip so that lack of an integrated heat spreader
helps bring temps down it does require higher precision during manufacturing of
the cooler itself though so as good as all of that is
thing is high binned chips and precision manufacturing both come at a cost and
that cost has certainly been passed right along to the consumer
let's discuss the inconvenient truths
if you were to build a similarly small form-factor gaming pc for instance in a
doctor's xaver sentry n case or Dan case
or something like that that is assuming you can find any of them in stock the
total is going to be about eighteen hundred dollars with the ghost canyon
nook with the i9 9988k version you're looking at
eighteen hundred dollars one small problem that's for the bare bones kit after
adding some nice to haves like RAM storage and a graphics card the total
for our configuration comes to twenty seven hundred dollars woof i mean sure
you're always going to have to pay a premium for a small form factor machine
but the thing is even compared to a similarly spec'd
laptop this is a not insignificant premium the Gigabyte aors 15g that we
looked at a little while ago performs as well as the nook in games thanks to its
2070 super GPU while costing 500 less and like
it's got a screen attached to it guys unfortunately the value proposition
doesn't improve much if you move down to an i5 or an i7 configuration because
it's even harder to recommend shelling out for a premium machine like this if
you aren't equipping it with the very best components as for the easy upgrade
bit well there are two problems with that
one is that if history is anything to go on initiatives like this rarely survive
longer than a generation or two am i really going to get a 12th gen upgrade
module down the line how much is that going to cost and second the
well you were going to have to upgrade and throw away everything anyway argument might be more defensible in a
world where only Intel exists but the thing is AMD has done an excellent job
of enabling multiple generations of CPU upgrades across existing motherboards
over the last couple of years all of this leaves me in quite an
awkward position here then i think that the ghost canyon nook is
one of the coolest computers to come out in a very long time and unlike some of
the boutique diy small form factor stuff like the actually it's even smaller than
this belka three case that we built a system in a little while back this is
mass produced which has a cost and like
i want Intel to keep building really cool stuff like this
so people out there are gonna need to buy it but on the other hand i really
can't recommend in good conscience that someone go out and buy a 5 liter chassis
gaming machine when they could settle for building one themselves in
like a you know an eight nine or 10 liter chassis and save anywhere from 900
to a thousand dollars
speaking of saving a thousand dollars that's not what we're about to do this
video is brought to you by the MSI GeForce rtx 2070 super gaming x it's got
eight gigs of 256-bit gddr6 memory it boosts up to 1695 megahertz it's got
three displayport ports so you can get that triple gaming high refresh rate if
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dynamic backplate with speed holes check it out now at the link in the video
description if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out our build in the velcase velka
3. it's actually smaller than this and i did see someone build with a 2070 in it
at one point but it's so cramped that i
don't know that i would necessarily recommend going that route it is a very
cool case though definitely not as elegant as this it's a
little bit easier to use