Intel’s quad-core “Skull Canyon” NUC is a workstation for the size-obsessed

Every year when Intel refreshes its NUC mini PCs, it releases more models meant to cover a wider range of needs. There are cheap fanless NUCs, NUCs that can fit in full-size hard drives, and mainstream NUCs that are essentially little Ultrabooks inside boxes. This year is the first where Intel has tried to release a quad-core workstation-class NUC itself instead of leaving that field to OEM partners.

This PC, also known as “Skull Canyon” because of Intel’s history of using skulls to promote performance-focused products, is quite a bit different from the other NUCs. It needs more space for cooling, so it’s around twice as wide as standard NUCs (though it’s a little shorter). But with that increased size comes a lot more flexibility and performance.

Pricing and building

Like other NUCs, the Skull Canyon version is sold as a “PC kit,” which means you have to add your own RAM, SSD, and operating system before you can actually use the thing. Assuming you want to equip it with fast PCI Express SSDs and a healthy amount of RAM, you’ll end up spending nearly $1,000—around $650 for the NUC itself, another $180 or so for a 256GB Samsung 950, $60-ish for 16GB of DDR4 RAM (the box supports up to 32GB), and $100 for your Windows 10 license if that’s the operating system you prefer to use.

If space and power consumption are of secondary concerns, you can get a lot more computer for the price. But you’d be hard-pressed to find one that’s both this fast and this small. Intel has also used the extra space inside the case to make room for a second M.2 SSD slot, which you can use either to increase the amount of fast solid-state storage in the NUC (the smaller NUCs that will fit a second drive use the slower SATA interface) or to create a RAID array for extra speed or redundancy. Both slots support four PCI Express 3.0 data lanes, so there’s bandwidth to spare.

Skull Canyon has the same ports as a standard NUC with a couple of important additions. The first is HDMI 2.0, which you’ll need if you want to play 4K content over HDMI to a screen that supports the HDCP 2.2 DRM standard. Intel’s platform only supports HDMI 1.4 natively, and the company tells us it’s using a separate chip to support HDMI 2.0 in the NUC until the chipsets and GPUs support it natively.

The second is Thunderbolt 3, the only version of the port to pick up much support from anyone other than Apple. Thunderbolt 3 supports 10Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 speeds on top of Thunderbolt 3 accessories, including external GPU docks like the Razer Core. It’s hard for me to imagine a circumstance under which someone would buy a quad-core NUC and an external graphics enclosure instead of just buying a standard mini tower and putting a GPU inside it, unless for some reason you think you’re going to travel with the NUC a lot. But it’s an option.

Even with the port differences, putting the Skull Canyon NUC together is basically the same as assembling the regular one. Four captive Phillips head screws hold the bottom on. Loosen them and the bottom comes right up, exposing the RAM and M.2 slots. The CPU, Wi-Fi module, and other parts of consequence are soldered to the motherboard, so there’s nothing else to do in there.

The lid can be removed and replaced, too; Intel (thankfully, blessedly) includes a plain black lid in the box with the NUC that you can use instead of the one with the skull on it, but USB 2.0 and 3.0 headers exposed on the top of the motherboard also open the door to lids with different looks or extra features like wireless charging or NFC. Unfortunately the lids for the other NUCs haven’t really fulfilled much of their original promise; the bulk of the ones I can find just add a couple of USB 2.0 ports to the top of the thing—in other words, you’re not missing out on a thriving lid ecosystem, nor are you likely to see many new lids for this much-less-common NUC.