Apart from fake renders of the Xbox Series X and a seemingly endless parade of new gaming monitors, the first big tech event of 2020 was home to a very cool announcement from Intel. The company unveiled the NUC Compute Element, a new initiative to produce incredibly tiny PCs with the power of full-fat gaming desktops by moving the motherboard, processor, storage and RAM onto a single replaceable card. Combine that Element card with a full-size desktop graphics card and a svelte enclosure, and you've got the recipe for an incredibly powerful gaming PC that can be carried with one hand and upgraded in a matter of seconds.
Let's take a closer look at the NUC Compute Element card itself, before we look at the wider ecosystem. These will be sold with a selection of soldered-on Intel laptop processors, including 45W Core i5, i7 and i9 variants - if you want to change these down the line, you'll need a whole new NUC Element module. (Intel has promised at least two years of upgrades, and hopefully more.) Outside of the processor and board though, everything else on the small card is upgradeable, with slots for dual-channel laptop DDR4 RAM and two NVMe SSDs. A tiny 80mm fan linked to a small vapour chamber over the processor keeps the whole thing cool, and should allow for better sustained performance than you'd expect from similar components in a laptop.
The whole Element is about the size of a mini graphics card, and slots into any NUC Element enclosure in much the same way. That means assembling the computer is just a case of slotting in the two cards, Element and graphics, connecting up any PCIe power required for either card and then closing up the case, no tools or know-how required. Thanks to that ease of assembly, the enclosure itself is also easy for companies to build - it's just a small form factor case with a power supply, a standardised base board and maybe some fans or front I/O.
from Eurogamer.net
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