'Porcoolpine' Tiger Lake NUC Has an Aggressive Fanless Design

The Simply NUC NUC11TNF 'Porcoolpine' is a new fanless Intel powered NUC featuring the companies latest 11th Gen Tiger Lake Core CPUs. The NUC11TNF is designed to bring you all the power and connectivity Tiger Lake can offer in a small, durable and quiet package.

The chassis is called the 'Porcoolpine' and yes, it looks a bit like a porcupine. The entire chassis is made out of metal, with heatsink fins jutting out almost everywhere. The aggressive fin layout should keep this NUC cool in almost any environment.

Compared to other mini-PCs on the market, like the iBox series from ASRock and ZBox series from Zotac, the NUC11TNF provides a more business-oriented feature set. You get vPro technology as a option for secure remote access into the NUC, and additional ports such as the DE-9M connector which is a very common connector on servers and appliances.

The Porcoolpine cooling system is also one of the most aggressive looking systems we've seen, but time will tell just how powerful that cooling system, is. 

The NUC11TNF comes in three configurations: Core i3, i5 and i7 models. The cheapest model starts at $679 and comes with a Core i3-1115G4 dual core processor, the mid-tier SKU gets an upgrade to a Core i5-1135G7 quad core for $809, and finally the top trim starts at $929 and features a Core i7-1165G7 quad core chip.

Because this is a business oriented NUC, you pay a price premium for the additional durability and other features. But, pricing is similar to other industrial NUCs like ASRock's iBox -1185G7E.

All models start with a base configuration of 4GB of RAM and 128GB of NVMe storage. If you need more capacity, you can upgrade to a maximum of 64GB of RAM and 8TB's of NVMe storage. There is also the option to fill the secondary 2.5' storage slot with up to 512GB of SSD storage or 2TB of HDD storage. 

For connectivity, you get three USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, one in the rear, two in the front, and one rear USB 2.0 port. Dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, a ethernet jack, and an option for Wi-Fi 6 AX201 connectivity.

For display outputs, you get dual HDMI 2.0b ports to the rear, not to mention that the Thunderbolt 4 ports support display outputs as well. Giving you four display outputs in all that support up to 4K resolutions at 60Hz.

This isn't SimplyNUC's first rodeo - it sells a number of NUCs and mini-PCs. This is one it sells under its own name, while it also sells some of Intel's boxes as well.

All three modes of the NUC11TNF can be preordered from SimplyNUC here.