Intel's Beast Canyon NUC Hits Retail Starting at $1,770

Intel's NUC 11 Extreme (Beast Canyon) NUC has gone up for purchase on Amazon. The barebone kit sells for $1,769.95, while the complete mini PC starts at $1,839.95. (Hat tip to FanlessTech.)

Beast Canyon is available with three different processor options. The model on Amazon (NUC11BTMi9) corresponds to the flagship SKU with the Core i9-11900KB processor. You can find the Core i7-11700B model at Simply NUC with a starting price of $1,399.

The Core i9-11900KB is part of a special 65W B-series Tiger Lake lineup. The 8-core chip comes with a 3.3GHz base clock and a 5.3GHz Thermal Velocity Boost (TVB) clock, along with 24MB of L3 cache. It features an unlocked multiplier so enthusiasts can try to squeeze even more performance out of the chip through overclocking.

Unlike previous NUCs, Beast Canyon comes with enough room for a full-size discrete graphics card. The device itself measures 357x189x120mm to accommodate graphics cards up to 308.4mm (12 inches) in length. It offers a PCIe 4.0 x16 interface and a 650W 80Plus Gold power supply, which should enable it to house the best graphics cards that money can (or cannot) buy.

The Amazon seller offers the NUC11BTMi9 with 16GB, 32GB and 64GB memory options. Storage-wise, you can choose between a single or pair of Samsung M.2 NVMe SSDs. The models from the Amazon listing include the Samsung 980 and Samsung 980 Pro SSDs. The NUC mini PCs come with Windows 10 Pro pre-installed.

The barebones kit doesn't include storage, memory or an operating system, which is obviously the most budget-friendly option. It costs $1,769.95, and you can equip it with the hardware that you desire. The cheapest "ready to go" Beast Canyon configuration on Amazon with 16GB of memory and a Samsung 980 250GB SSD costs $1,839.95, which is actually a fair deal compared to the barebones configuration, as you only pay $70 extra for the memory, storage, and OS.

If you want to go whole hog, the top SKU with 64GB of memory and two Samsung 980 Pro 2TB SSDs will set you back $2,909.95. That's an extreme price, but then the SSDs run $360 each and the RAM is another $250 or so, which means the total package scales pretty much in proportion to the cost of the extras.