We have been hearing about Intel's upcoming Skull Canyon gaming NUC for quite some time and finally Intel has officially announced it. The NUC6i7KYK, as Intel decided to name it, will be based on Core i7 Skylake quad-core CPU with Iris Pro Graphics 580 and have a Thunderbolt 3 port.
With its base specifications, the Intel NUC6i7KYK should be enough to drive some games at 1080p resolution and decent amount of details. The heart of the Skull Canyon NUC is the quad-core Core i7-6770HQ Skylake CPU. It has support for Intel Hyper-Threading, which means you'll get 8 logical CPUs, has 6MB of L3 cache, 128MB of L4 cache and works at 2.6GHz base and 3.5GHz maximum Turbo clocks.
The CPU also comes with Intel Iris Pro Graphics 580 IGP, which packs 72 Execution Units (EUs). The IGP is clocked at up to 950MHz.
The new Intel Skull Canyon NUC also comes with support for up to 32GB of DDR4-2133 memory in two SO-DIMM slots and two M.2 slots support 22x42 or 22x80 SATA or PCIe SSDs.
The integrated GPU should be enough for some casual gaming, but thankfully, Intel has also included a 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3 port as well, making it ready for external graphics solutions. It also features USB 3.1 ports, mini DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 2.0 outputs, integrated dual-band 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth, Gigabit LAN, SDXC slot with UHS-I support and even an infrared port in order to pair it up with your favorite remote.
The new Intel Skull Canyon NUC should start shipping in May and we should see it up for pre-order as early as next month. According to the info, the barebone version will sell for US $650 while the one with 16GB of RAM, 256GB SSD and Windows 10 OS will sell for US $1000.
Source:
Intel.com.