 Some people will go to any lengths to make their gaming PC smaller, but only a select few of them have the engineering expertise to ensure that the system will still work. Fortunately, Intel is one of those few, and I'm really excited to take a look at their newest enthusiast nook, Phantom Canyon, featuring an 11th gen Tiger Lake processor and discrete RTX 2060 graphics. Cause, here's the thing guys, normally a high performance nook like this comes at such a hefty price premium that most people would rather just have a full-size computer. Except, look at this, an RTX 2060 is gonna cost you as much as $600 today. Okay then nook, let's see what you can do. Ridge Wallet is celebrating the 8th anniversary of their successful Kickstarter campaign and launch of RidgeWallet.com So get 15% off site-wide at RidgeWallet.com slash Linus. Intel has been selling nooks, or next unit of computing, since 2013 and this Tiger Lake variant is interesting to gamers for a couple of reasons. First and foremost is that you can actually buy the bloody thing. Now as Jared's Tech pointed out in this excellent comparison, we'll have it linked below, an RTX 2060 mobile GPU isn't quite as performant as one of these. But, it's also not that far off, meaning that we can expect a solid gaming experience at up to 1440p resolution, even in AAA games. Well that's reason number two. The first nooks were small, but they came with a significant performance penalty. By contrast, our unit here is equipped with a 10 nanometer Core i7-1165G7. Now that's only a quad-core and it turbos to a mere 4.7 GHz, but architecturally it's more advanced than Intel's 10th generation desktop processors, meaning that in moderately multi-threaded workloads, like games, it shouldn't be a performance bottleneck. To test this, we started with Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Now we know most people aren't playing this game every day, but what we also know is that if a machine can deliver a smooth 1440p experience in Shadow, it'll handle most pretty recent AAA games, as long as you don't try to flip on RTX. I mean, it's nice to have the option to turn it on and admire the eye candy, but the truth is the 2060 was never really fast enough for smooth ray traced lighting. CS GO though is a game that runs well on just about anything, but needs a fast CPU to run at extremely high frame rates for the best competitive experience. Our Phantom Canyon Nook kept up well enough, but no casual player would complain, but given the general rule that you want two frames per second for every one hertz of your monitor, competitive players with high refresh rate displays might find it a little lacking. Finally, F1 2020 drives home the point that you gotta be realistic, okay? It's a 2060. You won't be cranking everything to max at 4K resolution, but when you consider that the size of this thing is not that different from just an RTX 2060 for the whole system, there's not a lot to complain about here. Even thermal stayed well within reason. We both benchmarked the enthusiast Nook in our studio and took it home for some extended gaming sessions, and the GPU never passed 70 degrees as long as we kept the vents unobstructed. The CPU though is a more complicated story. It's clear that Intel has done some careful tuning to squeeze as much as possible out of this machine. So curiously, during a long blender render, we were hovering in the 80 degree range, but at relatively low clock speeds, and then we fired up Cyberpunk 2077, saw turbo speeds in the 4.6 gigahertz range, and then even though the CPU wasn't fully utilized, we saw temps as high as the low 90s. Thankfully though, even while the whole machine is being hit hard like that, it never gets intrusively loud. On the subject of cooling, by the way, we're gonna be stripping a PlayStation 5 and water cooling it, so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it. Of course, the last big compromise for anyone looking at a Nook is what they give up in terms of expansion and I.O. But this one is looking pretty good. We've got plenty of USB 10 gigabit ports, HDMI 2.0 and mini display port 1.4, an SD card reader, Wi-Fi 6, and this is really nice, 2.5 gigabit ethernet. That's fast, almost as fast as you can cable manage your home setups with the help of LTTstore.com cable ties. And if that footprint is still too big for your minimalist lifestyle, you can also mount it to the back of any VESA compatible monitor with the included hardware for a nearly cable-free experience. So that's already enough connectivity that most people won't feel limited by it, and for a compact device, it's pretty upgradable too. The CPU and GPU are soldered, no swapping out those, but you get two M.2 slots for SSDs and two SODIM slots if you want to add more memory. And the dual 40 gigabit Thunderbolt 4 ports mean that anything from external capture devices to high-speed fiber optic networking to even a graphics card upgrade is in play if you're willing to pay the premium for an external enclosure. Bringing us to the question of what kind of premium will you be paying? This guy starts at $1339, but 128 gigs of storage and 8 gigs of DDR4-3200 memory is less than a decent phone these days. So realistically, you're going to be spending around $1600 by the time you've got enough NVMe storage for Warzone and another game or two. Now normally, the premium that comes with using mobile hardware on a desktop has made NUCs extremely difficult for us to recommend, but as we alluded to before, the current landscape makes it look a lot more competitive, especially considering the quality of life benefits of having a super compact and quiet machine for your work or play. Now one use case that we can imagine for these is actually classrooms or other large-scale institutions. All you gotta do is swap out the flashy skull logo, put it on the included stand for optimal airflow, and boom! You've got a discreet looking little workstation with a great balance of CPU speed and GPU grunt. For those who don't need GPU power, we also got our hands on the new 11th Gen Performance NUC. It is louder than the Enthusiast model and it doesn't have quite as much connectivity, but it's also less expensive, uses Intel's new Xe graphics if you only plan on light gaming, and it even has an included phone charger thing on the top. 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Also, they now have full-length audio books, so premium subscribers can get special pricing on that, up to 65% off the regular retail price. Are you guys trying to decide between a Nook, a gaming laptop, or even a full-sized ATX build? Let us know in the comments below, and if you like small form factor gaming stuff like this, make sure to watch our smallest gaming PC build ever video, where I literally cram the computer together in order to screw it in. It's pretty bad, and it's a lot bigger than this.