 This is a NUC and kind of a large one, but at what point is a NUC no longer a NUC? Well, this is the Beast Canyon NUC and Intel has given us room for a full blown 12 inch GPU in here. But is it small enough to be a NUC or should you just have built your own small form factor computer? We'll see, but not until I build a segue to our sponsor, GlassWire. Instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC and Android device. Use offer code LINUS and get 25% off GlassWire at the link below. I've always had a soft spot for NUCs and this one is no exception. Meet the Beast Canyon. Sure, the eight liter chassis is bigger than a Ford and case, but Intel has used it to cram some truly impressive hardware in here. What we've got here has an i9-11900KB, basically a jacked up 10 nanometer laptop CPU with eight cores and a juicy 5.3 gigahertz turbo, as well as 32 gigabytes of RAM, half terabyte of storage, a teeny tiny 650 watt power supply and an RTX 3060. That's pretty impressive. But if it's so big, yeah, can we call it a NUC? Well, instead of calling the motherboard a motherboard Intel called it the compute element. And in fairness, it is quite a bit different than your average motherboard. Basically everything needed to run the computer. So CPU, RAM, storage and even cooling is taken care of by this tiny little box. It plugs into the baseboard, which allows you to connect other things to a PCIe connector like our RTX 3060. Other than that, this thing is basically just a small PC. It's kind of cute. It's like a slightly more phallic Ghost Canyon with its extension taking it from five liters to eight with the goal of adding more power and bigger graphics cards. The bare bones kit doesn't come with a GPU, but Simply NUC's website has a mini 3060 Ti and a full-size 3070 as add-on card options with support for up to a 3080. They've also added a third fan for better cooling and trust me, you're gonna need it. Just like you're gonna need one of our reflective heat sink t-shirts to stay cool on these summer days, lttstore.com. But that extra fan doesn't mean you can put this laptop CPU under too much stress. In Cinebench, we were able to beat the Ghost Canyon NUC despite it being overclocked to within an inch of its life. This thing was running at 98 degrees, poor thing. We were hoping the addition of this shroud around the Beast Canyon CPU cooler would help, but even on stock settings, it got up to a toasty 95 degrees. Although once the turbo was done, it settled in around 75, which is pretty good. It's an 11900 KB versus an 11900 HK, so we're not surprised that the new one beat it, but it is still nice to see. If you want to play it safe, you could go for the i7 Compute element, but forget about dropping it down to an i5 because that's just not an option anymore. Apparently people didn't buy it. In games, we see another marginal improvement with the Beast Canyon. The 3060 they sent us reached a high of 68 degrees during a one-hour loop of F1. So that's just shy of the 70 degree mark where it'll start throttling back. On the other hand, the Ghost Canyon's 2070 reached 70 degrees very frequently. So it's got slightly better cooling and newer hardware, but why would you want a Beast Canyon NUC? Well, it's cool. I like it and it's cool. From the way you open it to the layout, to the upgrade path, if you're the sort of person who wants a small form factor PC, but doesn't want to actually build one, let's be real, that can be an absolute nightmare, then the Beast Canyon is, well, an absolute beast. And if you do want to learn how to build one, you can watch our How to Build a PC, the Last Guide You'll Ever Need. Should be coming soon, so get subscribed. And I mean, just look at it. There's so much room for activities. The front I.O. is mostly unchanged from the Ghost Canyon. It just moved down a bit. While the rear I.O. gets a couple more USB ports and upgraded to two and a half gigabit ethernet. The Thunderbolt ports have been upgraded to 4.0 from three and the wifi has gone up from six to 6E. And before I open it up, check this out. It's got underglow. A young Brian O'Connor would shed a tear. While we're looking down here, there's a super easy to access M.2 slot, bringing the total in the system up to four. Now, if you do want to fully assemble it, it's not all that difficult. We've got four screws back here. They're all captive. Now this should just come right off. Yep, easy. I think these come out. Ha ha. Now the top peels off. This one's kind of tough, but you just need to give her. And this one goes up and out. You're in. You can get at all of it now. Okay, here we go. This is why we're actually in here. We want to rip this GPU out. RTX 3060s, they're just kind of, you know, Nvidia's one miss with RTX 3000. You can get it out. There we go. So long, Mr. 3060. So we have a 3080 Ti here. Are you sure about this? Yeah. So in the past, if you had a power supply that was kind of marginal, it was totally fine and you could sort of just do it. In this situation, the problem is that small form factor power supplies, because they're small, have less capacitance. So if you have something like a 3080 Ti and you chuck it in there, it draws 500 watts. The power supply doesn't like it. It goes boom. That happened to Andy's and James's and the Billy Billy PC, I think. We've killed a lot of small form factor power supplies lately. We're just doing 3080. Yeah, we're playing it safe. Yeah, we're playing it safe. It will fit. Will it suck? I guess we will find out. That's fine. Nope. Got it. That was pretty simple. All right. Let's game on this thing. Do you think it's gonna be fine? Yeah, I don't think it's gonna be fine. It's only a 3080. But it's right up against the power supply. I think it's gonna run real fast and then just go. So idle, we're looking at under 40 degrees on the GPU. CPUs already hit 95 degrees. Great start. All right, here we go. Here we go. It's getting toasty fast. 320 watts power consumption. GPU temperature did not take long. It looks like it's gonna hit 70 degrees here very soon. It's gonna run memories at a casual 88. All right, we hit 70 degrees. It might start pulling the clocks right now. Currently at 1900 megahertz. It's really quite fast actually. How long can it sustain it? It's hot, but like in a good way. I think it's actually working. I'm honestly surprised that this 3080 is just fine in this little computer. So if I'm honest, I didn't expect the Founders Edition 3080 to be happy in this thing, but it is. So good job Intel. If you do wanna buy one of these and upgrade it, make sure that you pick out a two slot card and you can't go past 12 inches in length. So basically Founders Edition, that's kind of what you get. Now there is a big problem though. The price. The base model with an 11900KB starts at 1600 US dollars. Once you upgrade the memory storage at a GPU, it'll set you back like 3000 dollars pretty fast. Small form factor components do usually cost a little bit more than their standard size ones, but we recently did a small form factor build in the Jote that had very similar performance for nearly half the price. That's using a standard motherboard and a really big cooler, the cooling I think was impeccable. So yeah, at the end of the day, the Beast Canyon is super cool and if you're rich, get it. Or if you enjoy a challenge and having an extra 1500 dollars, maybe just build one yourself. What you're not gonna build yourself though is a pair of shoes. So thanks to Vessi for sponsoring this video. Vessi footwear is known for being waterproof, they're lightweight, easy to pack and breathable. You don't need to worry about the weather anymore. With a dual climate knit material, keeping your feet warm in the winter and cool in the summer. They have super easy slip on and slip off and are comfortable for traveling and fit almost any occasion. Some of us are wearing them right now and they're also 100% vegan. Get $25 off each shoe using our code LinusTechTips at checkout. Check them out down below at vessi.com slash LinusTechTips. Well, if instead of wasting all your money on this thing and wanna learn how to build a small form factor PC, well, this video won't help you, but it's really difficult and an absolute nightmare and quite amusing. We'll watch it here.