 Crammed into this 5-liter chassis is a full fat RTX 2070, making the Ghost Canyon Nook 9 Extreme, as far as we can tell, the smallest mass-produced desktop gaming PC. Or that is... mostly desktop. Intel did take one shortcut here. They used a Core i9-9980HK mobile processor. So then, what is this thing? Is it a slim and trim desktop? Or a fat-ass laptop? Brought to you by GlassWire. Instantly see your current and past network activity. Detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off GlassWire at the link below. If you take a couple steps back, the Ghost Canyon Nook actually looks really similar to the original Nook. Just a lot larger and with more mesh than a European nightclub, to accommodate the much more powerful internal components and the loads of airflow that they require. Unlike the original Skull Canyon Nook, there's no option to switch out the skulls, but I don't think they're that offensive and I don't think most people will care. The I.O. is one notch below perfect. The lack of onboard 2.5 gigabit ethernet is a bit of a downer for me, on a machine with no PCI Express expansion, but in fairness, there are cheap USB dongles to add it after the fact, and having dual Thunderbolt 3 ports means that if you've got the money, you can plug basically anything you could want into this. But how does it game? TLDR? Darn well. We faced it off against a desktop equipped with a Core i9-9900K and a chunky RTX 2070, and then we also put it up against a SUSE Scar 3 gaming laptop armed with a mobile Core i9-9980H and an RTX 2070 as well. And the Nook landed almost squarely between them. It looks like the only thing holding it back from desktop grade performance is of course the mobile CPU. Our graphics card, actually you can see it right there through the mesh, stayed nice and cool, only reaching 70 degrees under load, and surprisingly actually even managed to outperform our desktop GPU in the GPU portion of 3DMark Time Spy. I was never really concerned about performance though, it was the cooling that worried me. And impressively, the Nook managed to remain relatively quiet while gaming, with the only minor acoustic annoyance being that sometimes the fans will quickly ramp up and down while doing little things like opening programs. That should be fixable with a fan curve adjustment in a BIOS update though, Intel. Outside of gaming, CPU performance was initially honestly pretty disappointing. The results in single threaded applications are as expected slightly better than the laptop, worse than the desktop, and then in multi-threaded workloads, the Nook not only got crushed by the desktop 9900K, but it also managed to lose out to the ASUS Strix Scar 3 laptop. With that said, during the test, the Nook was much quieter and cooler than the Strix, and Intel was nice enough to provide some fun dials to twist in the BIOS. So then, what would happen if somebody went in there and cranked the numbers up a bit? Turns out that by simply changing the sustained package power to 90 watts, the limits of this poor computer's thermal solution, we were able to nearly match the i9-9900K with its 95 watt TDP. So if you were to put some liquid metal in there, not that I'm recommending that, it can cause problems, and give it a bit more juice, you could probably beat a stock 9900. Unfortunately, getting inside the Nook is surprisingly easy for a small form factor computer, just like it's easy to buy comfy shirts at lttstore.com. The journey inside begins by loosening these two captive screws at the back and removing the top cover which includes two 80 millimeter cooling fans. Powering the fans with plugless contacts like these isn't required, but it does show the engineering that went into making this small machine reasonably user-friendly to both take apart and put back together. There were a few comments on my unboxing on our short circuit channel asking, oh who's the poor sod who has to put it back together? It was me and it only took me about 15-20 minutes. The mesh side panels then come off to reveal some very weird internals. On the bottom is a 500 watt flex ATX power supply courtesy of FSP, making this one of the only gaming systems this small to not rely on an external power brick. Then above that, our review unit was equipped with a 197 millimeter long RTX 2070 mini from Asus that barely fit. Then four screws and a bracket reveal a second hidden 8-pin PCI express power connector, meaning that theoretically you actually have the power leads available for an RTX 2080 Super, or maybe even a 2080 Ti. If one small enough to fit in this thing was ever made. Behind the GPU though, we find the real star of the show. All of the core components of the Nook 9 Extreme are on this motherboard of sorts that Intel calls the Compute Element. To be clear, it is still a motherboard. Like you're not able to plug a compute element into another motherboard and you know, yo dog I heard you like motherboards so I put a motherboard in your, you know, you get the point. Because the PCI express logic is on the CPU. So those slots on the baseboard that it plugs into are are dumb in the sense that removing the compute element would render them completely useless. Now there is some logic on the baseboard though. It can operate in two modes, either delivering 16 PCI express Gen 3 lanes directly to the GPU or cutting that down to eight lanes and splitting off four each for a four by PCI express slot and an M.2 SSD slot. Intel provided a large 110 millimeter Optane boot drive for our review unit. But I suspect that most people would actually end up using the other two M.2 slots that are on the compute element itself so that their graphics card will get its full bandwidth. The main idea behind the compute element aside from making the system super small is to make upgrades basically plug and play. Now on the surface that looks like just more e-waste because then you're throwing away your motherboard every time you want to change your CPU. But the thing is in many cases a meaningful CPU upgrade requires a motherboard swap anyway. So as long as memory and storage aren't soldered so they can be carried forward, which they're not, it's basically the same thing. I do find the ease of upgradability a bit more convincing on Razer's Tomahawk chassis though since access to the compute element doesn't require any tools like it does on this one. With that said if you've ever worked on a laptop swapping storage and RAM on the Nook is going to be a cakewalk. Now that we're in here we've got a good look at the cooler which is basically a little aluminum fin stack attached to a vapor chamber. It's really impressive that this tiny heatsink allows our CPU to hit 5 gigahertz turbo. If this was a desktop chip I don't think it would have a chance. But the Ghost Canyon Nook has two big things going for it. First of all mobile CPUs are generally binned more selectively for power efficiency than their desktop counterparts. That's because increasing the power consumption of a laptop by even 5 watts could be catastrophic whereas on a desktop it probably doesn't matter. Second the Nook CPU cooler is in direct contact with the CPU die because it's a mobile chip. So that lack of an integrated heat spreader helps bring temps down. It does require higher precision during manufacturing of the cooler itself though. So as good as all of that is, thing is high binned chips and precision manufacturing both come at a cost and that cost has certainly been passed right along to the consumer. Let's discuss the inconvenient truths. If you were to build a similarly small form factor gaming PC for instance in a Dr. Zabre Sentry, N-case or Dan case or something like that that is assuming you can find any of them in stock the total is going to be about $1,800. With the Ghost Canyon Nook with the i9-9988K version you're looking at $1,800. One small problem, that's for the bare bones kit. After adding some nice to haves like RAM, storage and a graphics card the total for our configuration comes to $2,700. Woof. I mean sure you're always going to have to pay a premium for a small form factor machine but the thing is even compared to a similarly specced laptop this is a not insignificant premium. The Gigabyte Aorus 15G that we looked at a little while ago performs as well as the Nook in games thanks to its 2070 Super GPU while costing $500 less. And like it's got a screen attached to it guys. Unfortunately the value proposition doesn't improve much if you move down to an i5 or an i7 configuration because it's even harder to recommend shelling out for a premium machine like this if you aren't equipping it with the very best components. As for the easy upgrade bit, well there are two problems with that. One is that if history is anything to go on initiatives like this rarely survive longer than a generation or two. Am I really going to get a 12th gen upgrade module down the line? How much is that going to cost? And second the well you were going to have to upgrade and throw away everything anyway argument might be more defensible in a world where only Intel exists. But the thing is AMD has done an excellent job of enabling multiple generations of CPU upgrades across existing motherboards over the last couple of years. All of this leaves me in quite an awkward position here then. I think that the Ghost Canyon Nook is one of the coolest computers to come out in a very long time and unlike some of the boutique DIY small form factor stuff like the actually it's even smaller than this Velka 3 case that we built a system in a little while back this is mass produced which has a cost and like I want Intel to keep building really cool stuff like this. So people out there are going to need to buy it. But on the other hand I really can't recommend in good conscience that someone go out and buy a 5 liter chassis gaming machine when they could settle for building one themselves in like a you know an 8, 9 or 10 liter chassis and save anywhere from 900 to a thousand dollars. Speaking of saving a thousand dollars that's not what we're about to do. This video is brought to you by the MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Super Gaming X. It's got 8 gigs of 256 bit GDDR6 memory. It boosts up to 1695 megahertz. It's got three display port ports so you can get that triple gaming high refresh rate if you're into that sort of thing and of course it's got RGB, dual fans and their dynamic backplate with speed holes. Check it out now at the link in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out our build in the Velka Velka 3. It's actually smaller than this and I did see someone build with a 2070 in it at one point but it's so cramped that I don't know that I would necessarily recommend going that route. It is a very cool case though. Definitely not as elegant as this. It's a little bit easier to use.