Over the last weekend, TwitchCon attendees could catch a glimpse of Intel's Raptor Canyon NUC 13 Extreme PC. This new Intel design is much larger than its predecessor, signaling that the company is looking at making more prominent form factors for future NUC lines.
A new Intel NUC 13 Extreme "Raptor Canyon" appears at the company's TwitchCon booth, 13th Gen Core CPU & Triple-Slot dGFX Support
Intel will allow the graphics card, processor, and memory to be upgraded with their new NUC 13 Extreme "Raptor Canyon" PC. Intel has revealed both NUC 12 Pro and NUC 12 Enthusiast models, which still maintain a small form factor and focus on both the enterprise and gaming markets. However, for this new build, users will have more opportunities to upgrade the system, since it is aimed at true enthusiasts and extreme users.
Intel's next-gen NUC 13 system will be called Raptor Canyon which is named after the chips 'Raptor Lake' that will be featured within it. The NUC 13 Extreme 'Raptor Canyon' will feature 13th Gen 'K' unlocked SKUs such as the Intel Core i9-13900K, Core i7-13700K, and the Core i5-13600K. The NUC will also feature support for a full-length PCIe x16 graphics card (Gen 5 standard) and will come in a 13.9 Liter chassis which is a >50% increase in chassis size vs the existing Eden Bay Compute Element.
The new Intel NUC 13 Extreme will offer support for three-slot GPUs. Intel will definitely be marketing its own Arc discrete graphics cards with the NUC 13 Extreme systems since those will be available by then but users will also have the choice to go with either AMD or NVIDIA graphics cards too.
Meet the NUC 13 Extreme (Raptor Canyon) 😱 pic.twitter.com/sg7tWbs3oa
— FanlessTech (@FanlessTech) October 10, 2022
Considering that Intel's existing NUC 12 Extreme already has Gen 5 PCIe x16 support, we can expect that to be carried over to the NUC 13 Extreme too but it's not confirmed if we will get any Gen 5 M.2 SSD functionality since Raptor Lake CPUs don't have exclusive Gen 5 M.2 lanes but they will rather be split with the discrete GPU lanes. The CPU will come with two Gen 4 x4 lanes for M.2 devices.
Within the NUC 13 Extreme 'Raptor Canyon' Mini PC will be the latest NUC 13 Extreme Compute Element codenamed Shrike Bay. Once again, the latest compute element will support all Raptor Lake Unlocked 'K' and 'KF' series chips. It will be interesting to see if the previous-gen Eden Bay Compute Element which houses the 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs will be backward compatible with the newer Raptor Lake chips considering they utilize the same socket and the desktop CPUs are confirmed to be inter-compatible.
The Intel NUC 13 Extreme Mini PCs are expected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2022 which means that Raptor Lake is definitely going to ship prior to that so expect a 13th Gen Desktop CPU launch in early Q4 followed by the NUC 13 systems in late Q3 '22.
During the announcement at TwitchCon, Intel demonstrated the new NUC 13 Extreme, using the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series graphics card and a Raptor Lake CPU. No information as to the version of the Intel processor. Within the next few weeks, Intel will begin to reveal specifications, release dates, and pricing for the new Intel Raptor Canyon NUC system to the public.
News Sources: Intel on Twitch, @ghost_motley on Twitter
