When it came to Far Cry New Dawn, things looked up. The NUC's 3060 was just a few frames away from the iBuypower at 1080p and ultra settings. It was also above that 30-fps playability threshold at 4K, albeit not as close to the competitors as it was at the lower resolution. The CPU has integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics which operate at 400 MHz with a burst frequency of 1.35 GHz. The GPU has 96 Execution Units (EUs). The TDP and RAM are shared between the CPU and GPU. The CPU has integrated Intel Xe Graphics operating at 300 MHz with a burst frequency of 1.35 GHz. The GPU has 96 Execution Units (EUs) and can support two 4K displays, or one 8K display, at 60Hz. This is the second unit we have reviewed that had a CPU containing an Xe iGPU. The TPD and RAM are shared between the CPU and GPU.

Over the years, we have had the opportunity to review many different NUC systems, with the latest being the NUC 11 Compute Element (CE). That NUC has a quad-core i7 processor with 1.35 GHz, 96 EUs, Intel Iris Xe Graphics integrated GPU (IGPU), and a built-in video capture card. We found the NUC 11 CE to be a capable machine for casual gamers, high-end home theaters, and content creators. The photo below shows how much larger it is than the Pro.We also recently did a podcast with Kristin Brown of Intel specifically on the topic of NUCs ( located here) that you may enjoy listening to. This test really highlights the 96 EU in the iGPU of the NUC 11 Pro as in some tests was about 50% more performant than the NUC 8, and twice as performant as the NUC 10 Pro as they have less powerful iGPUs. It had a third of the performance the NUC 9 Pro which has a discrete GPU. SPECviewperf 12.1 Noise varies from a whisper to about 35dB, but we heard it go louder on 100% load to around 50dB. Power use is quite good. Under load, it reached 400W, but most of the time, it was about half that. In cost terms, less than 20 cents an hour. The latest Intel i7-11375H (desktop) has a 5GHz Turbo. This only runs in larger form factor desktops and is an average 14% faster. The real difference no TDP constraint and 37% faster at maximum speed. Graphics – 30% faster than Intel UHD To evaluate the device’s performance, we ran a SPECworkstation 3 benchmarking test on it and then compared the results to other NUC systems that we have tested. The full review for the other NUC system can be found here, here and here. This buttonizer session storagevalue will only be made when a menu button is using the Open menu and close on first loadsetting. The session storage value is used to remember which group has triggered this setting so that it only trigger once per session.

Invariably, Intel’s new NUC 11 will be compared to its predecessor the NUC 8, as these NUCs were designed for similar use cases. Below is a comparison of the key hardware components of these systems as well as the NUC 10 and NUC 9 that we previously reviewed.NUCs come in a variety of form factors and are used for many purposes, such as home theaters or home labs. But they are not just for home users; enterprises have been using NUCs for such diverse purposes as graphic workstations, edge devices, VDI clients, and nodes for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). We have also previously configured and reviewed NUCs for different use cases, ranging from using a relatively low-powered NUC7CJYS to run IGEL Workspace to running ESXi on a NUC 9 Pro. Overall, we would say the Intel NUC 11 Pro is a worthy successor to the NUC 10 Pro. It was slightly slower in applications that were multi-threaded because it only has four cores; however, graphic applications performed extremely well thanks to its Iris Xe iGPU. As more and more applications are becoming graphic-intensive, it was wise of Intel to trade a more powerful iGPU for CPU cores.

The Compute Element contains the “brains” of the computer: the CPU and RAM. The NUC 11 Compute Elements range from having an Intel Celeron 6305 Processor with 4GB of RAM to an Intel Core i7 processor with 16GB of RAM. You can find the complete Computer Element line-up here. Our Intel NUC 11

Use multiple screens without worry

It is the second system we have reviewed that has the Iris Xe iGPU, and it solidifies our position that it is a solid graphic processor for casual gamers, and for everyday use with home and office applications. It provides performance that could have previously only been achieved with a discrete GPU. Next, we connected a laptop to the input port and a monitor to the pass-thru port on the NUC. We launched OSB Studio on the NUC and configured it to connect to the capture card. We recorded a few minutes of video streaming from the laptop, then compared the captured content to the original content and could not detect any difference.