to build small gaming PCs for a while

but this is one of the smallest,

yet most full featured I've ever seen.

This five liter box is a full desktop gaming PC,

and one of the most easiest

to upgrade computers I've seen in quite a while.

In fact, it's easier to upgrade

than today's desktop computers.

That's because inside this five liter chassis,

you won't just find a traditional CPU

with a heat sink and fan

or a GPU board.

This is called the Intel NUC 9 Extreme

and I'm gonna show you exactly what's inside it

and how it might change

how you build your next gaming computer.

There is a brain inside this computer

that contains it's own CPU,

memory and storage that you can plug in to this PC

just like you plug in that graphics card.

So to pull out most of the main system components

to this computer,

I'm just gonna disconnect a few cables,

attach the main brain module up here,

which they're calling the Element.

NUC Element Compute module.

Still have a lot of headers on there

but this is the Element NUC module.

And inside of here I'm gonna show you even a little bit more

how modulated this system is.

So as you can see inside here,

not only is the entire CPU brain of this computer modular

but inside here you can replace the memory modules

and the storage modules as well

with no laptop memory sticks

or solid state drives as well.

It's got support

for three NVMe solid state drives in total,

two of them right in this module.

So maybe a couple of years down the road

you're thinking of replacing this Core i9-9980HK

with something faster and newer,

when you do that you can also replace all

of your ports as well.

You've got dual gigabit ethernet here,

a pair of Thunderbolt 3 USB-C jacks

that are multipurpose,

HDMI and four USB 3.1 ports right on this card.

And you can imagine as newer

and better port technologies come out,

you just swap out this one module.

It's like replacing your entire motherboard

of your computer.

That's because this computer doesn't really

have another motherboard,

all it has connecting the rest of the computer together

is this single baseboard with a couple

of PCIe X16 slots and an X4 over there

if you wanna add something extra like a video capture card,

instead of dedicating all 16 lanes to your graphics.

So you can see there's not a lot going on here,

this is just there to connect these main pieces

to the computer together.

All the rest of the I/O,

all of the rest of the processing power,

it's all here in this modular replaceable card.

Theoretically this all makes for one

of the smallest future-proof gaming PCs we've ever seen

and if you're worried about that future-proof thing,

Intel says it's planning

to ship at least a couple generations

of this NUC Element CPU brain.

The company also says it's 500W power supply is designed

to handle any graphics card on the market

for the next couple of years,

as long as it fits into this frame

which means it needs to be under eight inches

and fits into a dual slot chassis.

In addition to that,

it says that you shouldn't see any kind

of performance detriment from the fact

that all of this is happening over an X16 PCIe slot.

And if you don't like this exact five liter design

with it's prominent skull,

they will be some other options on the market.

Intel is planning to ship this as a Barebones kit,

meaning you need your own storage,

your own memory,

operating system and graphics card

if you wanna make it a gaming system.

From between $1300 and $1700 and i5,

i7 and i9 configurations

but there will be other manufacturers

building their own chassis around the NUC Element as well,

including Razer and some other companies

I can't talk about quite yet.

Those will be shipping this year

with the Barebone system from Intel shipping in March.

I've been a fan of Intel's tiny NUC computers for a while

but I've never seen enough graphical oomph in there

for me to buy one myself

and it looks like that's changing here.

I'm also a big fan of small modular computers,

I've tried to build them

but I've never been able to make them this small.

So if this works out,

I'm gonna be a customer for this actual box.

For now, I'm gonna wait and see how it plays out.

We're in Las Vegas all this week

for the Consumer Electronics Show

so you can check out our other videos

of intriguing gadgets as well,

including laptops,

foldables and more.