Chipzilla showed off its NUC 9  Ghost Canyon platform at CES earlier this year, but the company has just announced general availability and lifted the embargo on full product reviews.

The NUC 9 is built around Intel's NUC Compute Element, which essentially places the CPU, chipset, IO, and cooler onto a removable add-in card in a chassis that measures only 9.37 x 8.5 x 3.78 (WxDxH) inches.

The Intel NUC 9 Extreme is a different sort of animal than traditional small form factor PCs and HotHardware's review shows it to be quite powerful, thanks to the inclusion of 16GB of RAM, an Intel Optane 905P boot drive, a secondary Kingston SSD, and an ASUS GeForce RTX 2070 discrete GPU, though the NUC 9 does have integrated graphics as well.

A barebones Intel NUC 9 Extreme (model NUC9i9QNX), without any components or accessories will sell for about $1,639, but fully configured like the one in the review will retail north of $2,000. It's not cheap, but Intel's NUC 9 Extreme is compact, robust, reasonably quiet and capable.