Is it a petite powerhouse, or a diminutive danger?

LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM

1 TROUBLING BEGINNINGS

THERE IS ONE COMMON—and almost unavoidable— issue with small form factor builds. They can be fiddly, which is just the way it goes when the chassis is this compact. Intel has ramped up the scale, but that doesn’t necessarily mean this will be a walk in the park. To see what we’re working with, we need to get star ted by opening the top of the case. This involves a heavily loaded spring thumb screw on the back of the case. Gently, and we mean gently, loosen this screw and set it aside somewhere safe. You may be wondering why we’ve emphasized being gentle with this heavily loaded spring thumb screw? Well, we may or may not have spent around five to ten minutes searching for it as it pinged straight off initially. We’ll leave that for you to figure out.

2 OFF COMES THE TOP

NOW THAT YOU HAVE the screw loosened—and, hopefully, haven’t wasted too much time looking for it on the floor—you can prize the top panel off of the Intel NUC. To do this, you’ll need to slowly slide the top panel backward and then lift it upward. Place this aside, preferably next to the thumbscrew you’ve just taken off— it’s always advisable to keep all of these par ts together as builds can get messy quickly. Once this is off, we can get a first glimpse into the machine. Along the top, you’ll see the USB header cable that runs across from the I/O shield to the motherboard. We’ll need to come back to this later so it’s wor th noting. You can also see the CPU fan, a heatsink chamber, and also the compact SFX 750W PSU powering this NUC 13 Extreme.

3 E XHIBIT SIDE PANEL A

SO THE TOP’S OFF and now we need to access the side, star ting with the front. Thankfully, there are no hidden screws here. In fact, so far, this isn’t nearly as bad to strip down as we initially feared. To remove the side panel, pull back from the top lip and lift upwards, and it should ease off. Put it somewhere safe, as with the other par ts, you don’t want to scratch or damage your case. With the side panel off, we can see a large RTX 4070 Ti-sized hole at the bottom. Above that, is the Intel NUC compar tment where all the wizardr y takes place. Here, we can see the rest of the heatsink, CPU fan, and now our DIMM slots containing the Kingston DDR5 sticks supplied by Intel.