Technology

Intel Plans High-end Gaming Notebook NUC X15 Whitebook


Intel is working on a new range of high-end notebooks that will be marketed under its own brand as so-called white books. The devices offer, among other things, Core H CPUs and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060/3070 GPUs. Its code name is “King County”.

As can be seen from the first entries at online retailers and sources from the Taiwanese hardware industry, Intel plans to introduce several variants of the so-called Intel NUC X15 “Whitebook” laptop in the further course of the year. These are different variants of a so-called white label notebook that Intel partners can sell under their own brand in some regions.

The new gaming notebook, which can also be described as a kind of consumer workstation, is currently being developed under the code name “King County” and has a 15.6-inch display. The screen is available in versions with Full HD resolution and 240 Hertz maximum refresh rate or QHD resolution and 144 Hertz maximum refresh rate.

Intel Core H-Series CPUs with up to 45 watts & 8 cores

Under the hood is the Intel Core i7-11800H from the “Tiger Lake” series, which works with a maximum power dissipation of up to 45 watts. The chip is manufactured on a 10nm scale and offers eight computing cores including HyperThreading. Depending on the configuration, the base clock is between 1.9 and 2.3 gigahertz, while turbo boost can reach up to 4.6 gigahertz. A cheaper configuration variant with Intel Core i5-11400H is also planned (6 cores, HT, 2.2-2.7 GHz base clock, up to 4.5 GHz via turbo).

Read More: Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake Chips Leaked With 24 Cores 32 Threads And 5.5GHz

RAM is usually not preinstalled ex-works, but Intel offers support for up to 64 gigabytes of DDR4 RAM. There are two PCIe slots for SSDs, one of which is connected via PCIe 4.0 x4 and thus offers extremely high transfer rates. The second M.2 slot connected via PCIe x4 Gen3 can of course also be equipped with an SSD. Add to this WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 support, a full-size HDMI 2.0b output, and DisplayPort 1.4b support. Thunderbolt 4 is also on board.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 or RTX 3070 provide graphics power

When it comes to graphics chips, Intel does not spoil it, even if you are actually planning your own hardware in the form of Intel Arc GPUs. Depending on the model, the Intel NUC X15 Whitebook will be available with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 or Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 graphics unit.

In the USA, Intel apparently wants to offer its new gaming ‘whitebook’ as a kind of barebone kit that can be equipped with memory by the buyers as they wish. In most cases, however, the Intel X15 is likely to be offered by resellers who adopt this pre-configuration in different versions and sometimes use their own brand names.