General Information
Fresh From the Box
Out of the box we see a fairly standard package for any mini PC I've looked at in the past. Outside of the unit itself, you have a fairly hefty power brick to power the PC via barrel connector, as well as a HDMI cable and VESA mounting kit for those who want to stow the PC away on the back of a monitor (or proudly display it on a VESA arm if you're that way inclined). The IO on offer is generous, with the body of the PC being all but a mirror image of the later Geekom PCs I've looked at before, minus the Geekom branding on the top. The front of the unit shows us a Thunderbolt 3 port, next to a USB A 3.2 and 3.5mm jack. To the left you get a full-sized SD card reader, and the right a Kensington lock. The back is, as usual, where you find all the good stuff though. It's certainly not the most generous outing I've come across, but you do get a Mini DP, two USB A 3.2s, a HDMI port, Ethernet port, and finally another Thunderbolt 3 port. It'll certainly be enough for most.
Looking to the internals you have the i7-1165G7 being the brains behind the operation, with this being among the first to have Intel's Iris Xe graphics when it first came out. Supporting it in this configuration is 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512GB M.2 SSD, though you can also find flavours of this mini PC with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD, and completely barebones if you already have your own on hand. Opening up the bottom of the case you'll only really find a 2.5 inch SATA bay empty, but it good as always to just see four screws between you and being able to upgrade your RAM and SSD too. It's a clean and accessible design with no frills.
Day to Day Performance
Using the NUC 11 as a day to day PC really isn't much of a challenge; to some its age may even come as an advantage with the older Windows 10 coming as standard. You can of course upgrade to Windows 11 whenever you want, but I do know we have no shortage of people wishing they never did so on our site. I had no issues driving two monitors on this PC (3440x1440 and 1920x1080) and it handled 4K video playback on YouTube with no issues at all. Looking at your standard benchmarks, the i7-1165G7 managed to hit 6291 on Geekbench 6's multi-core score, and 2170 for single-core performance, while with Cinebench R23 we see a multi-core score of 6547, and a single-core score of 1533. It does well enough, but I wouldn't expect any miracles with modern PC games. Some more demanding titles will run, but not without compromises on quality and resolution; your 2D titles aren't a problem though. I had a good bit of fun playing the recently released Balatro on this PC, though you really wouldn't expect issues out of a 2D card game.
Emulation is perhaps a little more interesting. To assist in this review I decided to put together a bit of an emulation showcase to show off some of the higher end systems and how they performed. In the video below, you can find an hour long supercut of me trying a bit of Wii U, Switch, 3DS, and PS3 emulation to varying degrees of success. Wii U, as it has surprised me in the past, really had no issues running on the NUC 11. Even Breath of the Wild managed to hold a steady 30fps at 720p with FPS++ enabled, which did admittedly impress me a little. If you're happy to lower the graphics to 180p, you can even achieve a stable enough 60fps… though I imagine this is a little less desirable to most. Mario Kart 8 also ran well after enabling asynchronous shader compilation, with Wind Waker HD following up with no issues at all.
Yuzu was a bit more of a mixed bag than I was expecting it to be, with a number of games crashing outright, and others just running poorly. It's not all doom and gloom, with the pivotal Atelier Firis DX Art Book running at full speed though! Jokes aside, I do think this chip can do more. Dark Souls Remastered struggled to run at full speed at native resolution but crashed on load when trying to scale it down. Other titles like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe straight up wouldn't run too. The biggest surprise in the Switch department was definitely Tears of the Kingdom running at a state I could almost call playable. I personally wouldn't go for it myself, but if my Switch died and I really had an urge to play, it certainly would be an option.
My time playing PS3 and 3DS games was a little more limited, with Dark Souls 2 running particularly poorly after a very long load time. If you are going to watch the below video, you might want to skip over this part if you're particularly sensitive to jerky images. It is very rough when it decides to stutter. 3DS would run well enough at x2 to x3 resolution scaling. I will mention in the video I didn't realise Majora's Mask 3D was running at x2 speed due to playing without audio at the time, which does explain why it struggled more than I thought it would.
This video was a little rushed as I realised a little bit last minute that it would be a good inclusion, but I'm hoping as time goes on I can bring a little more order to the emulation process to show exactly what these devices are capable of. I did also realise after the fact that OBS' auto noise filter is a little too aggressive with me, so apologies for my voice cutting out. These videos will improve in time!
Closing Thoughts
All things considered I do see this as a relatively capable device, and one capable of doing well for casual PC use and some mid-tier emulation. Where it really falls short is at its current price point of $495; it just isn't all that competitive in 2024. Looking just at Geekom's own mini PCs I can see significantly better value in something like the A5, which packs a comparable 5800H from AMD for a little over $100 less. It finds itself in a weird position where it is a perfectly capable device, but it does nothing unique for me to be able to recommend buying it at its current retail price.
If despite that you are interested, Geekom have again sent over some small discount codes for the device on Amazon UK, US, and Canada. As mentioned in previous reviews, these aren't any kind of affiliate deal for us, and frankly I don't believe they're a big enough cut to be looking at this system either way. You can find the links below:
Store Links -
