In brief: Intel's Next Unit of Computing (NUC) PCs are great options for anyone who wants a computer with a tiny footprint. Its next NUC, the unannounced NUC8CHK "Chaco Canyon," which Intel is calling NUC 8 Rugged, has the added advantage of being fanless.
Unlike Skull Canyon and Hades Canyon, Chaco Canyon isn't aimed at gamers. Its processor is a Celeron N3350 dual-core (Apollo Lake) CPU, which has a base frequency of 1.10 GHz and a burst of 2.4 GHz. Thanks to its 6W TDP, a fanless cooling solution can be used.
The NUC 8 Rugged also comes with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage, both of which are soldered in place, so no upgrading them. You can, however, expand the storage using the M.2 2280 Key-M slot with an M.2 PCIe x4 NVMe or SATA SSD.
Ports and connectivity options include Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5), Bluetooth 4.2, USB 3.0 and 2.0, HDMI 1.4 and 2.0, and a headphone jack.
Graphics-wise, the NUC uses the Celeron N3350's integrated Intel HD Graphics 500. While this should be enough for most expected use cases, such as in retail environments or as a home media player, it's not going to run Metro Exodus very well.
You can take a closer look at the NUC 8 Rugged in the video below, which comes from the YouTube account of Simply NUC.
No official word yet from Intel on the NUC 8 Rugged, though the chipset drivers are available to download, so expect an announcement soon. As for the price, Tom's Hardware notes that TigerDirect has the NUC listed for $247.99.