THIS Intel NUC 12 Pro is GREAT

In our Intel NUC 12 Pro review (codenamed "Wall Street Canyon"), we see what the Intel Core i7-1260P platform offers in both traditional and fanless forms. With Alder Lake, the new Intel NUC offers more performance in a compact form factor.

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Timestamps
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00:00 Introduction
01:56 External Hardware Overview
06:02 Internal Hardware Overview
09:57 Bleu Jour META 12 Fanless Intel Core i7-1260P NUC
11:58 Intel Core i7-1260P NUC Performance
14:13 Intel NUC 12 Pro Power Consumption and Noise
16:02 META 12 Fanless Industrial NUC Power Consumption
17:19 A word about VMware ESXi 8.0 Compatibility and Windows 11, Ubunutu, and Proxmox VE
17:39 Key Lessons Learned
19:21 Wrap-up

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Other STH Content Mentioned in this Video
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[GavinR]

One of the advantages of the NUC having an external power supply is that they are designed to work with a huge range of power supplies. They don't even require 19V, which is very useful for those of us running embedded systems with DC power. NUCs will work perfectly fine with 12V battery power.

[JasonTaylor-poxc]

Quick correction - Intel DOES provide the appropriate plug for the power adapter if you get the right SKU. The SKU ending in 0 is the one without, 001 is US and 002 is EU.

BTW, I have 2 - both of the "tall" variants so I could put in a 2.5 SATA drive too on i5 and the other i7.

[MichaelSD]

Something I don't see talked about much with these but I'm experimenting with at home, you can connect two of these systems together with a short and cheap thunderbolt cable to get an incredibly high speed network connection between them for incredibly cheap. I'm running ubuntu and had to modprobe the thunderbolt-net driver but it was fairly plug and play otherwise. I'm getting iperf values of 18gbit/s for a ~$12cable

[thetj]

I worked at a company that's service partner of a small /medium systems integrator here in Germany and we had a ton of NUCs at our customers, just with their logo on it.

and servicing these is really easy. even replacing the whole mainboard took less than 30 minutes including testing that it then ran without any problems. 👍

[jeremybarber]

As many of the commenters have mentioned, I really wish Intel made the heatsink taller. A 1cm increase would make a WORLD of difference for thermals. I ended up hacking my 7200u NUC apart so I could hot-rod a larger cooler onto it.

[ddEEE]

The MAC prefix on the lable, 48:21:0b, is for Pegatron Corporation, so looks like ASrock or one of the other subsidiaries makes these.

[ArronLorenz]

Just swapped out some old iron for three of these. We don't run machine heavy VMs. Mostly Linux, and a Windows print server. So now our little NUC Proxmox cluster is running perfectly.

Even rocking CEPH for some of the storage.

[willcurry]

I love Intel NUC due to the thunderbolt ports for attached NVMe m.2 external storage drives. Great Plex Server also.

[the-perfidious]

Great Review! My only gripe with the intel-made Nucs is they have a chronic case of tiny heatsinks, they tend to throttle or at least get super spicy if you try to run heavier workloads where they need to boost for more than a few seconds at a time

[notaprofessionalJ]

as a TMM (sort of) virtualization host these are pretty fantastic. the biggest draw for me is the lack of limitation in networking now that you have 40Gbps at your disposal!

[denverag]

6:45 IT would be interesting to see what would happen if you used a shipping tube to make a chimney on top of the unit to see how much extra cooling that airflow provides, on my Noctua C14S i was able to cool a 3050X to just shy of 60w passively using a 3 ft long square cardboard box and there was a nice noticeable airflow, not quite enough to hold up a sheet of paper, but maybe some tissue paper

[feejus]

Just want to thank you Patrick. I keep watching your videos and they are very entertaining and informative.

[kirkr]

Thanks for all the work on, very helpful!

[nekrosoft]

The power supply is overkill on purpose. NUC doesn't require that big of power supply to run. Big power supply is in case you plug in super power hungry thunderbolt devices.
If you never going to run crazy power hungry thunderbolt devices, you can use much smaller power supply.

[martinhyska]

I tried nuc pn50 in allmetal fanless akasa newton a50 case. Till up to 25w is nice, everything cold. Problem is 3D gaming. If watts go up to 40w temperatures climb so high to 80-90C, specially in summer. Its like forge and my ssd also over 70C. Adding one fan with slow motion on top solve it to go down about 25-30C. In my opinion fanless case can hold to 15w-25w, depend on size. But add one fan is so effective to not sence do monster pasives.

[Tempo_Gigante]

Soooo love the part that the power brick isn't integrated.

[XEONvE]

You can now buy GaN 120 W USB C charger and buy the converter head from USB C to DC 2.5mm or 3.5mm.. very small and compact set.
GaN 120W charge can output 20V 6A. perfect for mini pc or laptop

[andreaskuhn]

I would love to see a powerbrick, with the same size and shape like the NUC it selft, so that you can stack them both together (put the powerbrick under up on the NUC - perhaps with some magents?)
I would also love to have some kind of "Docking Station" with the same size of Case!
One Thunderbold cable, one ore two NVMe inside an some more USB (2-3x USB 2.0, and like 4-7 USB 3.x Ports). a Displayport, and maybe another 1 GBit (?) NIC

[pkt]

Very cool. With the current scalper prices of pi's, the 1L and under hold a lot more appeal for me. Particularly if you can get a super low power one.

[Herr_U]

One thing I'd be kinda curious about in the power draw&noise tests (with geekench et al.) is how it performs if one were to turn off the Turbo feature*? (something I generally do on systems - since I don't consider the extra watt-per-performance beyond the base clock to be worth it)

(* it is a bios option, but also - in linux at least - one can toggle this on-the-fly (assuming the bios has it set to allow, so turning it off in a boot-script is very handy))

But overall, great overview with lots of details.