Intel NUC 12 Pro Wall Street Canyon Kits Review: Alder Lake in UCFF Avatar

System Performance: Miscellaneous Workloads

Standardized benchmarks such as UL's PCMark 10 and BAPCo's SYSmark take a holistic view of the system and process a wide range of workloads to arrive at a single score. Some systems are required to excel at specific tasks - so it is often helpful to see how a computer performs in specific scenarios such as rendering, transcoding, JavaScript execution (web browsing), etc. This section presents focused benchmark numbers for specific application scenarios.

3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R23

We use CINEBENCH R23 for 3D rendering evaluation. R23 provides two benchmark modes - single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of different PC configurations in both supported modes provided us the following results.

The performance numbers tally with the 40W PL1 allocation in the actively-cooled NUC 12 Pro kits compared to the 28W number for the same processor in the NUC BOX-1260P.

Transcoding: Handbrake 1.5.1

Handbrake is one of the most user-friendly open source transcoding front-ends in the market. It allows users to opt for either software-based higher quality processing or hardware-based fast processing in their transcoding jobs. Our new test suite uses the 'Tears of Steel' 4K AVC video as input and transcodes it with a quality setting of 19 to create a 720p AVC stream and a 1080p HEVC stream.

Despite the Ryzen 7 5800U being configured with a 25W-30W target TDP, the larger number of high-performance cores enable it to perform almost as well as the Alder Lake-P systems configured with a higher power limit in these multi-threaded benchmarks.

The faster iGPU clocks in the Core i7-12x0P and a better allocation of the power budget to the iGPU help the actively-cooled NUC 12 Pro kits to lead the pack in this QSV benchmark.

Archiving: 7-Zip 21.7

The 7-Zip benchmark is carried over from our previous test suite with an update to the latest version of the open source compression / decompression software.

The larger number of high-performance cores enables the Ryzen 7 5800U to surpass the NUC 12 Pro kits in this multi-threaded benchmark.

Web Browsing: JetStream, Speedometer, and Principled Technologies WebXPRT4

Web browser-based workloads have emerged as a major component of the typical home and business PC usage scenarios. For headless systems, many applications based on JavaScript are becoming relevant too. In order to evaluate systems for their JavaScript execution efficiency, we are carrying over the browser-focused benchmarks from the WebKit developers used in our notebook reviews. Hosted at BrowserBench, JetStream 2.0 benchmarks JavaScript and WebAssembly performance, while Speedometer measures web application responsiveness.

From a real-life workload perspective, we also process WebXPRT4 from Principled Technologies. WebXPRT4 benchmarks the performance of some popular JavaScript libraries that are widely used in websites.

Web browsing user-experience continues to be dictated by single-threaded performance. Within the list of compared systems, the actively-cooled NUC 12 Pro kits were expected to be on top based on the processors. There are no surprises across the full gamut of browser benchmarks.

Application Startup: GIMP 2.10.30

A new addition to our systems test suite is AppTimer - a benchmark that loads up a program and determines how long it takes for it to accept user inputs. We use GIMP 2.10.30 with a 50MB multi-layered xcf file as input. What we test here is the first run as well as the cached run - normally on the first time a user loads the GIMP package from a fresh install, the system has to configure a few dozen files that remain optimized on subsequent opening. For our test we delete those configured optimized files in order to force a fresh load every second time the software is run.

The fast cores in the Core i7-12x0P are of great help here, with thermal throttling also not coming into the picture for the Bleu Jour Meta 12.