Intel NUC 12 Pro Wall Street Canyon Kits Review: Alder Lake in UCFF Avatar
by Ganesh T S on January 26, 2023 11:30 AM ESTSystem 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.
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abufrejoval - Sunday, January 29, 2023 - link
In the PC market, even "small" niches seem to be big enough to merit a product, otherwise Intel wouldn't keep on doing them.My main NUC use case is µ-servers in a 10Gbit cluster using cheap cascaded KVMs in the rare case I need the console. Near silent and low average power 24x7 operation is the goal, with enough peak power to get things done in a hurry.
Yes, you could build that from laptops, but unfortunately the ones that offer 64GB RAM and 2-8TB of NVMe as well as a TB port for 10GBit Ethernet are designed for gamers and carry quite a hefty premium and extras I don't need.
In corporate workplaces laptops have pretty much replaced small form factor PCs, even more so with the pandemic. But there are still quite a lot of profesisonal installations in public services, medical care and production, where NUCs mounted to a firmly attached display are quite the ticket.
Personally, I'd prefer to have Mini-ITX board variants for every NUC Intel builds, but that really seems too niche these days.
ottonis - Friday, March 17, 2023 - link
A NUC can be a tremedously useful device to power up a basic digital audio workstation (DAW), alongside external audio and midi devices. It has enough processing power to run even the most modern DAW (e.g. studio one) alongside a bunch of virtual instruments and effects. Once everything is installed and up and running, it may be useful to deactivate Wifi, Bluetooth and LAN and to purge the autostart menu from all but the most essential scripts and programs, in order to reduce DPC latency.It is so compact that it a dream come true for musicians wanting to save precious space in the homerecording studios or who are on the run and on tour and need to travel as light as possible.
So, if you know how to set this device up, it is an invaluable tool for musicians.
It's benefit over laptops: it has more I/O. I struggled to connect all my external devices with an otherwise great laptop, but the NUC can handle them all (4x USB-A + 2x USB-C)
CyrIng - Saturday, January 28, 2023 - link
The blue carton box has a better look than the NUC case.About Hybrid processors, CoreFreq is now monitoring Pcore and Ecore, including their own Turbo tunable tweaks
ISO available at www.cyring.fr
abufrejoval - Sunday, January 29, 2023 - link
The GPU-Z data is obviously bollocks: I was first thrown off by the low memory bandwidth of 25GB/s, which is really what DDR3 based GT3 solutions or single channel DDR4 might do (64-bit width may be another hint, because it's 128-bit on dual channel).I am seeing more like 40GB/s on my various Xe's, 38.4GB/s on an i7-1165G7 and 42GB/s on an i5-12500H with an 80EU Xe, both using DDR4-3200 SO-DIMMs.
But it's the pixel and texture fill rates and the GPU boost clocks where things must have been read wrong, nothing clocks 11GHz on CMOS just yet and the fill rates are matching the RTX2060 on my NUC11PHBi7 using GDDR6, 10GPixels and 21 GTexels are more realistic with 1.3GHz boost.
So please recheck the setup and data.
abufrejoval - Sunday, January 29, 2023 - link
It's too bad how Intel often just manages to get withini >90% of what I want, only to bungle it on the final stretch...The "blue day meta" variants (what on Earth did they smoke?) are rather intriguing because they seem to allow screwing say a Noctua fan on top (is there a matching fan connector on the board?): that could fix the major isse with the NUCs, too little volume/mass for cooling 20-30 Watts at acceptable noise levels.
What's critically missing for me, is the Thunderbolt ports, which I need for 10GBit networking, be it via Ethernet or TCP over TB. I believe those parts may still be in short supply, but I'd always pay €20-30 extra to have those ports.