Intel NUC 12 Extreme Dragon Canyon PC Brings Alder Lake To Battle In Specs Leak
It's pretty amazing the level of firepower that company's can pack into a small form factor (SFF) machine. Intel's enthusiast-grade Next Unit of Computing (NUC) PCs have really highlighted this, as we saw in our NUC 11 Extreme 'Beast Canyon' review last December. An even faster iteration is apparently just around the corner, if the latest round of leaks is any indication.
Nothing has been announced yet, but over at SimplyNUC there is an empty landing page for Dragon Canyon, otherwise known as the NUC 12 Extreme. Additionally, the reseller had posted product listings for a few Dragon Canyon setups, which it later removed. Somebody obviously jumped the gun.
While SimplyNUC has since removed the product listings, leaker @momomo_us managed to grab a couple of screenshots detailing price points on two models. The higher end of the two was listed at $1,714 (€1,401) and the other was listed at $1,514 (€1,181).
Meanwhile, the folks at Videocardz got their hands on what look to be official documents from Intel outlining the NUC 12 Extreme's load out. If those documents are real, and barring any last minute changes, here's what we're looking at...
- 12 Gen Intel Core i9/i7 processors
- PCIe x16 Gen5 slot for add-in discrete graphics (up to 12" in length)
- Up to 64GB dual-channel DDR4-3200 SODIMMs
- 3x M.2 Key slots
- HDMI 2.0b connector
- 2x Thunderbolt 4 ports
- 6x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A ports
- Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX2111
- 10Gb Ethernet port standard, and additional 2.5Gb Ethernet port on Intel Core i9 SKUs
- Intel three-year warranty
It is said the NUC 12 Extreme will feature an LGA 1700 socket that will work with any 65W Alder Lake CPU, though Intel will sell two variants—NUC12EDBi9 with a Core i9-12900 and the NUC12EDBi7 with a Core i7-12700.
The Core i9-12900 is a 16-core/24-thread chip with eight P-cores and eight E-cores, 30MB of L3 cache, and a top 5.1GHz clock speed, while the Core i7-12700 is a 12-core/20-thread CPU with eight P-cores and four E-cores, 25MB of L3 cache, and a top 4.9GHz frequency via Turbo boost.
Both are high-end CPUs in the Alder Lake stack. The NUC 12 Extreme will allow users to pair either one with up to 64GB of RAM and fast SSD storage. Toss in a full-size discrete graphics card and you'll be off to the races.
To that end, it's interesting that Intel's graphics boss Raja Koduri recently teased a Beast Canyon NUC with an Arc Alchemist graphics card inside. Intel will officially kick off its Alchemist part this quarter starting with discrete laptop GPUs, followed by desktop cards shipping the second quarter and workstation models in the third quarter.
