Intel announces NUC 12 Extreme Dragon Canyon with Alder Lake-i9

Intel has announced the NUC 12 Extreme, which has been named Dragon Canyon. This mini PC can be run with an i7 or i9 of the Alder Lake generation and comes standard without a separate graphics card. The NUC costs at least 1632 euros in a webshop.

The Dragon Canyon is basically an upgraded version of the NUC 11 Extreme Beast Canyon and has the same chassis as that mini PC, for example. However, the NUC 12 Extreme has an updated NUC Compute Element, the PCIe plug-in card with processor, RAM and storage. Where the NUC 11 supports Extreme Tiger Lake chips, Dragon Canyon works with Alder Lake processors.

Customers can choose from two NUC 12 Extreme models, one with an i9-12900 processor or one with an i7-12700. Both processors have eight Performance cores, but the i9 has twice as many efficient cores as the i7 with eight Efficiency cores. The maximum turbo boost clock speed of the i9 is also 0.2GHz higher than that of the i7 at 5.1GHz. In addition, the i9 has 5MB L3 cache more than the i7, namely 30MB.

By default, the NUC comes without memory, storage or separate graphics card. The housing offers space for two DDR4-sodimm cards and has three M.2 slots. The housing also fits a single graphics card with a maximum length of 30.48 centimeters, or 12 inches. On the outside is an HDMI 2.0b slot, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, six USB 3.2 Type A ports and a 10Gbit/s Ethernet connection. Furthermore, the NUC supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.

Intel will also sell the updated NUC Compute Element separately, so that NUC 11 Extreme PCs can be upgraded. European suggested retail prices of the products are not yet known. Webshop SimplyNUC does have the two NUCs as a pre-order. The i7 model including 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage costs 1632 euros including VAT; the i9 model costs 1,898 euros with VAT with the same memory and storage. The i9 model is expected in April, the i7 should appear in the same quarter.