The NUC12 Enthusiast

Right when our old NUC5 died, its replacement had been delivered and brought online – a new Intel NUC12 Enthusiast, also known as the NUC12SNKi72 (I work at Intel, but even I find that name a bit obtuse). This is a seriously fast machine in a fairly compact package, even though admittedly not as small as the old NUC5. On the other hand, as a machine with an ambition to be a replacement for a dedicated gaming PC, it sports a dedicated graphics card and not just the integrated graphics typical for the classic NUCs.  

Unboxing

The NUC12SNK comes in a substantial box with a giant NUC logo and a picture of the machine itself on the front. It has a gold-black color scheme that is really pretty.

The box lid unfolds from the back, being held in place with a couple of magnets. Once open, the skull motif is seen in gold on a satin-like surface that keeps the machine in place in the top shelf of the box.

The lower half of the box is a drawer, containing the power supply, power cord, the metal stand used to mount the NUC vertically (very heavy), and accessories.

Overall, the packaging provides a nice feeling of having bought something classy and advanced, and not just a boring old computer. HP did something similar with the Spectre 360 laptop I bought last year. Once the machine has been installed, the box will eventually be discarded so maybe it is a bit of a waste. Still, a nice touch and kind of fitting with the higher price of the product compared to the smaller NUCs.

Opening the Machine

This was the “kit” version of the NUC, which means that you have to open the machine in order to install memory and storage. The top cover of the machine is held in place with six tiny hex screws, and I was rifling through my various toolboxes trying to find something small enough… until I realized that there was one included in the box. There was no mention of this fact in the manuals available online, you just had to look at everything and figure it out.

Underneath the lid, there is a second layer that contains the LED-lit skull logo. For some reason, this one uses a different type of screw. Had this machine been designed by IKEA, it would have used the same hex screws as the top (full disclosure, I actually tried using the hex key for the lid before switching to one of my own screw drivers).

The NUC came with a couple of blank pieces of heavy plastic that you can apparently use to put your own picture into the system instead of the skull. I believe this feature is inherited from the NUC12 Extreme or the NUC11 Enthusiast, but there is nothing specific to the NUC12 Enthusiast in any documentation I could find. It appears that producing an inverted image for use requires some vinyl cutting machinery that I have no idea where to find – so no custom graphics for us. Even though it could be kind of fun.

In practice, unscrewing the lid and the skull display was quick and painless (once I figured out the screws).  

Easy Installation

Installing memory and disks was also super-easy. The NUC uses two laptop-style SO-DIMM slots that can only handle DDR4 memory (a bit of a disappointment since the Alder Lake Core i7-12700H does support LP-DDR5 memory). It also has three M.2 slots for NVMe drives. Unlike the old small NUC, there is no support for adding a 2.5 inch SATA drive.

Booting Up

After putting everything back into place and attaching the big power brick, the machine booted up without a hitch. The default is to light up the Skull logo in blue, which looks kind of cool. When not lit up you have no idea anything is hiding behind the opaque lid. Some nice decoration tech there! If you don’t like having a skull light up, it can be turned off.

The UEFI for the machine also uses the Skull motif, and this cannot be turned off. The eyes turn red towards the end of the boot process, which is a nice touch.

Setting up Windows 11

The most time-consuming part of the setup was installing Windows 11. It turns out that Windows 11 (downloaded in December of 2022) does not have any network drivers applicable to the NUC12SNK. This is very unexpected since the hardware is common and industry-standard – on-chipset wired Ethernet and an Intel Killer AX1690 WiFi chip.  

The Windows 11 standard setup just grinds to a halt at the point where it wants to connect to a network. No options are given to move on without connecting to a network. But the installer clearloy lacks the drivers needed to use either the WiFi or the wired network on the machine. A bit of bind there. Fortunately, there is an answer on the Intel support site: press shift-F10 to open a CMD window, and then enter a magical incantation: “oobe\bypassnro”. It looks just as strange as it sounds.

Seriously Microsoft? How can the setup process not offer a way to proceed without a network when the installer realizes there is no network hardware available at all? Ridiculous! (this blog post has a screenshot of what it looks like)

Once Windows 11 was installed (without a network), it was time to get the machine on the network. This required downloading the Intel network drivers from Intel, putting them on a USB, and installing them on the NUC. It has been a long time since I last had to that – when I built a Rocket Lake system in 2021 this was not needed. But since this is an “Enthusiast” product, I guess the buyers are the kind of people who can handle a small hurdle like this. If you don’t want to deal with this, buy a machine with Windows pre-installed. It is not the fault of Intel as far as I can tell, but an issue with Microsoft’s installer not being up-to-date on recent hardware.

Blinkenlights be Gone

The family did not appreciate the skull logo on the machine. Fortunately, it is easy to turn it off using the Intel NUC Software Studio. This software can also customize the behavior of two other LEDs. I tried to make use of the lighting options in the UEFI, but they are more limited and highly confusing. Be smart and use the NUC studio!

The NUC12 SNK features three controllable LEDs: the skull logo, the power button, and an incomprehensible hexagonal “multipurpose LED” on the middle of the front panel. All of them are RGB-capable. They can be set to reflect storage activity, the power state, or turned off entirely.

Fast!

Finally, it is all installed. The machine is the fastest computer I have ever used. Everything just happens immediately, and feels much snappier than even my 2021 HP Spectre 360 Tiger Lake laptop that I thought was really fast already.

Some of the credit must go to the use of a PCIe 4.0 NVMe disk – PCIe 4.0 really speeds things up over PCIe 3.0. But the processor is just incredible. Keeping with the NUC tradition of using laptop chips in small desktops, the NUC12 Enthusiast is based on the Core i7-12700H. This has 6 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores, for a total of 20 threads. That is more compute power than anything else in the house. Reviews agree.

The graphics card is an Intel ARC A770M with 16 GB of graphics RAM. I have not really pushed it or tested it, so I have no idea how it stands up to other cards. But it is nice that we can have an all-Intel-chips gaming NUC. 

Too see it run at maximum processor power, I used Y-Cruncher. It can load all the cores and provide a way to see how much the processor can clock when it is entirely compute-bound. It seems that the E-cores are the last 8, reading from top to bottom and left to right.

The Intel Xtreme Tuning Utility (XTU) provides some more insight, including the active P-cores and E-cores. If your Intel-based system is supported, this utility is a must-have. Not so much for tuning, as for just looking at what the processor in the system is doing, how warm it gets, and to see if your system becomes power- or thermal-limited.

Here is XTU looking at the middle of a Y-Cruncher run:

Overall, the NUC12 Enthusiast is a solid machine that I expect to do good service for many years to come. It offers almost the same performance as a big desktop in a much smaller form factor, and when lightly loaded it is basically quiet (which is something that is not usually true for a proper big gaming chassis with fans everywhere). It has all the USB and other ports you could ask for, and plenty of internal expansion space as long as you are OK with M.2 instead of old-style large spinning drives.

But as can be seen from the photo above, “small” is relative. It is small enough to fit underneath the bottom edge of the screen. But compared to the old standard-sized NUC5, it looks absolutely enormous.