Recently available in France, the Intel NUC 12 “Serpent Canyon” wants to find a place on your desk with a starting price close to 2000 euros and a Graphic card dedicated Intel Arc.
Launched at the end of September, the NUC 12 Serpent Canyon is a new Intel mini-PC with a 2.5-liter chassis (230 x 180 x 60 mm). Geared towards gaming, the device is now available in France from the reseller IamNUC, with a starting price set at 1890 euros, reports the specialized site MiniMachines.
The components of a gaming laptop in a mini-PC
This new NUC has the particularity of embedding, for the first time in this format, a dedicated Intel Arc A770M graphics card. Coupled with a 45 W Alder Lake processor (the Core i7-12700H in this case), this mobile GPU chip is armed with 32 Xe cores clocked at 1.65 GHz and 16 GB of GDDR6 video memory. On the NUC 12 Serpent Lake, the latter will be able to manage up to four screens via the HDMI 2.1 output of the mini-PC, but also via its two DisplayPort 2.0 and the two Thunderbolt 4 ports (one of which is installed on the front). In addition to these various ports, there is a 2.5GB Ethernet socket, six USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A inputs, an SD card reader (UHS-II), an optical output and a 3.5 mm jack socket.
© Intel via MiniMachines
As indicated MiniMachines, one of the advantages of this NUC 12 Serpent Lake is to offer a very respectable firepower while limiting itself to a thermal envelope of less than 200 W (150 W announced for the Arc A770M and 45 W for the Core i7-12700H). The power supply supplied with the device is also limited to 330 W, which gives us a good idea of the overall consumption of the device… which will necessarily remain much lower than that of a traditional gaming tower.
Up to 64 GB of RAM, but in DDR4
For the rest, this new NUC can be configured with a maximum of 64 GB of RAM in DDR4-3200 and can also be equipped with three SSDs thanks to two M.2 2280 slots. Be careful, however, only two are NVMe PCIe compatible Gen4. The third port is limited to Gen3. On the connectivity side, the NUC 12 Serpent Canyon is finally based on an Intel AX1690 modem allowing support for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.
Note, however, that the machine is expensive. IamNUC offers it from 1899 euros, but in barebone version and without OS. For a configuration including, for example, 16 GB of DDR4, 1 TB of SSD and a Windows 11 license, expect just under 2200 euros from this retailer.
Source : MiniMachines
1