Intel’s “Phantom Canyon” NUC sits in between the corporate’s commonplace sq. NUC mini PCs and the expandable NUC Excessive bins in measurement, efficiency, and expandability. It is a lot smaller than the NUC Excessive bins and nonetheless suits a devoted GPU and extra highly effective CPU, however just like the smallest NUCs, these elements are laptop-class elements that may’t be upgraded.
The subsequent-generation follow-up to Phantom Canyon is supposedly across the nook, in keeping with plausible-looking leaked photographs and specs from a Chinese language discussion board put up (by way of Tom’s {Hardware}). The brand new NUC, purportedly
codenamed “Serpent Canyon,” combines a Core i7-12700H CPU (six P-cores and eight E-cores) with one among Intel’s Arc A770M GPUs, making it the primary of those high-performance NUC bins with out an AMD or Nvidia GPU in it. The Phantom Canyon NUC makes use of a 4-core Core i7-1165G7 and an Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU, so Serpent Canyon needs to be fairly a bit extra highly effective general.
The Serpent Canyon pictures make it look chunkier than the Phantom Canyon field, which as Tom’s {Hardware} factors out is a probable facet impact of the higher-performance CPU and GPU—extra energy means extra cooling and thus a bigger case. However the PC ought to nonetheless supply spectacular efficiency for its measurement, and its array of USB, Ethernet, Thunderbolt, HDMI, and DisplayPort outputs ought to accommodate most peoples’ equipment and multi-monitor setups. Like Intel’s different high-performance NUCs, it additionally has a lit-up cranium on the facet. This will likely or could not make it go quicker.
Whether or not an Intel GPU is something to get enthusiastic about stays to be seen; early unbiased benchmarks of the Arc A380, a mid-range providing that is at present solely out there in China, present it falling quick of an Nvidia GTX 1650 and a Radeon RX 6400 in real-world gaming benchmarks. The GTX 1650 is greater than three years previous, and the RX 6400 is a cut-down model of the scathingly reviewed RX 6500 XT, so none of that’s nice information for Intel.
That stated, the A770M may nonetheless be a decent performer. Intel’s drivers nonetheless have fairly a little bit of room for enchancment, and in comparison with the A380, the A770M incorporates a wider 256-bit reminiscence interface, 4 instances as a lot rendering {hardware}, and 16GB of VRAM as a substitute of 6GB. That ought to give the A770M the firepower it must a minimum of beat the RTX 2060 that shipped within the last-generation Phantom Canyon NUC, however we can’t know for positive till we’ve got {hardware} in hand.
If these NUC bins have a significant weak point, it is that they are significantly pricier than bigger however extra highly effective mini ITX PC builds. We do not know what the Serpent Canyon NUC will price as soon as it is right here, however the Phantom Canyon NUC begins at round $1,400 on Amazon and SimplyNUC.
