Alder Lake in UCFF Avatar

In the early 2010s, the PC market was in a doldrums. The nettop craze has waned, and smartphones and tablets are increasingly taking over everyday computing use cases. While the traditional business PC and workstation market had stabilized, the dying consumer market needed a shot. Intel announced his Next Unit of Computing (a 4-inch by 4-inch motherboard) in 2012 and started selling mini PCs based on its own branded boards. Low-power processors have become powerful enough to deliver the processing power of large desktops that fit in the palm of your hand. NUCs quickly caught the attention of the market, with clones such as his GIGABYTE BRIX and his ASRock Beebox coming from Intel’s partners. In this decade, this Ultra Compact Form Factor (UCFF) and other his SFF machines and systems aimed at the gaming market have emerged as bright spots. Since then, the NUC family has expanded to cover all these market segments.

2022 was a milestone in the original 4″x4″ form factor’s 10-year journey. Intel announced his UCFF product family, the first with hybrid processors. Codenamed Wall Street Canyon, his NUC 12 Pro is now available in a variety of flavors. To reveal the evolution of his UCFF ecosystem over the past decade, Intel sampled three different Wall Street Canyon NUCs targeting different market segments.

The NUC12WSKi7 targets mainstream business users and home consumers, while the vPro-enabled NUC12WSKv7 targets IT departments for business and enterprise deployments. The Wall Street Canyon family also includes bare boards such as the NUC12WSBi70Z (a light version of the board in the NUC12WSKi7) that can be used by OEMs and customized for specific applications. Our sample set included the Bleu Jour Meta 12, a rugged fanless mini PC based on the NUC12WSBi70Z and optimized for industrial use. In the review below, we take a closer look at the performance profiles and feature sets of the three NUCs.

Introduction and product impressions

Intel’s Alder Lake processor ushered in the era of heterogeneous computing with hybrid processors into the mainstream market. The combination of Performance and Efficiency cores will first be sold for desktop platforms before moving to the low-power market in early 2022. The processor family manufactured by Intel 7 brought a multitasking focus to computing and hinted at the OS. When you need to perform different tasks and translate them into a better user experience. The Alder Lake-P series is supposed to offer everything within its 28W power envelope. His first UCFF system based on Alder Lake-P processors was actually from ASRock Industrial. The NUC BOX-1200 series was introduced within weeks of the Alder Lake-P launch. While being the first company to bring a new platform to market, our review of the NUC BOX-1260P shows that the company hasn’t spent much time optimizing the BIOS for optimal power consumption and performance. All right. The Alder Lake-P impression from that system was not favorable in terms of performance per watt. That final verdict will no doubt be based on Intel’s own Alder Lake-P product, the Wall Street Canyon NUC (NUC 12 Pro).

To celebrate the decade-long journey of the mainstream UCFF NUC form factor, Intel sampled three different Wall Street Canyon NUCs.

• Intel NUC12WSKi7, based on Core i7-1260P
• Core i7-1270P based Intel NUC12WSKv7 (slightly different case design, apparently aimed at future mainstream NUCs)
• Bleu Jour Meta 12, not yet released rugged fanless NUC based on NUC12WSBi70Z – Lite version of NUC12WSBi70Z board, without Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 Type-C port

One of the key performance drivers in the past few generations of Intel NUCs has been fine-grained power control. Especially at the high end, Intel has started setting PL1 limits above the rated TDP. Until the Comet Lake-based Frost Canyon NUC (NUC10i7FN), the PL1 limit was set at 28W. Coming to the Tiger Lake family the Tiger Canyon NUC-NUC11TNBi5 we evaluated also had the PL1 set at 28W however the Panther Canyon NUC (NUC11PAQi7) upped the ante and by default he set the PL1 to his 40W configured to We haven’t published a stand-alone review of the Panther Canyon NUC, but readers can find all the benchmark numbers for that system here. The Alder Lake NUC builds on his NUC from Tiger Lake by keeping his BIOS default PL1 and PL2 values ​​at 40W/64W. As we will see later in this review, this poses challenges for fanless system vendors and also exacerbates the fan noise problem of standard kits.

The NUC12WSKi7 sample came pre-installed with a Kingston KC2500 PCIe 3.0 x4 500GB NVMe SSD and 2x Crucial CT16G4SFRA32A 16GB DDR4-3200 SODIMMs. We ran the evaluation of the three systems in sequence, allowing us to reuse the same RAM and SSD across all three systems. Although the system’s overall packaging was tailored for the video unboxing, the contents of each box reflected the components of the retail packaging. , screws for mounting the mount and mounting the M.2 SSD, various quick start guides and a regulatory information brochure.

The NUC12WSKi7 inherits the same ultra-compact form factor design seen in previous NUCs. With the removal of support for 2.5″ drives, the system is now only 37mm tall. All front ports are Type-A, and two Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports are both located on the rear. Surprisingly, it also includes a rear I/O USB 2.0 Type-A port. It is supplemented.

NUC12WSKi7 – Chassis Design and I/O

The production version of NUC12WSKv7 is superficially identical to the NUC12WSKi7 above. For our review sample set, however, we opted to put it in a redesigned casing.

NUC12WSKv7 – Updated chassis color scheme

The new case design above is a preview of plans for future 4×4 NUC models. The perforated bottom of the case can be removed without tools to access the underside of the system (for RAM and SSD installation).

NUC12WSKv7 – 4×4 Designer Version Preview

The third NUC model is the Bleu Jour Meta 12. Bleu Jour’s Meta series of fanless systems are for industrial applications. The Meta 12 uses a Lite board (NUC12WSBi70Z) that does away with the Type-C port. The main difference is the presence of a DC power input connector in addition to the normal power adapter connection.

Bleu Jour Meta 12 (NUC12WSBi70Z) Fanless Rugged Industrial PC

The gallery below shows additional photos of the internals of the above three systems.

Full specifications for regular and vPro review samples are listed in the following table. The Bleu Jour Meta 12 is essentially the same as the NUC12WSKi7, except it lacks the two Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports.

In the next section, we’ll look at the BIOS options along with an analysis of the motherboard platform. Following that are several sections focusing on various performance aspects before concluding with an analysis of the system’s value proposition.