Gaming PC

Raptor Lake Brings Incremental Gains

Ultra-compact form factor PCs have dominated the PC market in the last decade since Intel introduced the NUC. NUCs started out as bulky tower desktop replacements in applications where the physical footprint and system capabilities greatly exceeded actual requirements.

Last year, the company announced its first UCFF NUC family with hybrid processors, marking its 10th anniversary. His Alder Lake-based 4″x4″ Wall Street Canyon NUC is a significant improvement over its predecessor in both performance-per-watt and value proposition metrics. Just a few quarters later, Intel is updating its Pro line of 13 of his UCFF NUCs.th Gen. Core processors (Raptor Lake). The new Arena Canyon NUC inherits the same hardware features as the Wall Street Canyon SKU, with the main update being internal SoC changes.

Raptor Lake-P offers incremental improvements over Alder Lake-P in terms of both performance and power efficiency. We have already confirmed that one of his Intel partners, ASRock Industrial, is leading the offering of his Raptor Lake-P based UCFF mini PCs. Intel’s Arena Canyon NUC targets the same market segment as the ASRock Industrial NUC(S) BOX-13xxP/D4 SKUs. However, Intel plans to provide a more comprehensive list of processor choices and barebones and pre-built options for each.

Intel sampled us with a pre-production version of the NUC13ANKi7, a slim version of the NUC 13 Pro with a Core i7-1360P processor. This review comprehensively describes the performance profile of the system and how it compares to previous generations and other competitors in the market.

Introduction and product impressions

Intel’s Raptor Lake processors build on the heterogeneous computing paradigm introduced with Alder Lake’s hybrid processors. Desktop processors have enjoyed some minor microarchitectural tweaks to boost performance, but the -P series owes its improvements to the maturity of the Intel 7 manufacturing process. The updated voltage-frequency curve allowed Intel to increase the core’s turbo clock for both performance and efficiency. Some I/O improvements such as additional Thunderbolt 4 ports and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 support are also included in Raptor Lake-P, but their adoption depends on other board component choices.

Intel’s Arena Canyon NUCs are visually identical to their Wall Street Canyon counterparts, down to the I/O port placement and internal board layout. In fact, one of the main reasons Arena Canyon is releasing within a few quarters of Wall Street Canyon seems to be the internal platform similarity. Intel decided to keep the changes to a minimum with the same DDR4 SODIMM support and Burnside Bridge retimer on the Type-C port. In other words, the Arena Canyon NUC’s Thunderbolt 4 port doesn’t support USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 like the Wall Street Canyon NUC does.

However, compared to the Wall Street Canyon NUC, the Arena Canyon NUC lineup has some unique SKUs. There are some models that use special Core i7-1370P and Core i7-1370PE processors (6P+ 8e configuration not available on Alder Lake-P). Additionally, some of his SKUs use processors aimed at the embedded market. These have his 5 year availability window (compared to his 3 year lifecycle of other products). Overall, Intel plans to release around 30 different Arena Canyon NUC SKUs (boards/slim and tall kits/ready-to-go mini PCs) over the next few quarters.

Intel’s lineup of 4″ x 4″ mini PCs (sold under the Pro moniker) has evolved to target business use cases. With that in mind, the company keeps several SKUs with vPro Enterprise features to make it easier for IT to deploy and manage. The new vPro system offers hardware-based remote management with cloud-based management, Intel AMT for out-of-band connectivity with KVM support, hardware alarms, and remote power control.

The company also offers the NUC Pro Software Suite (NPSS) to ensure uptime for digital signage applications. This requires connecting one HDMI port to your primary display and the other to his second HDMI port on another Intel NUC. By default, both NUCs drive their own primary display. When the NPSS tool detects a heartbeat failure, the working NUC drives both displays (its own display and the failed system’s display). The tool also includes an application monitor for restarting unresponsive applications and explicit HDMI-CEC control by diagnostic software.

The compact nature of these systems also makes them useful for use in IoT and edge computing applications in the automotive, healthcare, industrial, and educational sectors. In terms of reliability, Intel certifies all his NUC 13 Pro systems to run 24/7 during his 3-year warranty. These NUCs come with cutting-edge features (for UCFF systems) such as Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, and support for four simultaneous 4Kp60 displays. Features such as display emulation also make it suitable for headless operation and digital signage deployments.

In terms of industrial design, Intel has (thankfully) decided to go with a matte textured chassis with the ‘intel nuc’ logo embedded. Ventilation support and thermal design appear to have been retained from previous UCFF NUCs. The top-of-the-line SKU based on the Core i7-1370P was more interesting to review because of the extra cores, but the Core i7-1360P model we’re looking at today was basically the NUC12WSKi7 reviewed in detail in. Pre-production sample packaging does not reflect retail box contents. The sample came with a 120W (20V @ 6A) power adapter, cable management screws, and mounting screws.

The kit also included a 512 GB PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD (Samsung PM9A1) and 2x 16 GB DDR-3200 SODIMMs (Kingston ValueRAM).

Windows 11 Home was pre-installed (OEM deployment), but I chose to wipe the disk and install Windows 11 Enterprise 21H2 with the latest updates. In general, migrating to Microsoft’s latest release (22H2) is accompanied by performance issues and unexpected benchmark behavior. The full specifications of the review sample (tested) are listed in the table below.















Intel NUC13ANKi7 (Arena Canyon) Specifications
(tested)
processor Intel Core i7-1360P
Alder Lake 4P + 8e / 16T, up to 5.0GHz (P) / 3.7GHz (e)
Intel 7, 18MB L2, 35W
(PL1=40W, PL2=64W)
memory Kingston ValueRAM KVR32S22D8/16 DDR4-3200 SODIMM
22-22-22-52 @ 3200MHz
2x16GB
graphic Intel Iris Xe Graphics
(96EU @ 1.50GHz)
disk drive) Samsung PM9A1 MZVL2512HCJQ
(512GB; M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe;)
(Samsung 6th Gen. V-NAND 128L (136T) 3D TLC; Samsung Elpis S4LV003 controller; OEM version of 980 PRO)
networking 1x 2.5GbE RJ-45 (Intel I226-V)
Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX211 (2×2 802.11ax – 2.4Gbps)
audio Digital audio with bitstreaming support via HDMI port
3.5mm stereo headset jack (Realtek audio codec)
video 2x HDMI 2.1 (4Kp60)
2x Display Port 2.1 with HBR3 over Thunderbolt 4
Other I/O ports 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A (Front)
1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A (rear)
1x USB 2.0 Type-A (rear)
2x Thunderbolt 4 (Rear) (Type-C)
operating system Windows 11 Enterprise (22000.1696)
price (Store price on March 27th2023)
we to be decided (bare bone)
$(148 + TBD) (as set, no OS)
full spec Intel NUC13ANKi7 Specifications

In the next section, we’ll look at various BIOS options and follow up with a detailed platform analysis.

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