I've looked at a lot of AMD power mini PCS lately but this here is an Intel-powered mini PC in fact
it's from Intel it's the Intel nuc 12 kit and being, of course, the kit model it does come
with the ram SSD, and operating system which is Windows 11. so it is running the core i5 the
1240p with Iris XE Graphics it has 12 cores and 16 threads this particular model maximum turbo is 4.4
gigahertz and with this particular unit you can add a 2.5 inch drive to expand upon the storage
it does have included of course Wi-Fi which is Wi-Fi 6E very good high spec fast transfers 2.5
gigabit Lan and it can run two displays what is missing from this particular model here
and it's interesting to know too coming from Intel is that it does not have USB 4 spec and
it doesn't have Thunderbolt quite interesting this model just completely does without it I
don't know why why but it does and it does have ddr4 Ram 32 gigabytes of it included not ddr5
along with a Mini PC you'll find a Visa mounting bracket Core i5 sticker some paperwork 120 watt
power supply a little bag with some screws so therefore the Visa mounting bracket but also a
2.5 inch Drive which this does take HDMI cable and our power cable so in town with this particular
Mini PC has made some really weird decisions because it's got the latest 12 GN Core I5 1240p
with Iris XE Graphics yet they give it here just two HDMI 2.0 ports so 2.0 a 4K 60. that's all
you get we don't have Thunderbolt okay that's an external Thunderbolt drive would be nice to use it
or usb4 no no Thunderbolt 4 no USB 4 ports really weird a USB 2 Port USB 3.2 Gen 2 that's our power
in right here and we do have 2.5 gigabit Lan this is where the hot air will come out of it and if I
flip it around this side we'll see that we've got a another two ports here now both of these are USB
at least 3.2 gn2s but as I said where's the type C Port where's the Thunderbolt Port USB 4 Port
type c it's missing it should be here or at least one of these ports and we do have a 3.5 millimeter
with microphone support and this is our power button with status LED behind it so either side we
just have vents while there is a Kensington lock slot here and then the other vent so I'll take a
look at the internals just before I do I'll point out that here we've got four screws you need to
remove and those two holes there are the mounting points for that Visa mounting bracket if you did
want to mount this onto the back of a monitor when you open this up just be very careful because
there is a ribbon cable that connects to the sata 3 connector so I'll just pull this up and you'll
see right here that there's our room for the 2.5 inch drive that slots in there and you'll see that
we've got a b key SATA so this is not nvme here's our nvme slot and an Intel SSD that they are using
there and note that we've got some copper up here with two thermal pads that's really good to see
that's of course going to help that SSD to stop it hopefully from thermal throttling and just cool it
down a little bit some PC manage factors when many PCs don't even bother and there are our two sodium
RAM sticks now this is another area where it's kind of weird because this is ddr4 they didn't
go with ddr5 spec with this and they are using here two 16 gigabyte sticks from crucial as you
can see and the speed of these is 3200 megahertz so if it was ddr5 it would be a lot quicker and
Aid the integrated Iris XE Graphics just that speed would really benefit it but hey we're
missing out on that now I'll just run you through the BIOS here there's not a lot really that we can
do or tweak but there's a few interesting settings here so under Advanced you've got storage onboard
devices video so if you wanted to dedicate more to the ira60 graphics of ram that is then you're able
to do this you can tweak those now I'm going to leave everything here as default so it's an out
of the box experience exactly what you can expect pretty much like all my reviews so I don't really
change or tweak anything else unless I State I do and there's just a few other settings in here
um add and config now under power performance and cooling again I'm just going to leave this
as is you can tweak this a little bit you can put the fan mode into
um cool so it'll be running at higher RPMs it will be a lot louder but yes it will drop the
temperatures down but I'll let you know how it is stock security pretty straightforward and then
I'll boot order so I'm gonna get out of this now and jump into windows 11. here at Windows now just
to show you that the version it does come with is Windows 11 Pro now of course you need to run
updates I haven't updated it all at the moment just so it doesn't affect any of my benchmarks
there's nothing going on in the background so here we have installed RAM as I pointed out before
they're 32 gigabytes and we don't have quite the 32 available to us because there is a small
amount as you saw in those bios settings that is dedicated to the iris XE graphics with it looking
at the device manager not too many things of interest but just to show you that the drive this
is it right here the Intel SSD it's pcie 3.0 even though I believe the slot should support pcie 4.0
spec and it's not particularly fast here is the results of my Benchmark so you can see that that's
well under what you'd get for even the top pcie 3.0 drives would be a lot quicker with a right so
it's a little slow there but good capacity 512 gigabytes so scrolling down further you'll see
that we do have that gigabit 2.5 gigabit Lan Port there wi-fi 6E and of course the processor listed
16 times because it has 12 cores but 16 threads General performance of this Mini PC is very good
it's quick it's fast and just to give you an idea taking a look at the gink bench five scores here
so geekbench 5 I've ran on 8 core 16 thread ryzen 7. 6800 H mini PCS and this is scoring
better that's how good the 12th gen is with the CPU side of things especially so multi-core score
here that's performing as good as those 16 thread 18 core mini PCS and the single core score is a
little bit higher there so very good and you feel it the whole system really quick I've noticed
no slow down no lag no problems everything is blazing fast that I do and that's what you expect
especially for the price tag of this Mini PC then when you take a look at cinebench again these
scores here are cinebench R23 that is you can see that multicore score here over 10 000 points
now this again is faster than the ryzen 6800 H at 45 Watts that I tested and here single core
score there again falling out a little bit faster there so very good linear performance on tap here
but we are only running the ddr4 ram here so if it had ddr5 these scores would be EV even better
there when it comes to the performance Now video playback the typical test file here jellyfish
okay that loads in fast it does not have any dropped frames and that is atvc 10 bit
runs fine so that's the iris XE Graphics handling that and not a problem so 4K 60
start of this clip is like in slow motion there I'll just skip ahead where it is at 60
frames per second like right now that's definitely 60 frames per second no frames dropped at all so
good performance and how well does it stream well very good look at this one drop frame that's it
this is 4K 60 using Chrome so it is decoding here you can see at the top it's telling me that this
is uh the codec is actually AV so it's not vp9 here that's using but not a problem at all what
about then video files too so it's going to handle everything you throw at it I'll get it out of that
and I just test out the jellyfish file test file which is hevc 10 bit
no drop frames runs perfectly fine really smooth that's what you want and then 4K 60
same story really good performance again no dropped frame so if you are going to be using this
as a media PC it's going to be perfect for that but remember you've only got 4K 60 but for movies
and things you only need really 4K 30 so it will be fine for that the sad thing is we don't have
Thunderbolt or usb4 or any outputs 4K 120 hertz for example for really smooth desktop performance
then The Thermals well they're not bad it gets up to 92 degrees yes that's hot but the main thing
I'm looking for here is does it thermal throttle and checking that out thermal throttling you will
see that it does say that the power limit has been exceeded but it hasn't thermal throttle
there's a no ride here okay and that's good so that checks out now the maximum wattage it can
pull here is well it's actually just under well very close there 64 Watts that's because power
limit 2 is 64 Watts that is set there now what I'm seeing from the wall is 84 Watts idle it's
about 12 Watts a little high but I do have an external hard drive that's plugged into it at
the moment 2.5 inch SSD and the fan well when you push it hard you are certainly going to hear the
fan with this particular Mini PC here's a sample of it under full load just to give you an idea
then our video editing performance well the timeline here these are some 4K files that
are 100 megabit per second and I don't really see much slow down it's a very simple basic
video here and I'll just play this back and you can see that it doesn't seem to be well
maybe dropping the occasional frame there now of course the performance here with an integrated
GPU even Iris XC Graphics still won't be as good as something like say an RTX 3060 will be a lot
better so dedicated graphics will still always be a lot better for video editing things like
this so what I will test out now like all my other benchmarks and tests they do with these mini PCS
is the export time here with the 4K preset here for YouTube and it'll be one minute of footage
I hope you can see here that it is the YouTube 4K preset with Adobe Premiere Pro here which
does tend to favor Intel's quick sync so I expect these export times to be very quick and we'll see
what it's going to be doing most of the work here 60 Graphics is you can see it 100 and
the CPU is only at 20 so this is very quick and I'm expecting this to be around under 40
seconds probably in total maybe even faster than that hopefully it is for one minute of footage
it's just about to finish up now and that was approximately 35 seconds so with the ryzen 7
6800 H that off the top of my head was about 34 35 seconds so this is one second longer
here for a basic video like this one minute of 4K footage a look at gaming performance with
one of the most demanding games cyberpunk 2077. now I've tested this out with the 680m graphics
from AMD with 12 executional units and it's 2.2 gigahertz turbo and it gets around 30 frames per
second with cyberpunk on the lower settings at 1080P and this is only pulling around about 17
frames per second so there is a massive difference when it comes to integrated graphics performance
with the new 6000 series from AMD versus this Iris Graphics so this is one area where Intel
is now falling behind they were pretty much in the lead last gen now they're behind definitely
then GTA here running with the normal settings and in between everything for the view distance
and pedestrian density it's getting a good frame rate so very playable at 1080p here and the car
quite a bit slower now because it has to render of course all of that Graphics of the inside of
the car but it's a playable frame right over 60 frames per second but again this is falling
behind now of what the 680m can do with the ryzen 6000 series apus now the timing of this Mini PC
probably isn't so great because they've just announced and launched the 13th gen of mobile
chips this remember is a mobile chip but in a Mini PC and well 12th gen is still very good
there's the third thing gen that you may want to consider now this particular model as I showed you
it's quick and snappy decent benchmark scores for the type of Mini PC it is now what it does really
well is Media playback a little bit of very light gaming but because it doesn't have the ddr5 ram
the IR service XC Graphics is limited a little bit there while it still performs well as you
saw like playing GTA 5 if you had a Mini PC with ddr5 Graphics or you went for one of the new AMD
6000 series well you get better performance there with the gaming and then there's some
really odd choices here with this model from Intel the fact that there's no usb4 there's no
Thunderbolt ports there's no type c Port it's a bit odd like I mean why would you kind of go for
this unless you just wanted a dedicated media playback machine and I thought well it must be
cost Saving right this is what Intel's doing they didn't put the Thunderbolt 4 they didn't
put type c ports they made these cat packs no HDMI 2.1 because it's cheaper but it still is
an expensive model this one being the kit with the RAM and the storage and you saw from their storage
speeds it's not like blazing fast it's not PCA 4.0 speeds either there so all up it's hard for
me to recommend in this Mini PC with all those choices out there with AMD 6000 series and then
sure okay I'd say maybe three months we're going to have then the 13th gen mini PCS from Intel so
thank you so much for watching this review I do hope to see you in the next one bye for now