The Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast Has Won Me Over on Arc GPUs

The Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast has genuinely surprised me as one of my favourite computers this year. Priced at $2,299 (plus about $500 for components that aren’t included, like RAM and storage), this is the first pre-built PC that has made me actively question my choice to build my own computer.

This is for a few reasons. It’s tiny, it’s powerful and it’s one of the first computers featuring Intel’s new dedicated Arc GPU graphics, positioning Intel against Nvidia and AMD in the video card market. It also comes with a three year warranty.Arc reactor
Unsurprisingly, the Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast is one of the most powerful computers we’ve ever reviewed at Gizmodo Australia. The model we reviewed included an i7-12700H processor and Intel’s new Arc A770M GPU (which was released in October), powered by a 330W power supply (that chunky rectangle on the left in the above image).

It also included 16GB GDDR6 RAM and 512GB NVMe storage, which are both upgradeable, but these components do not come standard with the computer (you’ll need to buy these components separately). This bumps the price up by about $500, depending on your shopping list.Let’s start with our benchmark testing. On Geekbench, the NUC 12 scored 82,859 points on the OpenCL Compute test (for overall computer performance), 1,712 points on the single-core test and 11,596 on the multi-core test. Very, very impressive numbers.

Over in Cinebench, we got similar numbers. On the single-core test, the NUC 12 scored 1,756 points and first place. This is 49 points above our previous winner, the ASUS Space Edition Zenbook (which actually packed a 12th Gen Intel core i9 processor), so bravo Intel. On the multi-core test, the NUC 12 scored 15,536 points at fourth place. Very respectable, again.

But how about some gaming testing? Well, I played quite a few games on this thing, including Fortnite, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022), Forza Horizon 5 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and the computer consistently produced framerates similar to my own build (which is an Nvidia RTX 3060 and AMD Ryzen 5 3600 with 32GB DDR4 RAM).

On Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022), here’s how the computer performed at a 2K resolution. Perfectly fine, although I’d recommend sticking to a 1080p for gaming on this computer.

The Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast has genuinely surprised me as one of my favourite computers this year. Priced at $2,299 (plus about $500 for components that aren’t included, like RAM and storage), this is the first pre-built PC that has made me actively question my choice to build my own computer.

This is for a few reasons. It’s tiny, it’s powerful and it’s one of the first computers featuring Intel’s new dedicated Arc GPU graphics, positioning Intel against Nvidia and AMD in the video card market. It also comes with a three year warranty.Arc reactor
Unsurprisingly, the Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast is one of the most powerful computers we’ve ever reviewed at Gizmodo Australia. The model we reviewed included an i7-12700H processor and Intel’s new Arc A770M GPU (which was released in October), powered by a 330W power supply (that chunky rectangle on the left in the above image).

It also included 16GB GDDR6 RAM and 512GB NVMe storage, which are both upgradeable, but these components do not come standard with the computer (you’ll need to buy these components separately). This bumps the price up by about $500, depending on your shopping list.Let’s start with our benchmark testing. On Geekbench, the NUC 12 scored 82,859 points on the OpenCL Compute test (for overall computer performance), 1,712 points on the single-core test and 11,596 on the multi-core test. Very, very impressive numbers.

Over in Cinebench, we got similar numbers. On the single-core test, the NUC 12 scored 1,756 points and first place. This is 49 points above our previous winner, the ASUS Space Edition Zenbook (which actually packed a 12th Gen Intel core i9 processor), so bravo Intel. On the multi-core test, the NUC 12 scored 15,536 points at fourth place. Very respectable, again.

But how about some gaming testing? Well, I played quite a few games on this thing, including Fortnite, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022), Forza Horizon 5 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and the computer consistently produced framerates similar to my own build (which is an Nvidia RTX 3060 and AMD Ryzen 5 3600 with 32GB DDR4 RAM).

On Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022), here’s how the computer performed at a 2K resolution. Perfectly fine, although I’d recommend sticking to a 1080p for gaming on this computer.