 Intel's new Dragon Canyon Nook Extreme is like nothing we've ever seen before, but you wouldn't know it from the outside. Packed in this shoebox-sized enclosure, wait, no, this one, is a shockingly zero compromises PC. Gaming at 4K? Easy. Content creation? No biggie. There is nothing it can't do, but it's also clear that Intel's engineers had to find some creative solutions to make the whole package come together this tightly. Just like I find creative solutions to tell you about our sponsor, Pebblehost. Pebblehost offers dedicated servers starting from $39.99 a month with a range of systems for all use cases. Use code LINUS for 30% off your first month valid for the first 100 people who use it. Spurred on by the rise of the Mac Mini and other single board computers, Intel's Nook concept didn't start out like this, but rather like this. The kind of thing that you might find at your local library or gracing the desk of your friendly neighborhood spreadsheet warrior. These compact machines have been incredibly attractive to businesses for their flexibility, portability, and most importantly, their cost. So then how did this become this? And is that even a good thing? Well, Intel's ninth generation Ghost Canyon saw the six to 25 watt power sipping cuboids like this one replaced by a larger 45 watt powerhouse. Still no full-size GPU slot, but given the form factor, that makes sense, and you can always add an external one. Then 11th gen came around and boom, four different Nook models. You got the performance and pro, which were still in the micro PC format. Then you've got the enthusiast rocking an RTX 2060 that made for a heck of a package given the size. And finally, the extreme. This guy right here. The main innovation for the extreme edition was the inclusion of a modular compute element that contained the storage slots, memory slots, CPU and cooler, all of which were designed to simply slot into a backplane that was pre-installed in a larger chassis. Because there was more room to play with, the extreme was equipped with a modular SFX power supply and space for a two slot GPU up to 10 inches long. And naturally with extreme in the name, Intel decided to give it RGB underglow for that too fast, too furious style and a modifiable backlit skull front plate. But that was last year's model. What's new for 12th gen? We've got the Core i9-12900 equipped model. And upfront, there's only one major change. The dual USB-A ports are now a type A and a type C that runs Thunderbolt 4. Then around back, this is where things get really interesting. Because above the two and a half gig Intel network port that we had already, there's a new Aquantia 10 gig port. Having this on board makes the Dragon Canyon pretty much the only player in town for a machine this size that can fit a full sized GPU and effortlessly handle high bit rate video editing off of a shared network drive. Then we've got the usual assortment of USB 3 10 gig ports and HDMI output over here on the compute element, just in case you don't want a discrete GPU and two more Thunderbolt 4 ports, each supporting up to six daisy chain devices. So when it comes to IO, this thing is absolutely packing. And the most unbelievable part is that even with top tier hardware inside, it managed comfortable temperatures on both the CPU and GPU, even in unrealistic synthetic workloads and all without sounding like a hairdryer. I guess that's what full mesh side and top panels will do for you, right? Now let's have a look under the hood. Just gonna clear some space here. Yeah. Four captive screws on the back. This pops off. Both side panels slide back, a little something like that. You pull this bad boy up and we're in. Now my fabulous assistant over here has done the same, thanks, Colin, to the 11th gen version and side by side, it becomes easier to start noticing a few differences here. Starting from the top, the 90 millimeter Cooler Master fans have been replaced by 92 millimeter soon on fans. Fun fact, in computer terms, 90 and... Oh. 90 and 92 millimeter are the same thing. They get used interchangeably, who knew? The other changes are shrouded in secrecy, deep within. The... Yes. Let's go deeper. So the first step to doing that is to remove our Intel Arc Alchemist GPU. Unfortunately, it's pre-released, so it's got full active camo, so the camera won't be able to see it. Let me just get this put away over, just to try to keep it clear over there. Oh, we've be careful handling those. Stressful. Lttstore.com. Next, we're gonna pull out this little airflow duct smoober here. Now you might think, looking at the back of these devices, that they've got, you know, one slot for the compute element, two slots for GPU, and then a final slot where you could put a network card or a wifi card or a RAID card, who knows what you wanna put in there. But actually, it's completely bare because it needs that extra space to pull in fresh air for the compute unit. Otherwise, I mean, it would be pulling in hot air off the back of the GPU. This thing would absolutely freaking cook. Two more captive screws. Man, do I ever love captive screws. The last thing you want is to drop a screw here and have it fall onto this board down here. Short something out, it sucks. All right, so we pull this up and out. There we go. Oh, wow, that gives us a really great look. I got a couple of thermal pads for a couple of M.2 slots. And ah, this is another difference in it. Okay, just a second here. Let's pull out this guy. Ah, yes. Gone is one of our M.2 slots here. So you can see here's our SODIMM slots. Here's one M.2, two M.2, three M.2, all supporting full size 2280, or not full size, but standard size 2280 NVMe drives. But over here, we have just two of these along with our two SODIMM slots. These are DDR4 by the way. And the third one has been relocated to the back. That's right. Let's pop off this, all right. Whoop, there it goes. Something that is a downgrade though, is that the original Nook Extreme had another 110 millimeter M.2 on the bottom here. And that little trap door on the 12th Gen 1 opens up to reveal a tooling cost savings, where they reused the trap door, but don't actually have anything there anymore. The good news is that while we go from four M.2s to three, all three of them run at Gen 4 speed now. So at least they're all fast. If you wanna take the whole compute element out, you'll wanna be extremely careful with these antenna connectors. We accidentally broke the other one during testing. Okay. And the reason that I wanted to take this out, there we go, was to show you the Wi-Fi M.2 in the back here, but the back plate appears to come off with screws from the other side, which means we need to go deeper. Oh, well, there we go. That was relatively straightforward. Just those four around the edges. And that gets us a perfect look at, actually, both the Wi-Fi chip, which is Wi-Fi 6E. So that's an upgrade over last Gen, which was just Wi-Fi 6, as well as our PCH. Whoa, this thing is heavier than it looked. I guess that's what all copper fins will do for you. That explains how it manages to cool this darn thing. And look at the size of that vapor chamber. It covers both the CPU and the VRMs. Oh, right, and we haven't even gotten to the best part yet. Unlike its predecessor, it has a desktop socket. So even though it comes with a 12900, conceivably, we could put a 12900K in it and see if it would run it. There you go. Oh, no problem. There's still time for me to break something today. Yeah. Okay, we need a GPU. Whew. I think this is the only one of these in the building. RTX 3080 Ti, baby. We're going big or going home. Okay. You know, with it pulled apart, you can really see how they pulled off those excellent thermals, because the CPU is sucking fresh air in straight from outside of the case. And then the GPU, same thing, is gonna be sucking fresh air in right through the mesh. It's freaking awesome. I love it. Okay, we've got the 12900K all fired up and getting it to work was not easy. It appears there's some sort of weird current limit for the chip at one amp. And when you're running something at like 1.2 volts, that's like a watt and a bit. Basically 400 megahertz is how fast it was going. We were unable to get into Windows 11 at first due to a BIOS feature that we couldn't enable halting the boot sequence, but it turns out Windows 10 did work. We then use the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility uncorked the current limit and boom, there's plenty of performance actually, but not all of it. We were still falling way short of our prior Cinebench runs that were in Windows 11 by nearly 6,000 points. We added in tech power-ups throttle stop. And after some fiddling around, we unlocked most of the potential of this thing. It appears that we're very thermally limited, not very surprising. And we were able to get within margin of error of our original Cinebench multi-core runs, like a few hundred points. Well, until right now. So we were at 16,000 before, but with just a little bit of undervolting, we were able to get it to 19,000, which is freaking wicked. Let's just drop the voltage more. Basically less voltage means less temperature, which means higher scores until it crashes, which it might right now. Yeah, because before these were immediately jumping to a hundred degrees. Now it's like in the nineties for a bit, it's probably gonna thermal throttle here, but we're drawing 130 Watts. And because of the lower voltage, it's not immediately killing itself. Oh, and it was slower. So I guess we picked about the sweet spot for undervolting before, negative 0.1 volts. That seems to be where it's happiest. That's a 4770K worth of performance right there. That's mangled. It crashed. With a little bit of tuning, it is clear with an unlocked processor, you can get a lot more performance out of this, but I wouldn't, you know, trust it. It's very clear that the 12900 that Intel had in here from the factory was the right call. Like Colin, how mad would we have been if they had this 12900K in here and you just couldn't use most of it? It kind of defeats the purpose. You spend $300 more on an unlocked chip and you can only eek like 18% more power out of it. So like really what's the point there? One thing I do find really interesting between the old NUC and the new one is that on the old NUC, I was able to get way more performance out of it by increasing the TDP of the chip to around 90, 95 watts. And it survived it, like it was hot, but it could do it. Whereas in the new one, probably because of the IHS and just the space that takes up, we can only get about 65 watts out of this chip for a long period of time. Just more between your chip and the cooler, higher temps. As for the Dragon Canyon NUC as a whole, it's a very compelling package. There's more connectivity, more CPU performance, 10 gig networking and PCIe Gen5 to pair with Intel's upcoming Arc Alchemist GPUs. Well, in this tiny little ball of a case, there's really nothing else quite like it, but the cost? Well, the i7 variant comes in at $1,150, while the i9 we have here will separate you from $1,450. And that's before you buy the storage, a graphics card and the memory. But don't run away at the price just yet. We benched a couple of systems to see what it would take to get all these features. And in that context, the pricing's kind of sane. Obviously we can make some compromises to save a buck. Maybe we don't need to have a bunch of M.2 slots or 10 gig networking. But if we want to maintain feature parity, we're getting dangerously close to the retail price of the Dragon Canyon NUC, and we weren't even able to match it for its size. So, the three-year warranty and this level of build quality, I can see the appeal. I could see a gamer on the go picking one up or a traveling video editor or vlogger. Heck, I could even see someone using this as a professional. You could just chuck like a Quadro in it, awesome CAD workstation, or even just as a banging home theater PC. Speaking of which, we have some awesome new home theater content coming out soon, so get subscribed. You won't want to miss it. And you also will not want to miss this segue to our sponsor, Ting. Do you like saving money? Ting Mobile is a low-cost carrier with rates that help you do just that. Starting with unlimited talk and text for $10 a month and data plans for $15 a month. Their set 12 plan with 12 gigs of data is only $35 a month. And if you need it, unlimited data plans are available from $45 a month as well. You can even share your data on a family plan to save even more. Ting Mobile also offers pay-per-use plans with their flex plans charging just $5 per gigabyte. And even with those savings, you're still getting national wide coverage and award-winning customer support. Consumer Reports named Ting Mobile their number one carrier in America. Almost every phone on the market will work with Ting Mobile and they have the perfect plan for everybody, no matter what your needs are. So check them out at linus.ting.com and to receive a $25 credit. So thanks for watching this video. If you want one of these NUCs, link's down below. And if you want to check out our other NUC content we did, well, that'll be on the end screen right here. Have a good day, bye.