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 paddle host
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of systems for all use cases use code line is for 30 off your first month
valid for the first hundred 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 on 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 contain change 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 to oh okay
we've got the core I9 12900 equipped model and up front 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 aquancha 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-size GPU and effortlessly
handle high bitrate video editing off of a shared network drive then we've got
the usual assortment of USB 310 gig ports an 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 kind of clear some space here
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 suit
on fans fun fact in computer terms 90
and 90 and 92 millimeter are the same thing
they get used interchangeably who knew the other changes are shrouded in
secrecy deep within
let's go deeper so the first step to doing that is to remove our Intel Arc
Alchemist GPU unfortunately it's pre-release 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 kind of keep it clear over there
be careful handling those stressful
lttstore.com next we're going to pull out this little airflow ducts maneuver
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 Wi-Fi card or Raid card who
knows what you want to 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 sucks all right let's pull
this up and put it 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 oh
yes gone is one of our m.2 slots here so you
can see here's our sodium slots here's one m.2 two m.2 3m.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 sodium slots these are ddr4 by the
way and the third one has been relocated to the back that's
right I'm gonna pop off this right
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 one opens up to reveal
a tooling cost savings where they reused
the trapdoor 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 want to take the whole
compute element out you'll want to 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
here 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 actual actually both the Wi-Fi chip
which is Wi-Fi 6E so that was an upgrade
over last gen which is just Wi-Fi six 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 12 900 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
I think this is the only one of these in the building our TX 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 going to be sucking fresh air in
right through the mesh 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 used the
Intel extreme tuning utility to uncork the current limit and boom there's
plenty of performance actually but not all of it we are 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 run 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 uh just drop the voltage more basically
less voltage means less temperature which means higher scores until it
crashes which am I right now yeah because before these were
immediately jumping to 100 degrees now it's like in the 90s for a bit it's
probably going to 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 uh 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 we've 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 eat like 18 more power out of it so like
really what's the the point there one thing I do find really interesting
between the old Nook and the new one is that on the old knock 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 Nook as a whole it's a very compelling
package there's more connectivity more CPU performance 10 gig networking and
PCIe Gen 5 to pair with Intel's upcoming Arc Alchemist gpus well in this tiny
little football of a case there's really nothing else quite like
it but the cost while the i7 variant
comes in at 1150 while the I9 we have
here will separate you from 1450 US Dollars 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 same obviously we can make some compromises to Save A Buck
maybe we don't need to have a bunch of MDOT 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 Nook and we weren't even able to match it for its
size so with a 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 bang home theater PC speaking of which
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