Intel NUC 12 Pro Wall Street Canyon bite-sized review

The box that houses Intel’s latest NUC 12 mini-PC has “the power of small” printed on it – and it’s right: This business PC is mighty tiny but packs enough computing punch to get the job done.

Intel’s NUC’s are what you call “barebones” PCs, meaning they generally just a chassis with a motherboard and CPU then you add an operating system, memory, storage and (if you want) a dedicated graphics card, customising it to suit your particular needs. According to Intel, the modular form factor gives businesses the flexibility they need in a business PC.

The review unit came packed with an Intel i7 1250P CPU @2.10GHz, 16Gb RAM, 465Gb storage, Windows 11 and Intel Iris Xe graphics, and while it won’t suit the gamer in your life, it is well suited for work places or small businesses that need a powerful PC that won’t take up a lot of room.

Intel NUC 12 in action.

This model Intel NUC 12 supports up to 64Gb of memory and 1Tb of storage, and in terms of i/o, you’ll find 2 x USB 3.2 on the front panel and 2x USB 4 (type C), 1x USB 3.2, 1x USB 2.0, 2 x thunderbolt connections, a 2.5Ghz ethernet port and two HDMI ports on the rear panel.

In fact, the form factor is so small that I can see it being just right to mount behind a monitor or under a desk – and it even comes with mounting holes and brackets so you can keep it out of sight if you want.  I benchmarked the NUC 12 using Geekbench 6, returning CPU scores of 2373 (single core) and 9782 (multi core). Testing the GPU, it returned a score (using the Vulcan API) of 19,201.

With prices starting from around $750, depending on the barebones-ness of the box, for businesses wanting to customise their PCs to their specific needs and don’t want them taking up a lot of room, Intel’s space-saving NUCs are a great option to consider.