Utilizing the 12th generation Core processor and Arc A series discrete graphics card, Intel has created the NUC – Raptor Canyon. The processor is equipped with the Core i7-12700H, and the graphics card is the Arc A770M, both working together to push the NUC’s performance to new heights. For those looking for a high-performance NUC, Raptor Canyon is certainly a choice not to be missed.
This review focuses on the top configuration of the Raptor Canyon. The Core i7-12700H is a familiar product for many readers, being Intel’s flagship product in the high-performance laptop segment, widely used in high-performance gaming laptops and mobile workstations.
Compared to the processor, the Arc A770M graphics card undoubtedly has more highlights. Intel’s Arc A series discrete graphics cards officially debuted this year, marking the beginning of a new era for Intel in high-performance graphics, showcasing Intel’s ambitions in the high-performance graphics field! This is significant not only for Intel itself but also for the entire PC industry!
Strong CPU paired with a new card, this is the general situation of Raptor Canyon. How does the actual performance of the Arc A770M graphics card measure up? What kind of power can the Core i7 and Arc A770M graphics card together display? In this review, I will take you to explore, so interested friends, just keep reading.
At the beginning of the article, I need to clarify that most Intel NUCs sold on the market do not come with memory and hard drives pre-installed, requiring consumers to purchase them separately. The Raptor Canyon I received for review is a media evaluation machine, which differs from retail models as it comes pre-installed with 2×8GB DDR4-3200MHz laptop memory and a 500GB PCIe4.0 M.2 solid state drive.
The packaging of the Raptor Canyon (media evaluation machine) is also different from retail models. Although both the media evaluation machine and retail version have a black exterior, there are significant differences in the shape of the packaging box.
Opening the packaging box reveals the Raptor Canyon standing inside. The compact body design is a significant advantage of Intel NUCs. According to Intel’s official introduction, the internal space of the Raptor Canyon is only about 2.5 liters.
This NUC is paired with a power adapter rated at 330W. The power adapter is relatively large and feels substantial in hand.
According to measurements, the weight of this Raptor Canyon media evaluation machine (with vertical stand) is approximately 2.12kg, while the power adapter weighs about 1.41kg.
The Raptor Canyon supports both vertical and horizontal placement.
Vertical placement. This configuration requires the installation of a vertical stand.
The vertical stand uses a rubber buckle to secure the Raptor Canyon’s body, allowing it to be placed vertically.
Horizontal placement. This configuration does not require the installation of a vertical stand; simply lay the Raptor Canyon flat.
The Raptor Canyon features Intel NUC’s signature black exterior design. Its front panel includes a power button, a reset button, an SD card reader, a Thunderbolt 4 port, a 3.5mm audio jack, and two USB 3.2 ports.
The rear panel is more richly equipped, featuring four USB 3.2 ports, an Ethernet port, a Thunderbolt 4 port, a 3.5mm audio jack, an HDMI 2.1 port, two DP 2.0 ports, and a power adapter port. Additionally, there is a computer lock hole designed on the rear panel.
In the vertical placement configuration, the side of the body features a square RGB lighting module.
In low light conditions, this square RGB lighting module on the side becomes even more prominent. This lighting module supports customization, allowing users to adjust the lighting effects using Intel’s NUC Mini PC software studio.
Next, I will disassemble the machine’s casing to take a look at the internal design of this NUC.
It is important to note that the casing should be removed from the side with the RGB lighting module.
First, remove the casing to reveal the square RGB lighting module.
Continuing to remove the layer of the square RGB lighting module reveals the core area of this NUC.
The Raptor Canyon has two DDR4 laptop memory slots built-in. Due to it being a media evaluation machine, both DDR4 laptop memory slots are currently fully populated.
Next to the two DDR4 laptop memory slots is the Intel Killer Wi-Fi 6E AX1690i wireless network card.
The Raptor Canyon also has three M.2 solid-state drive slots, all designed for standard 2280 size installations. Being a media evaluation machine, it currently has one PCIe4.0 M.2 solid-state drive installed.
This NUC also has heatsinks designed for all three M.2 solid-state drive slots.
Intel NUC Mini PC Software Studio
The Intel NUC Mini PC Software Studio is the control center for the Raptor Canyon, where detailed settings for this NUC can be made.
In the performance tuning interface, performance mode and fan mode can be set.
This NUC is preset with three performance modes: low power mode, balanced mode, and maximum performance mode. Users can also customize and set the computer’s performance freely.
In the LED interface, the square RGB lighting module on the body can be adjusted.
Note: All performance tests in this article were conducted in the maximum performance mode of this NUC to fully showcase its performance level.
Additionally, before the formal testing began, I updated the BIOS of this NUC to the latest version released on September 22, 2022.
The Core i7-12700H paired with this NUC is the high-end model of Intel’s 12th generation Core mobile processors, featuring Intel’s innovative high-performance hybrid architecture design with 6+8 cores and 20 threads, and a turbo frequency of up to 4.7GHz. This high-performance hybrid architecture balances performance and power consumption, providing a new creative and gaming experience.
Through a 10-minute FPU stress test, the Core i7-12700H processor in this NUC demonstrated a sustained output capability of around 80W.
Through CPU-Z, Geekbench 5, and CrossMark tests, the performance of the Core i7-12700H is already impressive.
Dual-channel DDR4-3200MHz laptop memory performs normally.
In terms of graphics, this NUC is equipped with the high-end model of the Arc A series mobile graphics card – the Arc A770M. It is based on Intel’s Xe HPG architecture.
The Intel Xe HPG architecture consists of four main components: Xe cores, Xe media engine, Xe display engine, and Xe graphics pipeline.
Xe cores – Compared to traditional GPU vector units, Xe cores with built-in Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX) AI engine provide 16 times the computational power for AI inference, significantly boosting productivity and performance for workloads required in gaming and content creation.
Xe media engine – The Xe media engine accelerates numerous video codecs and supports a wide range of industry standards, also featuring industry-leading AV1 hardware acceleration encoding and decoding. AV1 offers 50% better energy efficiency compared to the commonly used H.264 codec and 30% better than H.265.
Xe display engine – The Xe display engine supports high-resolution, high-refresh-rate HDR displays and adheres to several new industry standards, enabling uncompressed 4K @120Hz display refresh rates through Display Port 2.0 10G.
Xe graphics pipeline – Rendering 3D graphics involves following a series of steps. The Xe graphics pipeline is a series of steps for rendering 3D graphics for the Arc A series mobile discrete graphics cards.
Intel’s self-developed gaming enhancement technology – Xe Super Sampling (XeSS)
NVIDIA has DLSS, AMD has FSR, and this year, with the release of the Arc A series graphics cards, Intel has also introduced its own gaming enhancement technology – Xe Super Sampling (XeSS).
According to Intel’s official introduction, the AI-driven Intel XeSS Super Sampling technology can significantly enhance gaming performance. For instance, it allows games to render frames at native 1080p resolution and then achieve near-native 4K resolution quality through XeSS Super Sampling technology.
Currently, Intel is collaborating with global game studios to optimize for Intel’s Arc discrete graphics cards and technologies like XeSS in several next-generation games. To encourage broader support for this technology in the industry, Intel plans to open up the XeSS SDK and toolkits to everyone.
Intel Deep Link technology – Enabling integrated and discrete graphics to work together
The Arc A series graphics cards support Intel’s Deep Link technology, allowing seamless collaboration between the discrete Arc graphics card and Intel’s CPU and integrated graphics, enhancing the experience in gaming, creation, and streaming through the following features:
Super Encoding – Compared to platforms that only use Intel’s Iris Xe graphics, Super Encoding allows the media engines across the entire platform to work together, increasing video encoding speeds by 60%.
Super Compute – Similarly, Super Compute can harness multiple compute and AI engines across the entire Intel platform, including Intel Core processors, Iris Xe graphics, and Intel Arc discrete graphics, accelerating various workloads.
Dynamic Power Sharing – Based on workload conditions, Dynamic Power Sharing intelligently and automatically prioritizes engine performance, allocating more power to either the Intel Core processor or Intel Arc graphics card as needed, boosting performance for creative and compute-intensive applications by 30%.
The Arc A770M is built on the ACM-G10 display core, featuring 512 EU units, 32 Xe cores, and 32 ray tracing units, paired with 16GB of GDDR6 memory and a 256-bit memory bus.
I have placed GPU-Z screenshots of the Arc A770M mobile graphics card alongside the Arc A770 desktop graphics card for comparison. Clearly, both graphics cards use the same GPU chip. The Arc A770M mobile graphics card is limited by the size and cooling constraints of laptops or NUCs, resulting in certain limitations on power consumption and operating frequency, and it operates in PCIe4.0 x8 mode.
Through a 10-minute FurMark stress test, the Raptor Canyon’s Arc A770M mobile graphics card demonstrated performance output capabilities of up to approximately 109W.
How strong is the performance of the Arc A770M? Let’s first take a look at the 3DMark benchmark test results.
According to the 3DMark Time Spy score, the Arc A770M mobile graphics card achieves approximately 84% of the performance level of the Arc A770 desktop graphics card.
Some games currently support XeSS technology. In this XeSS game test, I will use the game “Chronicles of the Gods” for testing.
XeSS Game – “Chronicles of the Gods”
In the graphics settings interface of “Chronicles of the Gods”, XeSS can be set. The game’s XeSS option provides four adjustment levels, with quality ranging from high to low being Ultimate, High Quality, Balanced, and Performance. The Ultimate mode offers great visual quality but sacrifices more game frames. The Performance mode, while providing higher game frames, sacrifices more visual quality.
As shown in the image above, after starting XeSS (Super Quality), some details in the game graphics improved, such as the texture of the grass on the ground appearing more natural.
Through testing, after enabling XeSS (Ultimate), the game frame rate increased significantly. I must say that XeSS technology is very effective.
In fact, NVIDIA’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR also started only a few years ago. With Intel’s strength and influence in the PC industry, XeSS technology has the potential to catch up with or even surpass the other two in a short time. I am very optimistic about the future development of Intel’s XeSS technology.
Next, I will test some games that currently do not support XeSS.
Game Test – “Naraka: Bladepoint”
According to the tests of the four games mentioned above, the Arc A770M can play a large number of popular games at 2K resolution.
Next, let’s take a look at the performance of the Arc A770M in productivity tasks.
AV1 Hardware Acceleration Encoding/Decoding Test – Wondershare Filmora
Compared to previous encoders/decoders, AV1 offers better compression rates and visual quality. Therefore, more and more video creators prefer to encode their videos using AV1.
Currently, video software such as Wondershare Filmora, Handbrake, and DaVinci support AV1 hardware acceleration encoding/decoding functionality for the Arc A series discrete graphics cards. In this test, I will use Wondershare Filmora to conduct a practical test.
Using Wondershare Filmora as an example, I will export a video with a similar bitrate using AV1 encoding/decoding, H.264 encoding/decoding, and H.265 encoding/decoding.
Ultimately, the video encoded with AV1 had a size of only 877MB. As you can see, AV1 encoding technology can efficiently help you save hard disk space.
Using a 4K, 30fps MOV video, let’s take a look at the performance of the Arc A770M in AV1 hardware acceleration encoding/decoding.
With Wondershare Filmora, enabling hardware acceleration with the Arc A770M is noticeably faster than relying solely on the Core i7-12700H processor.
Industrial Design Field Test – SPECviewperf 13
Using the SPECviewperf 13 benchmark software, I will test the performance of the Arc A770M graphics card in the field of industrial design.
Through testing, this mobile graphics card has performed well in industrial modeling applications such as 3dsmax-06, catia-05, maya-05, and Showcase-02.
The Intel Raptor Canyon is a powerful NUC. The 12th generation Core heterogeneous strong core performance is extraordinary, and the performance of the Arc A770M graphics card is also commendable. Additionally, this NUC can accommodate up to three M.2 solid-state drives, providing ample storage space for gamers and professionals to store vast amounts of games and data. Achieving such powerful computing capabilities in a body that is only about 2.5 liters in size is the charm of Raptor Canyon!
(This article is reposted from Bubble Network, Author: Zhang Fan)
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