Intel NUC 12 Pro Wall Street Canyon Kits Review: Alder Lake in UCFF Avatar

Power Consumption and Thermal Characteristics

The power consumption at the wall was measured with a 4K display being driven through the HDMI port of the system. In the graph below, we compare the idle and load power of the Intel NUC12WSKi7 (Wall Street Canyon) with other systems evaluated before. For load power consumption, we ran the AIDA64 System Stability Test with various stress components, as well as our custom stress test with Prime95 / Furmark, and noted the peak as well as idling power consumption at the wall.

The numbers are consistent with the TDP and suggested PL1 / PL2 values for the processors in the systems, and do not come as any surprise. As expected, the numbers for both the actively-cooled NUC 12 Pro kits are similar. The Bleu Jour Meta 12 doesn't seem to be able to support the default 40W / 64W PL1 / PL2 values. Instead, the peak package power tops out around 32W, translating to an at-wall power consumption number below 55W.

Stress Testing

Our thermal stress routine is a combination of Prime95, Furmark, and Finalwire's AIDA64 System Stability Test. The following 9-step sequence is followed, starting with the system at idle:

• Start with the Prime95 stress test configured for maximum power consumption
• After 30 minutes, add Furmark GPU stress workload
• After 30 minutes, terminate the Prime95 workload
• After 30 minutes, terminate the Furmark workload and let the system idle
• After 30 minutes of idling, start the AIDA64 System Stress Test (SST) with CPU, caches, and RAM activated
• After 30 minutes, terminate the previous AIDA64 SST and start a new one with the GPU, CPU, caches, and RAM activated
• After 30 minutes, terminate the previous AIDA64 SST and start a new one with only the GPU activated
• After 30 minutes, terminate the previous AIDA64 SST and start a new one with the CPU, GPU, caches, RAM, and SSD activated
• After 30 minutes, terminate the AIDA64 SST and let the system idle for 30 minutes

Traditionally, this test used to record the clock frequencies - however, with the increasing number of cores in modern processors and fine-grained clock control, frequency information makes the graphs cluttered and doesn't contribute much to understanding the thermal performance of the system. The focus is now on the power consumption and temperature profiles to determine if throttling is in play.

The two actively-cooled NUC 12 Pro kits have expected power consumption and temperature profiles. A sustained package power of 40W is possible in both configurations, with around 32W being the maximum power budget of the iGPU. Package temperatures remain below 90C, and the SSD cooling is good enough to prevent throttling as it remains below 50C. However, the Bleu Jour Meta 12 is a completely different story. It appears that the thermal solution is capable of operating the board only in the cTDP down mode of 20W with a similar PL1 and a 32W PL2. Further investigation is a must from Bleu Jour's viewpoint, and this is probably one of the reasons why the Meta 12 is not available for public purchase yet.

Thermal Performance

One of the key aspects of fanless systems is the thermal profile under load. Our stress test saw the internal package temperature go as high as 100C in the Bleu Jour Meta 12, and the chassis (doubling up as a heat-sink) tries hard to bring it down.

Using a FLIR One Pro thermal camera, the maximum case temperature under extreme stress at normal room temperature (25C) was determined to be around 78C.

The gallery above presents additional thermal photographs taken at the end of the simultaneous CPU and GPU loading segment of the custom stress test. Given that thermal throttling comes into play and the chassis struggles to keep up, the above temperatures are no cause for surprise.