Intel NUC 12 Extreme Review: so Much Power!

The Intel NUC 12 Extreme is an extremely compact 8 liter desktop gaming PC with Intel 12th gen desktop CPUs, a full length double-wide GPU slot, 650 watt power supply and plenty of ports. Despite the small size, cooling is well managed thanks to 4 large case fans and an open metal mesh casing. Clearly it’s attractive to those with limited space, but the build and component quality are also appealing. Good thing, since it’s not cheap! We test it with the Core i9-12900, NVIDIA RTX 3080 GPU, 32GB RAM and a 1TB PCIe4 SSD. This DiY PC is surprisingly not horribly difficult to work on, as long as you don’t mind tight spaces and it performs admirably for 4K gaming with AAA title games as well as video editing and rendering.