One of the more interesting gaming products that Intel makes is its NUC lineup of mini-PCs. Short for Next Unit of Computing, the NUC is basically a mini-PC that you can get as either a prebuilt unit or partially-built kit, with individual components also available separately. While the NUC does tend to be pricey, it’s a generally well-designed product that offers a convenient and compact custom system. According to a recent leak, the next generation Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast will be available with Alder Lake CPUs and potentially DG2 graphics cards.
The rumor comes from Chinese tech forum Weibo, where many hardware leaks have come from in the past. A user posted an image of an early listing for the Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast that includes a cut off name that we presume is “Serpent Canyon.” Intel uses moniker codenames for many of its products, so this is no surprise.
Yet to be confirmed or finalized
According to the image, the “Enthusiast” NUC 12 has yet to receive FCC approval. Still, the main hardware specs are unlikely to change. We can see that it features options for Alder Lake CPUs, but even more interesting, different unnamed discrete graphics card options with matching memory capacity specs for Intel’s upcoming DG2 graphics cards.
While there is no mention of a release date in this particular leak, it is interesting to see that Intel could potentially use its first discrete graphics cards in its NUC products. This leak also reveals some new details about several of these upcoming Intel products.
According to the slide, Alder Lake will support both DDR4 and DDR5 RAM. The graphics cards will feature DisplayPort 2.0, which would make those the first graphics cards to have that spec. We’ll wait for an official announcement before covering the Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast “Serpent Lake” in detail. If you want to learn more about the unannounced Alder Lake CPUs or DG2 graphics cards, check out our leak coverage on those.
