The NUC Extreme might not share much in terms of design with either the original NUC or its earlier Extreme siblings these days, as it's grown into a rather hefty SFF system. Now the 12th gen NUC Extreme has leaked and it comes with a few unexpected surprises, in both a good and a bad sense. Initially it looks like there will be two main barebones SKU's, the NUC12EDBi9 and the NUC12EDBi7, with a 65 W Core i9-12900 and a Core i7-12700 CPU respectively. In other words, it appears we're not looking at any dedicated CPU SKU's this time around.

The first thing that sticks out in the spec is the fact that Intel has gone for a pair of DDR4 SO-DIMM slots, rather than DDR5. In all fairness, this could be due to a lack of DDR5 SO-DIMMs in the market, but feels odd in a product with Extreme in the product name. Memory speeds of up to 3200 MHz are supported and up to 64 GB can be fitted. On the storage side, there's support for no less than three PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe drives using the 2280 form factor. Two of the slots can also accept 2242 drives and SATA drives. A full PCIe 5.0 x16 slot is also present for an optional graphics card, but more on that a little bit later.There's no lack of connectivity on the NUC 12 Extreme and the biggest surprise here is that Intel has sprung for a 10 Gbps Ethernet port as standard on both SKU's. The Core i9 also gets an additional 2.5 Gbps port. The HDMI port is sadly of the 2.0b variety, although there are also two Thunderbolt 4 ports that doubles up as DP outputs. Furthermore there are six USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) USB-A ports around the back, with an additional USB-A and USB-C port around the front, which appears to be 5 Gbps only. The front also appears to be home to a 3.5 mm audio jack and an SD card reader. Finally there's an Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX211 module that also supports Bluetooth 5.2, that relies on internal antennas.

As to using a discrete GPU, it seems like Intel will offer one or more SKU's with an Intel Arc graphics card and Raja Koduri has already posed on Twitter with such a system, albeit inside a NUC 11 Extreme. Graphics cards are limited to 12-inches/304 mm in length and dual slot, which means you can't fit any extreme graphics cards in your NUC 12 Extreme. Some pricing has already leaked and the Core i7 model has been listed for €1181 or US$1514, with the core i9 model coming in at €1401 or US$1714. Note that the pricing aren't conversions, but different listings.