Intel NUC 12 Extreme vs. Pop OS!

 Pop OS is based on Ubuntu, but it developed by System76 specifically for their own PCs.  Granted the PCs they make are based on industry standards, and so their system should run on most "Normal" PCs as well.  

Even so, I'm sure they go out of their way to select things like WiFi cards that are compatible with Linux, while at the same time making sure their version of Linux includes drivers for all of their hardware out of the box.  

I've used Linux since the late 90s, but I have been out of the loop for over 10 years as far as running it on the desktop, because once Apple came out with OS X and the Macbook Air, they had both a stable Unix based OS and a machine I wanted to run it on.  I liked the "Just works" approach, as well as commercial support for things like Adobe PDF reader, various accessories, etc.  

And apple stuff works great - until it doesn't.  I've had enough machines break over the years, and they have become increasingly impossible to repair and upgrade, and expensive to replace.  

I decided that I wanted a decent Linux laptop that is repairable and upgradeable, which lead me to the Framework.  My Framework works great and I am very happy with it, but with a laptop you always leave performance on the table.  On the other hand, I also didn't want a machine that took up half my living room either.  The Mac studio is very attractive in a lot of ways, but it again has no real upgrade path, and isn't repairable - plus I want to run Linux for most of my needs.  

While I would prefer a similarly powerful non-Apple ARM machine, they are in short supply.  I started looking around to see if there was something like a NUC, but more powerful, and I was in luck.  In fact there was something called the NUC Extreme, which is advertised as being for "Creators and Gamers".  Why is it that any decent PC or accessory is "Gaming" recently?  Anyway, while I am not so concerned with 3D games, I do need lots of memory, storage space, and RAM for things like running virtual machines.  

 When I first found out about the NUC Extreme, the NUC 11 was out, but the NUC 12 hadn't released yet.  It was, however in the hands of reviewers.  I toyed with the Idea of buying the NUC 11, as it was close to $500 cheaper for a machine that is only about 10% slower - but at the end of the day, I figured that if I was going to buy a new computer, it should be the best I could get for the form factor I wanted.  Plus, the processor on the NUC 12 is said upgradable to at least the 13th generation chips, which means a bit more future-proofing.  

Intel cryptically said that the NUC 12 Extreme would be available in the "First Quarter", which could mean as late as the end of June, so I decided I would settle in and wait.  I set a Google alert and waited a few weeks.  Yesterday the alert triggered, and sure enough a shop in Japan claimed to have them in stock.  I ordered right away, and it showed up today.  This was much faster than I was planning to have my hands on one, so the new monitor hasn't arrived yet.  Neither did any RAM or SSD.  

I decided to swap the RAM and SSD from my Framework into the NUC, hoping that Linux would just boot up and work.  

Before I go any further, the RAM was composed of two 8GB sticks  of DDR4 PC3200, and the SSD was a WD SN850 500 GB NVMe stick without heat sink.  That is so say that neither are super large in terms of capacity, but they are both about the fastest compatible components money can buy.  

16 GB of RAM is not nearly enough for me long term, but it should be enough for the next few weeks to put this machine through its paces.  (After that, I will upgrade the NUC to 64 GB and return the two 8 GB sticks to the Framework laptop).  

The SN850 SSD on the other hand, is a bit power hungry, so I will keep it in the NUC, and buy a new slightly lower power SSD for the Framework laptop.  Although 500 GB is not really enough space considering the VMs and Video Editing I will be doing, it will make a great super responsive system drive.  I can add other SSDs for mass storage, as there are two additional slots.  

I am not adding a graphics card at this time, however I probably will in order to satisfy Davinci Resolve.  

Once the component swap was complete, I closed up the box and powered everything up, and...

Sadly, the Pop OS 21.10 install I had on there did not work very well at all.  It booted up to the graphical login screen after I unlocked the disk, but I wasn't able to get much further.  The first time, I managed to enter my username and password before it froze.  On subsequent attempts, it would freeze on the login screen before I was even able to enter anything.  

I tried booting up in multi-user text mode, which kind-of, sort-of worked, but eventually froze up as well.  Booting up from the recovery partition worked, albeit in super low resolution.  I was able to see that the 2.5 Gb Ethernet and WiFi cards were not working, though the 1 Gb Ethernet port was.  

After a bit of unsuccessful experimentation (including updating the BIOS), I decided to just wipe the disk.  I have everything important synced with other machines using Resilio Sync anyway.  The only real downside was that I lost the work I put into getting the fingerprint reader on the Framework working.  

Eventually I decided to reinstall, using the 22.04 beta version.  That went very smoothly and works quite well.  The install went amazingly quickly, taking only a moment or so.  I am sure that was partly due to the Gen 4 NVME SSD I am using, but nonetheless it seemed noticeably faster than the Framework.  The WiFi works, as do both Ethernet ports, and the graphics seem a lot smoother too.  

I installed Windows 10 in Boxes, and even under virtualization, that is about the fastest Windows install I have ever seen.  Microsoft office likewise installed in Windows in record time.  It also boots in under 6 seconds.  

I had the usual wrinkles getting Japanese input working on Pop OS, but that's to be expected as they are an American company that doesn't even sell machines with Japanese keyboards.  (Hint: Install Mozc, and then install gnome-tweaks and enavle language switcher display).  

I've tried compiling a few things, and I can almost say it's too fast to test with the small things I compiled.  Perhaps next time I need to compile a kernel for one of my QuaStations that will be a suitable test.  Bluetooth audio and USB seem to work perfectly fine.  

The processor usage graph in the resource section of the system monitor is quite entertaining, I must say:

I have to say the fact that swap is being used on SSD is not optimal, so better to install more RAM and then disable swap in order to increase the lifespan of the SSD device.

Next, time to check the WiFi:

https://www.speedtest.net/result/13056811373

https://www.speedtest.net/result/13062630028

I haven't tested for top speeds locally, but even using the Internet, the real world speed of the WiFi is impressive with only the internal antennas.  

The Geekbench results weren't bad either:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/14437195

Here are some comparisons with other systems I own or owned:

My 2019 Macbook Pro 16 inch i9 (that the memory failed on...)

Over 50% faster for Single core, and almost 50% faster for multi-core.  Wow.  I would have thought a $5500 laptop would have fared better than that even after 2 years.  

The Framework Laptop:

20% faster in single core - but this is a 12th generation i9 vs an 11th gen mobile i5 - not a bad showing at all!

Multi-core, though... well that's a bit of a different story.  Whether that matters depends on what you're doing, of course.  

(Also note that this Framework score was suing the same memory modules).  

And finally, the M1 Macbook Pro:

Only about 3% faster on single core - which is truly impressive for the M1 given it's power budget and battery life.  The Multi-core falls further behind, but that's not really surprising.  Bear in mind that the M1 for sure has better graphics than the integrated Intel graphics I am using - and adding a fancy graphics card to the NUC 12 Extreme is entirely possible, but will add expense, and draw more power than the CPU in most cases.  

GeekBench is not the end-all be-all of measuring performance, by any means - however it does give a good idea of overall CPU performance.  A lot of the impression of speed for end users is determined by responsiveness, however.  Responsiveness is killed by swapping, so the first key to decent responsiveness is to have enough RAM to avoid swapping.  Once that is done, the next major key is storage speed.  When a user opens their word processor, etc., the system has to load that program and all of its dependencies from mass storage, and then load the file they are trying to access.  If the storage is twice as fast, the program will open almost twice as fast.   

That said, I have seen systems where the storage controller is so slow that upgrading storage even from HDD to SSD didn't help noticeably.  The NUC is (like the Framework!) able to use Gen4 NVMe SSD storage, which means that if you invest in faster storage, you will reap returns in stress free operation.  

Another interesting note is that there have been some noises over the past few days that a new patches for the Linux kernel will further increase performance above the numbers shown here.  

The next thing to talk about is the performance of Windows 10 performance under Boxes (which uses QEMU/KVI).  This is important for those of us who need to use Windows from time to time, as it determines whether we can get away with virtualization or we will need to install a dual boot partition.  

Note that I used the default settings of Boxes, and did not attempt to optimize speed in any way.  

The disk speed was ... fast enough but not nearly as fast as in Linux:

Since BlackMagic Disk Speed is not available on Linux, I also ran DiskSpd, which is available on both platforms:

Linux:

Windows:

Bear in mind, this test is being performed on a LUKS encrypted disk!

The Windows score does drop a lot, but it is actually still respectable.  It would take 16 minutes to read the whole disk in Windows vs about 2 minutes in Linux.  

The GeekBench score was pretty good.  

Finally the network performance, not bad at all:

So on the one hand, of course there is a penalty for virtualization - but on the other hand, I can confidently say that you can run Windows stress free for any every day needs you might have, even without tweaking the settings at all.  It doesn't really "Feel" virtualized to me in normal use, either.  

The bluetooth adapter for the NUC12 seems to sit on the USB bus, which is convenient since you can pass it to Windows in order to use bluetooth devices such as headsets from inside Windows.  

Note: Just make sure to avoid the Flatpack version of Boxes if you want to be able to pass through USB devices to the Windows environment.  

For those who want more details on the system under Linux, please check this hw-probe link.