MINI MEDIA MASTERPIECE

A shelf-sized home theater and couch gaming machine? You can count us in

- SAM LEWIS

GENERALLY SPEAKING, desktop PCs are our forte, but we don't want to shy away from the obscurities out there. Mini form factor machines have always caught our eye, though their inherent restrictions and performance limitations can often dampen our initial interest. However, Intel's latest NUC 12 Extreme 'Dragon Canyon' kits have well and truly sparked that fire in our bellies and we are looking forward to getting right into this rig.

We'll be tweaking this system to create a small, minimalistic home media and couch gaming system. To spice things up, we'll be pairing it with XGIMI's Halo Plus projector. This little companion will sit alongside the NUC 12 on a shelf to provide a discreet a setup. There's something exciting about playing games on the big screen and you can't beat it for kicking back and binge-watching a Netflix series.

One stand-out positive to having a smaller setup is less mess. Therefore we are aiming to create a more seamless and less cluttered experience without the compromise of less power in this rig. The Intel NUC 12 Extreme is the same design as the last Intel NUC 11, but this is a good thing. Measuring just 74-inches by 14-inches, it's far smaller than a competitively-specced Micro ATX machine but still has the ability to support a full-sized GPU.

Coming pre-installed with the i912900 CPU, it's no surprise that you can spec this tiny machine up to get some serious top-end performance. That's a plus for us as this will hopefully make the perfect couch gaming unit. Pair this with a wireless keyboard and trackpad, wireless controller, a decent set of speakers or headphones and you've got yourself a mean media center that doubles as a casual gaming rig. That's the idea anyway, so let's see how it fares.

GPU

GIGABYTE GEFORCE RTX 3050 GAMING OC 8GB