The Nook PC: A Powerful and Compact Gaming Computer

I recently had the opportunity to test out the Nook PC, a powerful and compact gaming computer that has been making waves in the tech community. Despite its small size, this computer packs a punch when it comes to performance and features. In this article, we'll delve into the details of my experience with the Nook PC and explore its strengths and weaknesses.

One of the standout features of the Nook PC is its powerful cooling system. This allows the computer to maintain high clock speeds even during intense gaming sessions. While I was expecting the 12900k to outperform this little powerhouse, it turns out that the cooling system on the Nook PC plays a significant role in its performance.

The Nook PC also boasts two Thunderbolt 4 ports, making it an ideal choice for streaming and capturing content. With these ports, you can connect external capture cards and stream your gameplay to platforms like YouTube or Twitch. Additionally, the computer's custom-designed motherboard allows for seamless integration of components such as GPUs, which is a significant advantage over traditional desktop computers.

Another feature that impressed me was the Nook PC's ability to handle high-end GPUs with ease. In my testing, I managed to squeeze in a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080, which is no easy feat considering the computer's compact size and cooling system. This level of performance is typically reserved for larger desktop computers, making the Nook PC an attractive option for those looking for a powerful gaming experience.

However, not all aspects of my experience with the Nook PC were entirely positive. Specifically, I was disappointed with its software encoder capabilities. The Nook PC's ability to handle high-quality video encoding was hampered by the limitations of its GPU. While it can encode 1080p at a decent speed, it struggled to keep up with higher resolutions and presets.

I also noticed that the Nook PC had some issues with AV1 encoding, which is a new open-source video codec designed for streaming content online. According to the latest OBS update, AV1 encoders are becoming increasingly important for high-quality streaming, but my experience with the Nook PC's AV1 encoder was underwhelming.

To put things into perspective, I ran some tests using Premiere and Resolved onces, which are demanding video encoding tasks that require significant processing power. The Nook PC performed admirably in these tests, beating out the 11,900k but falling short of the 12,900k. However, it's worth noting that the desktop CPU was running on a full 280ml AIO watercooling system, which is significantly more powerful than the custom cooling solution used in the Nook PC.

Despite these limitations, I'm extremely impressed with the Nook PC and believe it has a lot to offer for those looking for a compact gaming computer. Its compact size makes it ideal for small spaces or travel, and its ability to handle high-end GPUs without sacrificing performance is a major advantage over larger desktop computers.

The real reason why this thing stands out is its form factor – it stays super quiet and remains fairly silent most of the time, even when things heat up during intense gaming sessions. And while it's certainly pricey, I think it's worth considering for those who value portability and power above all else.

If you're interested in learning more about the Nook PC or exploring its capabilities further, be sure to check out my video on the state of video encoders. It's a couple years old, but other than updating quicksync, which I'll be doing soon, all the other encoders are still accurate to this day.

In conclusion, the Nook PC is an impressive piece of hardware that offers a unique combination of power and portability. While it may have some limitations when it comes to software encoder capabilities, its ability to handle high-end GPUs and its compact size make it an attractive option for those looking for a gaming computer on the go.

In-State Video Encoders: A Look Back at the Latest Developments

If you're interested in staying up-to-date with the latest developments in video encoding technology, be sure to check out my video on the state of in-state video encoders. It's a couple years old, but other than updating quicksync, which I'll be doing soon, all the other encoders are still accurate to this day.

QuickSync is a powerful and efficient video encoding technology developed by Intel that has been widely adopted across various platforms. While it's not without its limitations, QuickSync remains one of the most effective solutions for compressing high-quality video content.

Other notable mentions in the world of in-state video encoders include x264, x265, and H.265/HEVC, which are also widely used in various applications such as streaming services, video editing software, and more.

If you're looking to learn more about these technologies or stay up-to-date with the latest developments, I recommend checking out my previous video on the state of in-state video encoders. It provides a comprehensive overview of each technology's strengths and weaknesses, as well as some insights into their use cases and applications.

In conclusion, while the Nook PC may have its limitations when it comes to software encoder capabilities, its compact size and powerful cooling system make it an attractive option for those looking for a gaming computer on the go.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwe got a new package from our friends over at intel today this thing is substantial seriously i will say whatever you think about intel overall their press kits are usually pretty insane so today we're checking out intel's latest nuk intel nux are basically their tiniest form factor pcs that really kind of flex the capabilities of their processors for you know doing most the work that you need and historically have been really tiny pcs and it's something that i've never gotten a chance to look at on this channel but i have always kind of wanted to because as much as i love my giant tower cases and the like having something that's more manageable is very appealing to a lot of people so specifically where you're looking at here their new dragon canyon nook which is based on the 12th gen architecture and this thing is already looking stellar despite the fact that the point of this product line is to be basically the smallest form factor pc possible the nooks have gotten kind of bigger over the years and here we have the dragon canyon nook this thing is a tiny little pc it looks like a external thunderbolt enclosure and this is the entirety of the pc and the entire thing like first impressions the entire thing is mesh basically you've got ventilation here you've got ventilation on the side i guess the front technically isn't ventilation on that side obviously all the pass-through on the back there so these new dragon canyon nooks are based on intel's 12th gen architecture and this specific one sports up to not my correct screwdriver size specs wise we're looking at an intel core i9 12 900 or 12 700 cpu which are there you know top of the line i7 and i9 cpus they are both running at 65 watts of base power however it looks like they do have a couple different skus with this it supports up to 64 gigs of dual channel memory it has two thunderbolt 4 ports pcie gen 5 for graphics cards which has no use but it supports it uh it's got a ton of nvme slots 10 gigabit networking you've got onboard hdmi for the integrated graphics of course uh which we'll be we will be checking out you got dual thunderbolt 4 you got six 10 gigabit or usb 3.0 you've got 10 gig and two and a half gig ethernet and then you have hdmi presumably 2.1 i would hope on board as well and then it says it supports wi-fi six the antenna slots on the i o plate are currently blank again this does support a proper graphics card like an actual you know dual slot graphics card the only issue you're gonna run into is sizing so the main cpu and where the memory goes and everything is slotted in i guess a daughter board you have two different motherboards going on here one is along the back plane and one of its along the bottom the bottom one takes some of the power the back one takes some of the power but the back one slots into the bottom one using a pcie slot we've got a tiny little pcie thing going on here so you can use that as well which is pretty wild so this little fan shroud is just mounted like a pcie device and then the whole cooler just kind of folds off here and you can see the cpu plate which runs to the fins all of this kind of directs the airflow you've got a gen 4 nvme right here that says 1.2 volts ddr4 in an m.2 slot i'm not quite sure but then we have access to our dual uh sodium slots here i've got 64 or no 632 breeding is hard 32 gigs a 3200 memory that i picked up here which should be fine for this that's the ugly green stuff but it's literally going where you could not possibly see it in use so that doesn't matter and we do need an ssd we gonna get our benchmark on it's been a couple days this little tiny little box is a beast this nook can do a lot of stuff and as you can see here while i started with this goofy little 20 or 1660 i was like hey i just want a little card that can do video encoding if you need the extra infinite encoding power which i don't even believe is necessary now and i wanted something that would fit in this tiny little case so i grabbed this i fit my entire founders edition rtx 3080 in here now it is a very tight fit you're not gonna go any bigger than this in terms of thickness in terms of card like width or in terms of length because of all the front panel cables and power connectors that have to shove in the front here and i actually actually accidentally unplugged one of the usbc front panel connectors that i'll have to replug later but the 3080 fits in here and it runs great i am so stoked let's talk about streaming and content creation pro performance for a minute here though so i ran a bunch of streaming and encoding tests and a couple of the puget bench video editing benchmarks we can keep this conversation going with this thing i want to keep testing it for the long haul so any specific use cases you want to look at comment down below because i am so in love with this thing but i wanted to talk about streaming performance first so first and foremost the whole reason i even got this encoder gpu and whatever was because i imagined that you'd want the nvinc encoder for this computer i don't think that's necessary at all as a dedicated streaming box with no gpu in it at all other than the igpu on the 12900 in here it was a streaming beast it handled scene compositing even with my big stream or stream elements stream elements overlays and my webcam and the gameplay and all that with the avermedia live gamer bolt capture card it had no problems doing the compositing even at 1440p and 4k like it was great the gpu held up just fine and encoding wise we're looking pretty good as a dedicated streaming pc at 1080p 60 it can handle x264 slow no problem i didn't have a single game or scenario where it had trouble low bitrate high bit rate it was great it could not do slower which is to be expected not designed to run in real time but just wanted to test it and then the quick sync encoder also handled a h264 and hevc which i could only use in recentral without a plug-in for obs uh handled things just fine as well was able to record in full you know high bit rate 1440p 60 1440p 120 even from the xbox series x had an incredible time when it comes to 120 fps streaming which i wanted to test because if you missed my 12 900k review it had a bunch of you know potential for streaming and recording at 120 fps and higher uh since this is the 12900 i kind of wanted to test it i did not have similar results i can only do 120 fps encoding at 1080p at faster x264 preset not medium not fast not slow otherwise that was fine and streaming and recording either both with x264 although if you're doing medium don't record on x264 medium or so there's no point set a crf value or seek or just a high enough bitrate for vvr and record on like faster but streaming and recording by using like quick sync to record and x264 medium or slow it handled just like a champ no issues um and again 120fps recording in re central using quicksync as well was stellar when it comes to gaming and streaming on the pc at the same time i only tested a few games here just for time's sake to get this up in time i'm literally recording this like less than 12 hours before this goes live uh with games like apex legends splitgate and halo it could stream and record or it could stream and play when streaming at x264 medium without a hitch slow was a little too much for it uh and then streaming and recording or streaming and playing with quick sync was no issue whatsoever and in my testing of the 12900k quicksync actually had less game impact than nvinc did anyway so the gaming was with the 3080 in it uh but otherwise like x264 medium's totally fine slow isn't designed for real time anyway so like that was a great time so for a streaming box this thing is stellar and you do still have the full-size pcie slot since you can use the igpu you can then slot in a blackmagic decklink quad hdmi or a camlink pro or something like that and get up to four 4k 60 inputs and more if they make a bigger card for it because these cards aren't using the full bandwidth that the slot would use you got lots of input and encoding potential plus again two thunderbolt 4 ports for input for external capture cards as well as of course usb i was disappointed overall looking at the streaming capabilities that we just talked about compared to the 12900k this is supposedly a 12 900 it should perform similarly it did not i i'm assuming it's the cooling and the clock speeds because the clock speeds fluctuate all over the place whereas the 12900k was kind of locked to a really fast speed i'm going to assume it had to do with that it's fine for what this is but you know i was hoping i guess for closer to 12900k performance but obviously realistic expectations for the package we're looking at it makes sense and i'm okay with it i think i was most disappointed in the av-1 encoding the if you didn't know the latest obs update introduced some software av1 encoders which is a new open source video codec that's slowly but surely becoming the future of internet video streaming av1 is everywhere on youtube now if you go to your account playback settings and enable av1 as like the default so many videos i watch every day are already av1 enabled so decoding is available on the nvidia 3000 gpus the amd 6000 gpus the intel igpus on the latest generations as well as upcoming a lot of mobile hardware i still believe the software encoders have a ways to go so i'm not too concerned about this performance and i think by time we actually have the ability to stream it somewhere directly although you can upload it to youtube now before we have the ability to stream it somewhere we're gonna see gpu encoders come up anyway but just as a test i was fairly disappointed compared to the 12 900k the little nook here could not handle a whole lot in terms of the two software ab1 encoders provided with the obs update video on that linked below with both svt and aom it could not handle the default preset nor the you know higher tier slower presets it i had to bump things to a faster preset than default in order for it to encode 1080p so disappointed there not a huge deal looking at the puget results i just ran the premiere and resolved ones for the sake of time because those things take a while and i got other stuff to do it beats the 11 900k by a fair bit in both of those tests um but falls short of the 12 900k and kind of goes toe to toe with the 12 600k and again those desktop cpus were on a full 280 mil aio and this is a tiny little mobile motherboard with you know a custom little thin cooling solution so very impressive results here all things considered if you're looking now this thing stays super quiet of course once you're gaming and things heat up you hear it but it's nowhere near as egregious as any of the other computers i have even my test bench so like this thing is small it stays fairly quiet and completely silent most of the time and it has so much power and horsepower that i am very impressed now it's quite pricey it's gonna cost you kind of what uh what what a pre-built desktop of this caliber would cost you so you gotta you'd be making this decision specifically for the form factor rather than purely the performance as you'll get at least slightly better performance out of a full pre-built desktop but oh man these little pcs have come such a long way like i said let me know in the comments over over on discord discord.js evil fox if you want to dive into this further if you think i should explore other use cases i am just going to be playing around with this for quite a while because i am so impressed and so stoked especially since again i was able to shove a 3080 in there and you can fit all manner of capture cards in there i do hope you enjoyed the video if you did you know what to do and yeah this thing's pretty cool if you're interested in watching another video go check out my video on the in state of video encoders it's a couple years old but other than updating quicksync which i'm going to be doing soon uh all the other encoders are still accurate to this day so go check out that or if you're interested in how the bigger the desktop 12 900k and 12600k cpus perform videos over here remember be kind rewindwe got a new package from our friends over at intel today this thing is substantial seriously i will say whatever you think about intel overall their press kits are usually pretty insane so today we're checking out intel's latest nuk intel nux are basically their tiniest form factor pcs that really kind of flex the capabilities of their processors for you know doing most the work that you need and historically have been really tiny pcs and it's something that i've never gotten a chance to look at on this channel but i have always kind of wanted to because as much as i love my giant tower cases and the like having something that's more manageable is very appealing to a lot of people so specifically where you're looking at here their new dragon canyon nook which is based on the 12th gen architecture and this thing is already looking stellar despite the fact that the point of this product line is to be basically the smallest form factor pc possible the nooks have gotten kind of bigger over the years and here we have the dragon canyon nook this thing is a tiny little pc it looks like a external thunderbolt enclosure and this is the entirety of the pc and the entire thing like first impressions the entire thing is mesh basically you've got ventilation here you've got ventilation on the side i guess the front technically isn't ventilation on that side obviously all the pass-through on the back there so these new dragon canyon nooks are based on intel's 12th gen architecture and this specific one sports up to not my correct screwdriver size specs wise we're looking at an intel core i9 12 900 or 12 700 cpu which are there you know top of the line i7 and i9 cpus they are both running at 65 watts of base power however it looks like they do have a couple different skus with this it supports up to 64 gigs of dual channel memory it has two thunderbolt 4 ports pcie gen 5 for graphics cards which has no use but it supports it uh it's got a ton of nvme slots 10 gigabit networking you've got onboard hdmi for the integrated graphics of course uh which we'll be we will be checking out you got dual thunderbolt 4 you got six 10 gigabit or usb 3.0 you've got 10 gig and two and a half gig ethernet and then you have hdmi presumably 2.1 i would hope on board as well and then it says it supports wi-fi six the antenna slots on the i o plate are currently blank again this does support a proper graphics card like an actual you know dual slot graphics card the only issue you're gonna run into is sizing so the main cpu and where the memory goes and everything is slotted in i guess a daughter board you have two different motherboards going on here one is along the back plane and one of its along the bottom the bottom one takes some of the power the back one takes some of the power but the back one slots into the bottom one using a pcie slot we've got a tiny little pcie thing going on here so you can use that as well which is pretty wild so this little fan shroud is just mounted like a pcie device and then the whole cooler just kind of folds off here and you can see the cpu plate which runs to the fins all of this kind of directs the airflow you've got a gen 4 nvme right here that says 1.2 volts ddr4 in an m.2 slot i'm not quite sure but then we have access to our dual uh sodium slots here i've got 64 or no 632 breeding is hard 32 gigs a 3200 memory that i picked up here which should be fine for this that's the ugly green stuff but it's literally going where you could not possibly see it in use so that doesn't matter and we do need an ssd we gonna get our benchmark on it's been a couple days this little tiny little box is a beast this nook can do a lot of stuff and as you can see here while i started with this goofy little 20 or 1660 i was like hey i just want a little card that can do video encoding if you need the extra infinite encoding power which i don't even believe is necessary now and i wanted something that would fit in this tiny little case so i grabbed this i fit my entire founders edition rtx 3080 in here now it is a very tight fit you're not gonna go any bigger than this in terms of thickness in terms of card like width or in terms of length because of all the front panel cables and power connectors that have to shove in the front here and i actually actually accidentally unplugged one of the usbc front panel connectors that i'll have to replug later but the 3080 fits in here and it runs great i am so stoked let's talk about streaming and content creation pro performance for a minute here though so i ran a bunch of streaming and encoding tests and a couple of the puget bench video editing benchmarks we can keep this conversation going with this thing i want to keep testing it for the long haul so any specific use cases you want to look at comment down below because i am so in love with this thing but i wanted to talk about streaming performance first so first and foremost the whole reason i even got this encoder gpu and whatever was because i imagined that you'd want the nvinc encoder for this computer i don't think that's necessary at all as a dedicated streaming box with no gpu in it at all other than the igpu on the 12900 in here it was a streaming beast it handled scene compositing even with my big stream or stream elements stream elements overlays and my webcam and the gameplay and all that with the avermedia live gamer bolt capture card it had no problems doing the compositing even at 1440p and 4k like it was great the gpu held up just fine and encoding wise we're looking pretty good as a dedicated streaming pc at 1080p 60 it can handle x264 slow no problem i didn't have a single game or scenario where it had trouble low bitrate high bit rate it was great it could not do slower which is to be expected not designed to run in real time but just wanted to test it and then the quick sync encoder also handled a h264 and hevc which i could only use in recentral without a plug-in for obs uh handled things just fine as well was able to record in full you know high bit rate 1440p 60 1440p 120 even from the xbox series x had an incredible time when it comes to 120 fps streaming which i wanted to test because if you missed my 12 900k review it had a bunch of you know potential for streaming and recording at 120 fps and higher uh since this is the 12900 i kind of wanted to test it i did not have similar results i can only do 120 fps encoding at 1080p at faster x264 preset not medium not fast not slow otherwise that was fine and streaming and recording either both with x264 although if you're doing medium don't record on x264 medium or so there's no point set a crf value or seek or just a high enough bitrate for vvr and record on like faster but streaming and recording by using like quick sync to record and x264 medium or slow it handled just like a champ no issues um and again 120fps recording in re central using quicksync as well was stellar when it comes to gaming and streaming on the pc at the same time i only tested a few games here just for time's sake to get this up in time i'm literally recording this like less than 12 hours before this goes live uh with games like apex legends splitgate and halo it could stream and record or it could stream and play when streaming at x264 medium without a hitch slow was a little too much for it uh and then streaming and recording or streaming and playing with quick sync was no issue whatsoever and in my testing of the 12900k quicksync actually had less game impact than nvinc did anyway so the gaming was with the 3080 in it uh but otherwise like x264 medium's totally fine slow isn't designed for real time anyway so like that was a great time so for a streaming box this thing is stellar and you do still have the full-size pcie slot since you can use the igpu you can then slot in a blackmagic decklink quad hdmi or a camlink pro or something like that and get up to four 4k 60 inputs and more if they make a bigger card for it because these cards aren't using the full bandwidth that the slot would use you got lots of input and encoding potential plus again two thunderbolt 4 ports for input for external capture cards as well as of course usb i was disappointed overall looking at the streaming capabilities that we just talked about compared to the 12900k this is supposedly a 12 900 it should perform similarly it did not i i'm assuming it's the cooling and the clock speeds because the clock speeds fluctuate all over the place whereas the 12900k was kind of locked to a really fast speed i'm going to assume it had to do with that it's fine for what this is but you know i was hoping i guess for closer to 12900k performance but obviously realistic expectations for the package we're looking at it makes sense and i'm okay with it i think i was most disappointed in the av-1 encoding the if you didn't know the latest obs update introduced some software av1 encoders which is a new open source video codec that's slowly but surely becoming the future of internet video streaming av1 is everywhere on youtube now if you go to your account playback settings and enable av1 as like the default so many videos i watch every day are already av1 enabled so decoding is available on the nvidia 3000 gpus the amd 6000 gpus the intel igpus on the latest generations as well as upcoming a lot of mobile hardware i still believe the software encoders have a ways to go so i'm not too concerned about this performance and i think by time we actually have the ability to stream it somewhere directly although you can upload it to youtube now before we have the ability to stream it somewhere we're gonna see gpu encoders come up anyway but just as a test i was fairly disappointed compared to the 12 900k the little nook here could not handle a whole lot in terms of the two software ab1 encoders provided with the obs update video on that linked below with both svt and aom it could not handle the default preset nor the you know higher tier slower presets it i had to bump things to a faster preset than default in order for it to encode 1080p so disappointed there not a huge deal looking at the puget results i just ran the premiere and resolved ones for the sake of time because those things take a while and i got other stuff to do it beats the 11 900k by a fair bit in both of those tests um but falls short of the 12 900k and kind of goes toe to toe with the 12 600k and again those desktop cpus were on a full 280 mil aio and this is a tiny little mobile motherboard with you know a custom little thin cooling solution so very impressive results here all things considered if you're looking now this thing stays super quiet of course once you're gaming and things heat up you hear it but it's nowhere near as egregious as any of the other computers i have even my test bench so like this thing is small it stays fairly quiet and completely silent most of the time and it has so much power and horsepower that i am very impressed now it's quite pricey it's gonna cost you kind of what uh what what a pre-built desktop of this caliber would cost you so you gotta you'd be making this decision specifically for the form factor rather than purely the performance as you'll get at least slightly better performance out of a full pre-built desktop but oh man these little pcs have come such a long way like i said let me know in the comments over over on discord discord.js evil fox if you want to dive into this further if you think i should explore other use cases i am just going to be playing around with this for quite a while because i am so impressed and so stoked especially since again i was able to shove a 3080 in there and you can fit all manner of capture cards in there i do hope you enjoyed the video if you did you know what to do and yeah this thing's pretty cool if you're interested in watching another video go check out my video on the in state of video encoders it's a couple years old but other than updating quicksync which i'm going to be doing soon uh all the other encoders are still accurate to this day so go check out that or if you're interested in how the bigger the desktop 12 900k and 12600k cpus perform videos over here remember be kind rewind\n"