[1] For a more complete spec including the other parts you may need, see: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/new-home-gateway-route...
All I put on them are Chrome and Mame.
The $99 ComputeSticks are just powerful enough to play standard def video from someone like NetFlix or Amazon. Higher bit rate streaming video is too much, and the'll stutter. But they have higher spec ComputeSticks I've not played with for $199, and $299. (Maybe I'm being grumpy, but most video content simply does not need to be 4K, or HD.)
They are great with 3D graphics, as far as rendering. I write 3D, and have been having a good time with their 3D performance, using WebGL.
Seems like the Nuc prices are just at that level that one could pick up a desktop with the necessary CPU, video card and RAM while being expandable to the future - where the Nuc is not...
Even the slowest compute sticks had a BayTrail-T Atom in them which has support for hardware decoding of any 1080p content you're likely to come across and technically supports 4K 30FPS playback (though doesn't have the necessary DRM support to play any commercial 4K content). If your machine had trouble playing back any 1080p content you probably had something misconfigured in your player or video drivers so it was incorrectly using software decoding.
It's very upgradable as well. It ships with one open DIMM slot, so upgrading to 4GB RAM is dirt cheap.
The Celeron 2955U isn't a speed demon, but it's good enough for a home machine.
And, you can get a ROM image that allows running an actual linux distribution instead of ChromeOS: https://johnlewis.ie/custom-chromebook-firmware/rom-download...
Has anyone here tried these devices with Ubuntu, or maybe a more cut down distro? Could you use one of these as an internet and word processing box, with a normal/decent experience?
The CPU on mine (about 2 years old) is: https://ark.intel.com/products/81072/Intel-Celeron-Processor...