ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products | Hacker News Reader

ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products

intel.com

559 pointsmepian334 comments

I find the development quite interesting, and it lends credence to the theory Intel's NUC line was technically profitable (or at least not horrifically in the red), but just didn't make strategic sense - especially from a 'competing with your own customers' view.

While I never bought one of these NUCs myself, I've used quite a few deployed as thin clients and kiosk machines. Let's see what ASUS ends up doing with the product segment.

More broadly, I hope the trend of selling off business units rather than closing them outright continues (Google Domains selling to Squarespace being another recent example).

> didn't make strategic sense

Good little practical personal hardware things like NUC are what makes people love a company.

E.g. Intel CPUs always were just default CPUs and what made me love the brand were Intel Desktop Boards which were exceptionally reliable (although I've heard some people had different experience). IBM/Dell/HP/etc servers always were just servers but their high-quality "enterprise class" laptops made me sympathize them, despite they probably never meant to make a huge portion of their profit from selling these. RaspberryPi hugely changed how do I feel about Broadcom, towards the positive direction. This is about purely subjective perception but I would guess this can play a role in many cases. Haven't IBM benefit from the fact ThinkPads were used on the space stations?

With one of the third party cases, such as those from Akasa, they are nice inexpensive fanless machines with excellent Linux support and low power consumption.

I would remove the word "inexpensive". Many alternatives cost less. I know people buy Intel for brand, quality and warranty but definitely not price.

at those form factors, they were quite price competitive.

Yes many alternatives cost less, but if you want to tape them to the back of a TV that generates heat and has to be turned on 24/7 to display advertisements, video,..., they were cheapest by far.

Or in meeting rooms to display zoom/teams, ... A raspberry pi just doesn't handle those scenario's

An RPi actually can handle those scenarios in many usecases. A Chromecast devices with a server feed can as well.

I've found in the long term, it can not. In the short term, yes it does work.

Perhaps my failure rate is just high, but micro-mini systems for that use case were much more reliable for me over long time frames.

I've fount the weakest link is usually the microsd cards... I've tended towards usb drives, but ymmv of course. I also switched to intel mini pcs, that offer a lot more when the gouging was happening over covid.

But not as reliably. Especially the Chromecast.

Paying extra for reliability is absolutely worth it.

I bought it for Price

The Intel NUC Celeron systems could not be met for price if you also needed Windows. To beat the NUC Celeron on price you had to drop to ARM and use Linux but if the software you needed to run only supported Windows that was not an option.

the Celeron NUC's where GREAT for Line of Business use cases where the computer was running a Screen, or Single windows Application

Needing that much horsepower for a screen or single application is a sign that anything requiring Windows should be automatically disqualified.

I used to feel the same way about kiosks, POS terminals, etc. but… if you have an organization whose bread & butter is C# desktop apps and Windows development and they’re looking for, say, qty 10 units, you’ll have a really hard time justifying the training and NRE costs to do anything but Windows.

I 100% agree that it’s not the technically optimal solution. But don’t discount the idea that, given an existing set of people and skills, it can definitely be the local optima organizationally.

Yup, exactly this. I tried deploying such system on low powered ARM systems that could technically do it. It was a nightmare from a support and compatibility standpoint. Also the vendor would support the hardware for significantly less time than Intel would support their NUCs.

The maybe dozen NUC's I needed were not a very substantial hardware cost. You bought a Celeron NUC and they just worked even if you didn't have the most experienced staff supporting them or the best software running on them.

If you're going to be deploying a thousand such systems, sure, of course you shouldn't use NUCs.

> If you're going to be deploying a thousand such systems, sure, of course you shouldn't use NUCs.

I'd probably argue that, barring specific requirements that these might not cover, the NXP i.MX6/7/8 would probably be my default for something like this in volume. ~Motorola~/~Freescale~/NXP have been incredibly great stewards of the platform and provide significant lifetime guarantees for their parts (like 10+ years often). Plus you can generally run mainline kernels on them unless you're doing something special that requires something from their vendor branch.

For just running a screen not only is Windows a massive waste in terms of resources and costs, but so is a NUC. A Raspberry Pi (equivalent) is more than sufficient.

Depends on what the screen is doing. We deployed a system with multiple Raspberry Pi's running Chrome in kiosk mode, each driving a TV showing different data.

For one of them we had to switch from a Raspberry Pi to a small NUC to display a page with 3-6 videos running. The pi could show 1 or 2 videos but with all 6 going, it was very stuttery playback.

I'm actually surprised it handles two videos without issue... It's a good option a lot of the time. When the scalping got bad, I started using the cheaper intel boxes, smaller than NUC but more powerful than rpi and included a case and enough storage.

thanks for not reading my comment as I clearly said many apps do not have ARM or Linux compatibility

There is exactly zero reason for an app whose only purpose is to be shown on a screen to be Windows or x86 specific. It can be due to obsolete development practices or obscure vendor requirements, but still..

What would be some of the alternatives? I don't even need a gpu. It will be a home server.

I'd suggest checking out ServeTheHome, which has been reviewing tons of mini PCs or CNX Software or Liliputing which cover all the SBCs and minipcs that get announced/launched. There are way too many options to list and it largely depends on your exact needs.

Personally, I bought a cheap fanless Chinese (Topton) router (N5105, 4xi225v3) system from AliExpress running OPNsense that's worked flawlessly for the past year or so, but I'd recommend ordering your minipcs through a vendor where you can easily return it (like Amazon) if it's DOA or otherwise doesn't meet your expectations. I'd also skip the small Chinese vendors if warranty support is something you need. Go with a manufacturer that has a local office/support.

Also, depending on what you want your server for, if you want ECC, your minipc options will be extremely limited (a couple Xeon options when I looked). Personally, I went with an desktop Ryzen + ASRock Rack mini-ITX board in a slim case that was still pretty small since I wanted ECC for ZFS.

Running one of those same routers myself, been great. Setting up a friend with a topton N305 box that will host proxmox, about half resources going to OPNSense for routing, while also running pihole and wireguard... it may also share a usb connected HD for file sharing if/until he gets a separate nas.

I do wish there were one of them that included even two 3.5" drive bays so it can run as a forbidden home server doing all the things.

We've used both NUC and Gigabyte BRIX at work and the BRIX are far more capable per $ compared to the NUC.

Intel NUC is the BMW of mini PCs, certainly not "inexpensive" compared to the alternatives, even if we ignore the off-brand stuff.

I found NUC+monitor+mounting inexpensive compared to the alternatives about a decade ago. The NUC could be mounted on the back of the monitor, which made mounting cheap and simple. Two cables from the ceiling, one device fixed to the wall, done.

We use them as servers to be honest, so we've never had to worry about additional hardware. We deploy infrastructure on them as portable machines to take to conferences/demos etc which previously was done using in-house built ATX computers.

NUC and their ilk were a game changer and I'm glad to see a way for them to continue.

for who accept used PCs: https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/

for who accept Chinese brands (and suspicious Windows license): Beelink, Minisforum, etc

the rest: ECS Liva or ASRock DeskMini?

I’m a big fan of the ASRock deskminis for low power servers - dual 2.5” SATA bays, some have dual NVMe too.

Very nice little platforms with low power draw, and low noise!

I’ve got one of the DeskMini X300 on my desk atm with a 5750GE in it - 8c16t of Zen3 in 35W. It’s competitive with M1 Pro for performance and power draw.

I’ve gotten used Lenovo ThinkCenters for $30 on eBay. Sure they’re used and have a 3rd generation i3, but it’s the best budget home server option out there! They can easily replace whatever done on a pi and even more.

Yep ThinkCentres, Optiplexes, and Elite Desks go for pennies on eBay.

Got to love used office equipment! I’m a big Optiplex fan and I use one as my daily personal pc for everything. I use ThinkCenters for most of my Homelab due to the fact that I’ve found them the cheapest, but I use Optiplexs when I need something stronger. But I’ve never used an Elite Desk in a homelab, how do they compare to Optiplexs and ThinkCenters?

I've never been a big fan of HP, but they seem to be roughly equivalent to the Optiplexes. The lab I used to work in had dozens of them and they seemed to run just fine without complaints.

Used NUC, optiplex or others from eBay. If you need just "a" server for home, look for one of those small PCs on the used market. They often appear at very low prices after some company refreshes their office desktops. Replace the storage with something decent and you've got a perfect server.

Depends on your needs, I've been using a Minisforum HX90 for a couple years now. AMD 5900HX, 32gb ram, 2tb nvme drive. Runs great, relatively low power in standby.

Turing pi 2

I bought for price - a max mini would have been better but ludicrously expensive.

I think the poster above you meant other mini PCs by non-Apple manufacturers.

Decent Intel NUCs are ok price-wise, but definitely not cheap. A decent Linux-preinstalled box for my kid's Minecraft needs was about 800£ (non-basic Entroware Aura) here in UK.

It's a good machine technically speaking: perfect for lightweight gaming, office stuff, browsing, etc. But I suspect that a comparable mini PC from asian vendors would be twice as cheap and just as good. A laptop would be even easier.

I have tried a couple of pretenders and they were not up to the 24/7 load I have lined up, random reboots and lockups, maybe it was bad luck, maybe it was thermal management, either way the NUC keeps trucking.

Yeah, it does feel, look and work solidly.

Just pointing out that "cheap" is not the best description of these things :-)

There are Intel NUC laptops, or as they call them kits, I'm not sure what the details are. They're sold and branded by third parties but the guts are the same, except maybe the RAM and SSD (very minor customisation anyway). When I was looking I ended up with one since it was a pretty good price compared to the competition, I wanted one with a serviceable GPU for occasional games.

I considered those, but I think something like the Shuttle DS line of fanless mini-computers are nicer (especially since they have two Ethernet ports). See for example:

https://www.shuttle.eu/en/products/slim/ds20u7

A drawback is that Shuttle has less frequent updates than the NUC, and it's harder to find them in local stores.

Personally I liked the zotac zbox line of sff fanless machines.

But the akasa line is pretty interesting if a bit more diy.

I have been using a NUC as an HTPC for several years now and it's great, though the comments in the previous conversation about them ending the line were right about the noise.

I'm in the market for a similar device to replace my dangerously past EOL desktop, and funny enough I have been circling around Asus' SFF line.

> about the noise

I've been thinking of getting a fanless case[1] for my Asus PN51. Akasa also makes some for Intel NUCs too[2], amongst others.

[1]: https://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER...

[2]: https://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER...

Lenovo has the thinkcentre line

Dell has the optiplex

Go has the elitedesk and pro desk

All in mini/usff formfactor similar to the size of a Mac mini.

Yes this. The tiny PCs tend to have mobile CPUs in them as well which can feel a little sluggish. You can get a decent small desktop for the same money. I have a Lenovo Neo 50s as my main computer with a 12400, 32Gb of RAM and 1TB SN850X SSD in it. Very nice, quiet and reliable machine.

The Tiny/Mini/Micro series from Lenovo/HP/Dell don't use mobile CPUs at all, but the throttled (T) versions of their desktop counterparts. They're even socketed, so you could swap them out.

I use a Dell OptiPlex 7000 Micro having an i5-12500T CPU as my main dev machine and it's very snappy. Add a monitor and mount it on a MFS18 stand and you have a nice all-in-one system.

This secret might get out now :)

So many cores and threads for so few watts.

Yeah but for the same money as your Lenovo, you can get something much smaller.

It lurks under my desk getting dusty. I don't care. If it's really small it's really hard to make it lurk somewhere. It's either dangling, in some horrible mount or on top of the desk.

There's enough room in the Lenovo for a couple of PCI cards, a couple more disks and a hell of a lot more RAM if I need it too.

The fact that the 8th gen can handle 64gb ram is a nice surprise

Physical size generally matters to a certain extent, compared to the small amount of electricity for the computing power.

2 values I like comparing:

- Computing power (cpu benchmark) / per watt is a good comparison.

- After that, comparing those to compute power per dollar ratio really lays a clear picture out.

The NUCs are definitely smaller than the USSF boards (roughly mac mini size), but not enough that it has stood out.

Yeh, I struggle to see the point of a NUC when I can buy one of those used and get much better value

https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/

These are a great size and one I like a lot

Still the NUC size machines have their place, even the small chromeboxes, etc.

Did you meant Go = HP. I made the same typo anyway, they are one keystroke away.

Definite typo - meant HP, thanks!

I had an htpc for over a decade in various forms. I finally just settled on the Nvidia shield reading over NFS. It's so much better than the htpc I don't regret it for a minute.

After owning and using the same shield since 2016 I was advising to get it if anyone asked for a streaming and local playback of media. But now days I think Apple TV beats it easily as a streaming device. If Apple moved to an M chip and added audio passthrough it would be no contest. I would not advise people to get Shield if they want to get a device for the next 5-6 years unless it has a hardware refresh.

It does 4k HDR and ATMOS. What does it lack?

I use it with Kodi and Jellyfin as well use streaming apps such as Netflix as well as geforce now. But its processor is old and it shows its age when going through movie collections. It does not support VP9 and now the new coming AV1 codec. So for someone getting a new device today I would not recommend it as the price premium they are asking for a 7-8 year old processor based device I feel is not worth it. With a Jellyfin or plex server you can play most of your media on your smart tv directly or you can get a $50 google tv or amazon fire stick

Jellyfin user here. Started on Roku, moved to a Shield because I needed more codecs (my server's too weak to live-transcode anything above ~720p) and wanted to get there cheap.

Should have just gone straight to the AppleTV, which is where I ended up. Better UI, not shitted up with ads, less jank and crashing (friggin' Android), and none of the problems I'd see with playback of certain combos of audio and video codecs on the Shield. If not for the weak codec line-up, even sticking with Roku would have been better than the shield (yeah, it's shitted up with ads, too, but not as bad—hell, the Apple TV kinda has some, but again, less bad).

Shield does support VP9 as such; what it doesn't support is VP9 Profile 2 (i.e. 10 and 12 bit decoding).

It does HDR10 & Dolby Vision, but not HDR10+ or HLG. Iirc there's some strange app-dependent (non-)support too.

I have the older (not 4k) Shield, I'm just using TV apps since upgrading the TV, since I couldn't settle on anything else. Tried and didn't like the 4k Fire Stick.

It doesn't do AV1 in hardware. Not yet necessary today, but nice to have for future proofing.

Who really needs ATMOS, wasn't that only marketing fluff?

I've gone from the Shield (bought it within a month of release to replace my Boxee) to just using Android TV in my Bravia.

I have used many kinds of NUCs from various generations and a pair of NUC8 (i.e. with Coffee Lake U CPUs) are much quieter than both the earlier and the later NUCs.

Most of the time they are completely inaudible. I have one that works 24/7 as a server in the room where I sleep. You can hear them only at full load, which in these NUCs means 50 W power for the first half minute, and then 30 W forever.

Unfortunately later Intel reverted to the use of cheaper, noisier fans. I have not used the last two generations of NUCs, so I do not know how they compare in noise.

So the various models of NUCs can differ a lot in noise.

I have one that works 24/7 as a server in the room where I sleep.

Used to keep all the server and network stuff in my room, but couldn't sleep.

All the leds were like a blinking Christmas display.

NUC8 was great, the first time their CPUs could match desktop CPUs in raw performance, yet they were quiet. I have another NUC11Pro and that is much louder.

I'm still using the i3 NUC I bought about 10 years ago for one of my home theatre boxes. It started kicking off a lot of fan noise after a few years the fix was to replace the (now dry and cracked) thermal paste and the fan went back to inaudible rpms.

I have about 10 nucs in various roles around the house and the first thing I do when buying them used from ebay is replace the thermal paste and they've all been fine.

I'd love to go back to HTPC, but really want a full-screen friendly interface that includes the various streaming services. What have you been using for the UI/UX?

Aside: been using NVidia Shield TV(s) and Kodi for local/nas media.

Would a Mac mini work?

A lot of things would work at 2x-4x the NUC price, even without the Apple lock-in.

Costco occasionally has sales on Mac Mini for $299.00 (M1 Mac Mini).

Right now a Mac mini – Apple M2 Chip 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU – 8GB Memory – 256GB SSD – Silver is $499

Hard pressed to buy a decent NUC for less.

Having to spend $200 per 8GB of RAM and $200 per 256GB of storage like it's still 2012 pretty much destroys any value proposition from Apple.

You can put a 4tb drive on a USB port.

Just checked on ebay, a 12500H NUC with 16GB ram and 1TB SSD is $518.

You have to be in a completely distorted reality field to choose Apple in these circumstances.

Or price is of little consequence and you just want a nice machine.

I have several Nucs and would love a Max mini server. I think I’d prefer that option but the price is too high to justify it.

The bits I like are the built in 10gbe and the huge transcoding power.

>ave to be in a completely distorted reality field to choose Apple in these circumstances

I'm not sure a NUC is a good replacement for a laptop. That said, there are some really nice Intel and AMD based machines out there.

The Intel creates a lot more heat though. If the noise/performances ratio is important or if energy consumption is something you care about, the Intel solution doesn’t seem that interesting.

They would have to run Mac OS, and that's likely a no sale for many people.

There is Asahi Linux, however it's not really ready for day to day use, by comparison it would make the amount of time an Arch Linuxer spends trickering seem trivial in a business setting.

Also for many a large benefit of the NUC was the ability to swap out persistence and memory at will, supported, warrantied, and in most non-starter kits what you had to do. Mac minis is soldered everything.

Untrue, at least for the older intel ones. Have put linux and windows on a few of them over the years. The m* line one sure.. but linux support is coming and honestly macos isn't so bad if you are just using it to run homeserver stuff like file sharing/plex/etc.

I do hope that apple reverses some of it's recent 'lets just solder everything to the board' tendencies (especially in regards to storage), maybe they can start with the minis/studios and move down until the thiness of the air line means they can't anymore. Maybe the EU can sue the shit out of them like they did around the lightning cable. It's less clear to me if the soldered in RAM is a requirement of the design of the m* platform or not, but the storage certainly should certainly move to a standard like m.2/m.3/u.2. I managed to wear out the storage on a touchbar intel powerbook and getting the storage replaced basically meant getting a refurbed laptop, it took several days.

256GB seems pretty small for an HTPC, unless it's just pulling from a server in another room

The key is to use an external SSD via USB. Much better bang for your buck than Apple’s storage pricing.

While that’s true it kind of ruins the point in getting a small factor computer like a Mac Mini. You want as small a footprint as possible.

Personally I have a USB disk plugged into my router and my HTPC just grabs files over the network.

Not a NUC, but there are loads of competitive mini PCs for $500 or even less. Amazon has the Beelink SER 6 Pro for $500 after coupon with 32GB RAM, 500 GB SSD, 2.5Gbe and an 8 core Ryzen 7 7735HS with Radeon 680M.

Biggest problem with the Mac mini is it has no user upgradable parts, nuc does.

Nah the biggest problem (for intel macmini) is there is no easy t2 applesmc support in the Linux kernel so you have zero fan control without patching and building a new kernal and I never figured out how to do it

I have my old Mac mini and a 10th gen nuc in a proxmox cluster and they are basically the same. except I had to upgrade the nuc to give it nvme and 10g where as the macmini already had that. And then because I lack fan control on the mini slap a giant heat sink on top and point some fans at it

That’s less of an issue than the price.

It causes a price issue because Apple's upgrades are extremely overpriced

Non Apple Silicon is usually overpriced for the CPU benchmark point to run linux

Nucs, or USFF's are quite performant.

It's just a dream, but with TB4 or another high bandwidth PCIe interconnect, I'd be interested in seeing dockable cases not unlike the e-ports of yesteryear.

The case design would slot in the otherwise independent NUC formfactor, providing power and airflow, housing the (e)GPU and other cards, and re-enabling all the benefits of cramming things in the 5.25" drive bays on the front of your PC.

I got really frustrated recently after running out of space on my desk for all the cabling and clutter that used to live inside my computer. I had to build a rack to house new equipment to replace what was in a PIII ATX tower, and I find myself slowly losing ground to the copious adapters and peripherals I need to replicate the utility of formerly self-contained systems.

I've been wanting for monitors to get PCIe slots for GPUs. Lots of space to get creative with cooling as well.

My guess why it hasn't caught on is Thunderbolt timing issues. I could never get USB audio to work parallel to an eGPU on the same cable, which buries that whole one-cable-to-rule-them-all narrative.

I've been waiting for "board inversion" - where the video card effectively becomes the thing you insert the motherboard/CPU/RAM assembly in to.

In addition to the relatively short Thunderbolt cables, there's also the limited number of PCIe lanes that Thunderbolt offers, which will bottleneck higher end graphics cards.

Furthermore, Intel had no real way to get them in front of new customers. Asus is absolutely happy to cut deals with Walmart and Best Buy and to play hardball.

This was a good move on their part, I've got at least 6 different generations of NUC machines around, but I also have the ASUS PN50 which is a pretty solid "tiny desktop" / "mac mini" type of setup. Completely agree with the whole "why are you competing with us" question really creating channel conflict at Intel.

I use a Skull Canyon as my daily driver for programming and honestly I wouldn't have selected another machine.

Me too. Been waiting years for them to release a similarly performant model in the same form factor.

I waisted for the successor to skull canyon so long I just bought a Lenovo lol.

They brought out the Serpent/Raptor Canyon recently and they're awesome bits of kit.

Nice, I'll check it out. Know some folks who swore by it for their development desktop machine, even if they didn't develop much, they'd just remote into it from the macbook as needed.

fwiw, I'm OP. I use it with 32GiB of RAM and a 1TB M.2 and it's been fantastic for day to day development on two HiDPI screens. The Vega-M graphics card mine came with is also on mainline Linux in terms of driver support.

I bought two NUCs, one personally and one through work. I had a desktop class i9 chipset that I could travel around the world with. I actually plugged it into something like [0] with an eGPU when it was at home for the extra oomph.

I'd buy another for my next machine.

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cooler-Master-MasterCase-enclosure-...

> and it lends credence to the theory Intel's NUC line was technically profitable (or at least not horrifically in the red), but just didn't make strategic sense - especially from a 'competing with your own customers' view.

Maybe, maybe not. ASUS whose core business is in building PC components would likely have better margins and vertical integration vs Intel that has to work with partners and outsource.

> especially from a 'competing with your own customers' view

Intel was* a major mobo manufacturer, which is definitely competing with your channel.

* maybe still are -- I don't pay attention to that stuff any more.

Why would the business be horrifically in the red? It's commodity hardware at a slightly premium price.

Development cost and low sales. If they spend to much for the R&D and then sold not enough units to recoup the cost then the business would be in the red.

Over the years they developed some pretty special units. Examples are the Extreme Compute Element (NUCs in PCIe form factor) or the Hades Canyon with RXVega GPU and in general the more gaming focused NUCs. I don't think those were sold in high volume numbers.

I personally used an old NUC6i5 with 16GB Ram and 1TB SSD as my private "HomeServer" / "Media-PC" / "RemoteMachine" for a long time, mainly bought because it was (and still is) 5.9W idle power consumption while reasonable performance (way more than a raspberry PI at the time). I also spent the money on an Akasa Passive case[1], which made the device very expensive in total, but it was worth it at the time. It's still running as a backup.

BUT: I really think the times of the NUC are over. Media-PCs are getting less important (Netflix, etc.). With dedicated boxes like Apple-TV and TV Recording they hardly play a role any more and for home servers there are better alternatives.

I recently invested some money into a used Fujitsu D3417 + Xeon homeserver and it runs Proxmox at 9.3W Idle. The performance is just on another level than any NUC with the same price tag and because it is upgradable and supports ECC RAM, the only drawback is it's size.

I'm still questioning the industry, why they don't provide affordable ITX or smaller sized boards with enough space for ECC (!) RAM and two or more NVMe-Slots as low power low cost Micro-Server appliance. Newer AMD Ryzen does inofficially support ECC but the Idle Power consumption is pretty high. This could be a niche, I would definitely get one of these, if it was good quality (like the DELL, HP or Fujitsu Servers). These boards exist, but they are nearly impossible to get anywhere. An example would be the Gigabyte C246N-WU2, which does run at an unbelievable Idle consumption of less than 8W [2]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-dVdm3OjME

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFurC_HDlKM (German)

I have used the NUCs to integrate controllers into small robotic platforms and custom lab equipment. They are a good 'it just works' platform that you can scale performance v cost over time as needs vary (need image processing? drop in a core i7. just motion control? save money and go with an i3 or atom). Also they are more reliable and performant than RPi, and relative to the cost of the motion control systems, the NUC is a rounding error.

Notably the NUC has a standardized base plate mount that requires only two screws, and it has nice rubberized stand offs that isolate vibration. So, mechanical integration is super easy, and swapping out a NUC in the field is also very fast. In some cases it is easier to do a firmware upgrade by switching out the whole NUC than trying to walk a lab tech through punching a hole in the corporate firewall, or running an ethernet cord through the production floor, etc etc.

I use the VESA plate to mount on the back of a monitor (with an extension plate since there's a stand too). Completely out of view, almost silent, I can just flip the DP/HDMI inputs and go from "work" to "home" desktop (though full-screen VNC is plenty zippy and saves faffing with keyb/mouse). It's just a home (linux/Slackware) server for storage/streaming/tinkering but glad I spent a few extra € as it's rock solid.

My sheevaplug (!) sits unloved in a drawer since I got it :D

I would argue that media pcs and home servers are becoming _more_ not less important, precisely because Netflix, Disney+ et al have become such bad stewards of movies and shows, both in terms of deleting content, and no longer being "worth it" for the price. Anecdotally, I know more and more friends and coworkers who are moving to having their own media servers because they don't want to have to hunt through different services for their favourite shows or movies, or they've been burned by Amazon changing the streaming license of their "purchase."

I don't think piracy is a broadly popular method of watching media, not because it's wrong but because it's technically challenging and inconvenient. And if it started becoming popular, the industry would respond by either cutting prices or beefing up enforcement. Either way, the STB remains mainstream.

This is very geographically dependent. There are many places where piracy is the primary way, with most primary school children already knowing their way around a BitTorrent client and whatever the biggest tracker in the country is. With software like Jellyfin/Plex and the -arr suite, it only takes one tech-savvy relative to have the whole extended family and friends watching pirated media like genuinely easier Netflix.

Old (but not too old) Fujitsu mainboards are a great hack to build a computer with low power draw, especially in idle mode. They support relatively recent Intel sockets and 4 SATA ports out of the box, so really ideal for small-ish and very affordable file- and media servers. I‘ve seen in a German forum [1] specialized in this kind of thing that people reproducibly get 5-8W idle with such boards.

At least in the EU, you can get used Fujitsu towers with those power saving boards for cheap. Just take care that you pick one with the higher efficiency power supply (IIRC, that’s the E90+).

Hidden in that forum thread [1] are posts from members who bought a specialized board (€250 last time I looked) that takes idle consumption down to 2W. Can’t remember the name of the manufacturer so I can’t link to it, but if someone were interested, it‘s mentioned throughout the thread.

1: https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamste... - someone claims they reached 4W idle with this Fujitsu board

I have an ASUS PN40 that idles at 1.8W (_at the wall_). This is with one SSD and LPDDR3 memory.

Yeah the small systems are often very efficient, but you can't really use them for file serving from HDDs. USB (and even eSATA) enclosures are not a suitable replacement for internal SATA ports. Their controllers & firmware are not stable enough for heavy concurrent use and often crash or become non-responsive.

Idling an old Xeon or a 12100 at 4W is also a bit more challenging than a 1.1Ghz Celeron.

For the record, the PN40 not only has 1 SATA internal port, it even has an NVME-capable M.2 slot. I make no claims of the power consumption of the latter since I never used it.

If you want a shitton of SATA ports you obviously have to go somewhere else but then even the power consumption of the idling SSDs will start to be troublesome (and when in use will likely necessitate another PSU).

I also disagree with the assessment of eSATA (since it is basically external SATA), and think the claims of problems with USB to SATA controllers are very exaggerated. They all have terrible power management though; if I had to use one, I'd just cut USB power entirely on idle, which would btw also help with any controller issues.

M.2 SSDs have almost zero idle power draw, if that‘s what you meant?

HDDs can spin down and will not draw much in that state. I think it‘s a reasonable assumption for a file server at home that it will spend most of time in spindown.

I have seen some problematic reports on external enclosures on Reddit, but maybe they do work fine in many cases.

May be almost zero, but it's not zero! I have never tried DRAM-less NVME SSDs, but I have some samsung SATA 840-870 ones (tried several on this range) that consume around 0.2W on the most idle state they support. Considering my budget was 2W, it is not negligible...

I have a PN51 running my TV (as a dumb screen) and it's wonderful. It has a fan but I've never heard it even right close up. I haven't measured the power draw but I've never felt it any hotter than hardly detectable heat.

I'd recommend looking at Kontron and OnLogic, products. They very much are targeted to industrial applications, but they effectively make exactly what you're describing. Low power machines with lots of I/O and expansion capability in a small form factor. We use a couple of their full system solutions for our lab infrastructure, but they also sell boards if that's what you're looking for: https://www.kontron.com/en/products/systems/c136842 https://www.onlogic.com/eu-en/computers/industrial/

The time for media PCs may be over, they may not. I have a Plex server and the NUC is a great form factor for that.

But, even leaving aside media PCs, the form factor is great. They're powerful enough for me to use happily as a desktop, and I love having a tiny PC that doesn't take up acres of desktop.

I'm not sure if I can totally agree with that. The form factor may be nice but, in my case the NUC has always been very noisy and hot until I decided to buy the akasa case. This is no wonder, because the small packed hardware cannot be cooled as efficient as bigger cases, even slightly bigger onces.

The NUC is also limited in extensability and even if the form factor as such is nice, they are slow compared to only slightly bigger sized Ryzen workstations (e.g. Minisforum X400 or ASRock DeskMini).

I'm also running a Plex server (as Proxmox Guest) and in my opinion servers do not need to be small or fanless in general, if you can place them somewhere in a room where noise and space are not this problematic (my server is in the kitchen ON the fridge... I consider the living room and the bedroom as quiet places)

The NUC is pretty good for very specific use cases (presentations, fairs, etc.) because they can easily be transported and are small and the hardware is ok, but for most other use cases, especially servers, there are definitely better systems.

Seems to me torrents are getting a big boost and people are fleeing from streaming. I see many buying alternatives to stream like "the old days" after they have cancelled Netflix etc. I'm one of them, canceling and adjusting for several families.

1L desktops are the new hotness for home labs. Intel and AMD offerings are very impressive and some are super low power but can throttle way up if you give them the proper oversized power bricks. small, expandable, low power and most importantly cheap.

Personally my M1 Mac mini replaced the idea of a home server NUC for me. My workstation is also my server now because I don't need to worry about power consumption on it.

While the hardware itself may be astounding, the operating system is not my preferred choice for a server... even if asahi linux may already work well.

I tried TrueNAS Scale, Proxmox, handcrafted debian, Terraform+Ansible scripts and with all the problems it may have, Proxmox is my choice for over a year now and I never regretted it.

I already used the ZFS rollback feature [1] twice to get back where I was and IT JUST WORKS... never had issues so far.

[1]: https://pilabor.com/series/proxmox/restore-virtual-machine-v...

Yeah, the Mac is definitely for lighter home server tasks. I tried in the past to run more complex stuff, and it wasn't worth the hassle of figuring out macOS's differences vs Linux. Had PowerEdges in the basement once for a startup, but nowadays the Mac is enough.

About a week ago we had an article about Intel leaving the NUC market.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36680674

It seems a bit slapdash to announce that ASUS is taking the brand forward a week later. Like if they were planning on doing this for a while, it would be an orderly transfer, right? So, what, did somebody at ASUS see that ServeTheHome article and decide to just go for it?

Anyway, I really like NUCs, and I’ve got an ASUS laptop that I’m fond of, so I hope it all works out! It just looks a little funny.

> So, what, did somebody at ASUS see that ServeTheHome article and decide to just go for it?

That kind of stuff does occasionally happen. No idea about this particular case though. ;)

The best theory I’ve got is that when ASUS found out that Intel wanted out they essentially bought the NUC brand. Now when people search for “Intel NUC” they’ll end up on ASUS product pages.

Plenty of OEMs make similar systems but don’t have the NUC brand.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the clumsy announcement is because ASUS legitimately found out at the same time we did.

at the end of that article

Update 70 minutes after this piece went live. Intel just sent us the official confirmation:

We have decided to stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) Business and pivot our strategy to enable our ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth. This decision will not impact the remainder of Intel’s Client Computing Group (CCG) or Network and Edge Computing (NEX) businesses. Furthermore,we are working with our partners and customers to ensure a smooth transition and fulfillment of all our current commitments – including ongoing support for NUC products currently in market. (Source: Intel)

Asus seems to be on the ball in looking for new markets to expand into with whoever is managing it at the moment. After Valve Steam Deck proving that there was an addressable market for handheld gaming pc they have come out with probably the best device so to match steam deck

I don't really know how computers are made so I assumed that ASUS or someone like them was already the OEM for most of a NUC anyway. I didn't think Intel had any ability to make anything other than chips.

> I didn't think Intel had any ability to make anything other than chips.

Historically this was definitely not the case. Intel made board level products in house, and systems for code development, ICE units etc.

These days, probably it is all outsourced.

Intel never made board-level stuff in-house; no one does this in fact. It's always outsourced to a contract manufacturer that specializes in PCBs. Intel probably did their own PCB design however.

> Intel probably did their own PCB design however.

They do. I've heard rumors that some motherboard manufacturers don't have the skills in-house to design and simulate high-speed portions of the PCB (like the memory bus) themselves; they use Intel (or AMD) reference designs for that portion of the board.

Yes, I've heard similar things, that a lot of PC motherboards were basically slightly modified reference PCBs from Intel. The high-speed portions of the boards were really difficult to design.

This sort of device is usually made by OEMs, so the NUC was quite unusual, so that’s a reasonable thing to mix up.

Actually, this has made me curious—I’m not sure if Intel, like, physically made the cases. But it could be a deal like with Apple, they don’t actually physically make iPhones of course, they contract it out to Foxconn. Wasn’t able to find any info about a contract manufacturer for NUCs, does anyone know if they used one?

Maybe it was a point in negotiation.

I think the influx of very low cost Chinese mini PCs makes the NUC, Asus PN and Asrock devices a bit less attractive. Also thelow power AMD APU has been very good for the form factor. Maybe the margins are too tight for Intel. Another take maybe that the NUC came in when low power Arm desktops looked viable and Intel needed a low power small form factor to defend against that.

The Minisforum, Beelink and the generic aliexpress units are incredibly cheap.

There are celeron based fanless models with 4 2.5gbe NICs available for less than $200 on Amazon.

Personally I have been using the AMD 15w Ryzen variants it’s a nice balance for performance. I have several, my daily driver is an Asus PN50 with 2Tb nvme disk and 64GB ram driving 3 sceeens at 2560x1440 in a completely silent Akasa case.

As long as you are prepared to fiddle and potentially destroy the original case rhe Akasa cases are fantastic.

> The Minisforum, Beelink and the generic aliexpress units are incredibly cheap.

Certainly are, hard to resist for personal use, but then I read that one will likely never receive a BIOS update.

Also, those moments when you wonder whether something in your home is listening, resulting in ads for something you've just talked about... well that is usually some super cheap product listening for keywords and selling the info to a company that can't get away with doing the listening themselves...

So they're not worse than ASUS then.

I've had several motherboards from them, and they stopped receiving BIOS updates a year or two after release. Never got anything since meltdown & spectre have become known, for example (I think BIOS updates are needed for microcode updates on Windows, so this would be a serious problem for most users).

I've also used two ASUS smartphones, and… never again. The last one received one major update (from Android 5 to 6), and stopped receiving security updates a year after the phone was announced. Fuck that company.

I bought a Qotom Q190G4 in 2016 for $139.00. That was also a Celeron branded CPU -- but it was not Atom, I don't buy Atom PCs -- with four gigabit NICs. This is to say, I do not think there's a new influx, these machines were available for a long, long time now. And yet, NUCs have thrived alongside.

I wonder what impact they really have. I have always bought NUC though traditional IT market channels and we us them in the SMB market pretty heavily

I can not see any of these VAR's carrying minisforum or other generic aliexpress systems. So from an SMB stand point my options are NUC, Lenovo Tiny/Micro, and the simliar offerings from Dell and HP.

Maybe some Asus, Asrock, Gigabyte, etc.. Higher end consumer brands.

So I guess it comes down to how many NUC's are being sold in business channels vs the budget consumer channels

Can you share a link to the model that you're running?

Are any of these ARM systems suitable for easily running Linux on them?

It's hard to take ASUS seriously with a quote like:

> this collaboration will enhance and accelerate our vision for the mini PC – greatly expanding our footprint in areas such as AI and AIoT

It's just dripping in buzzword doublespeak. The NUCs seem like cool devices, do we really have to shoehorn "AI" and -- I had to re-read this -- "AIoT" into everything?

Yes. Failing to mention AI regarding any investment is basically MBA malpractice at this point.

To err is human. To arr is pirate. To AI is lemming.

At least it isn't yet AIoTaaS.

Now you've got me thinking of a hardware freemium model where you get some freebie IoT device on your home network, and its neural net convinces you to start paying its subscription fee (implemented with blockchain) once you're feeling done putting up with some limitation of the free version.

This was all the rage back in 1999. ISPs we’re giving away “free” eMachines with the purchase of a 3 year MSN dialup subscription.

Also Juno and Netzero giving internet access for watching ads.

And FreeDSL.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/freedsl-goes-live/

Alas, we have Wall Street to thank.

Nobody really believes this - not even Wall Street - but everyone knows how the game is played and begrudgingly plays along.

I use a Nuc clone to run Home Assistant, and AI event detection for my camera network (assisted by a Coral accelerator). So I think it legitimately qualifies for those buzzwords.

Except that almost nobody except random people on HN or certain reddit communities set up their own server for home assistant. Your personal interest and effort in this area really doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things -- I'm sure Asus and Intel marketing people weren't thinking about users like you when they wrote those words.

People have many other home appliances, no reason a local machine to provide local Cloud and home automation can’t happen.

This form factor is especially neat for the amount of power per watt one gets.

Honestly there is demand for local inference in the enterprise space, especially computer vision systems, that demand more power than comparable arm platforms can provide.

I could see there being a small but valuable niche they could fill.

At the same time, it’s not much to get surprised or worked up about. The marketing copy on any given PC OEM website for any particular product has always been complete jibberish.

These are companies running on extremely thin margins that have minimal marketing budgets.

Wait the I in IoT was internet....is that...artificial internet?

"Artificial Intelligence of Things" is also total gibberish.

Are you sure? "Artificial Intelligence of Things" is a pretty good description of autonomous robots or a fully self-contained home assistant puck.

Asus is one of the best in class, especially bang for your buck.

I suggest paying less attention to PR and more attention to specs. There is one company that is best in class for their PR/marketing, but their specs can't hold a candle if you are willing to spend equivalent money.

We should applaud companies that don't overspend on mind control/psychology tricks and spend that money instead on great products.

Been using an Asus PN51[1] with KDE Neon for about a year, and overall I'm very happy with it. Performance is good, never had a crash, stuff just worked out of the box without fuzz.

Seems like a decent fit to me.

[1]: https://www.asus.com/us/displays-desktops/mini-pcs/pn-series...

Another happy PN51 user (R7 4700U) - I've found it to be quite the mighty mite working with big NetBeans projects.

I'm honestly not surprised that Asus would pick up the NUC line.

The pn51 didn’t ship with a 4700. You’re either using a pn50 or 5700

Oops, you're right, it's a PN50. Anyway, I'm still impressed with this little guy.

Yeah got the same. Very solid

Did PN51 come with networking supported by default? When I got my PN50 some time ago, it couldn't connect to either wireless or wired networks and there was no indication which manufacturer's driver was required without some disassembly. I also loved how they shipped a CD with a computer that has no means of reading it with included drivers, so that was completely unhelpful.

Why is installing drivers still a thing in 202x in non-Macs?

Yeah both worked without any manual intervention. Was positively surprised of how smooth it went.

Fedora 37 is working smoothly on mine.

Would Asus or ASRock be interested in continuing the PC Engines APU2 line of low-power, fanless x86 embedded systems with coreboot?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35635900#35636960

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35635900#35636517

If they were it probably would have already occurred.

Hoping they continue Intel's long tradition of good support for Linux/BSD.

Agreed. I'm running a dual-boot Manjaro OS on the Serpent Canyon NUC (Intel 12th Gen CPU with their new A750 GPU). It was very finicky at first, but as soon as Linux 6.2 rolled around it worked almost flawlessly. For first gen hardware, that's some incredibly work by the kernel team.

This. Total white-box support is the model that other manufacturers have struggled to match.

What does 'white-box support' mean?

I'm looking forward to this! A couple of years ago, I had decided to upgrade my self hosted solutions after running two NUCs non-stop that are almost ten years old (and still running!). Unfortunately, I decided to go cheap with the upgrade and I bought two Minisforum computers, and one of them decided to crap out after just 6 months. No word from support yet. I want to believe that I would have gotten much better support from Intel, if anything would have happened. Also, in general, the NUCs have been more stable with seemingly mundane "features" like sleeping. I know these are just two data points, but I felt validated reading some of the other comments on the HN post from the other day where Intel announced discontinuing the NUC and where people were praising Intel for Linux support and whatnot.

I'm slowly starting to accept that I shouldn't skimp on things that I want to be robust.

My experience with a NUC that died about 18 months into a two-year warranty was pretty good. It took a while to do all the tests they wanted, but the responses were usually same-day from Intel's side. In the end I got a replacement, whole thing took maybe two weeks (partially me being slow doing all the tests for an issue I knew needed an RMA but c'est la vie).

Shame to hear about Minisforum though.

Which model minisforum computer did you have? Mine also died suddenly. It was the fanless Kodlix GD41. I've read of other people with similar experience. What is it about these machines that causes them to fail so quickly? I would not buy from them again.

The hard thing about the rabbit hole is when you have one, you need two to mirror, and then maybe a third to stage or develop with…

Anyone using a NUC as a mini home server? How is it? or if you use something else as mini server what? and why?

I keep thinking of getting something which I can run multiple vms as needed for things like game servers, hosting docker containers, etc. load it up with a bunch of memory. I don't want anything too big/power hungry given most of the time it would likely sit idle.

I use mine as an ultra low-cost self-hosting machine. I have the cheapest dual-core NUC 11 (bnuc11atkc2) with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD (figured that would be enough) running Debian in a poorly ventilated IKEA cabinet. It runs Pi-hole, Home Assistant for my smart stuff (Zigbee stick via USB), Livebook (live coding notebooks) and Nextcloud, everything in Docker, and has two 4TB USB HDDs on BTRFS exposed via SMB as a cheap NAS with daily Restic backups to Backblaze.

The machine sits at 49-53 °C and I have the fan curve set so the fan only starts spinning when it gets a little over that. Which I believe doesn't happen at all, because it's so underpowered.

I don't know exactly how much power it consumes, but the whole IKEA cabinet sits at 16 W for my router, one Raspberry and this NUC together, so probably not much.

I have the latest Gen 13 I5. It was an impulse buy as was on offer at a good price.

I installed a 1TB Solodigm P44 NVME drive, 32GB memory.

OS wise I installed Proxmox. Install was a pain but that’s because I wanted LUKS encryption. I had to install Debian first, setup LUKS, then setup Dropbear ssh so I can ssh in to it at boot for the password. Once that was out the way I followed Proxmox’s instructions on migrating Debian to Proxmox which is a case of adding the Proxmox apt repos and installing. A vanilla Proxmox install is minutes, but then it’s unencrypted data which is a pain when selling drives.

I have a small vm with WireGuard + rarr suite of apps, then a bunch of lxc containers, jellyfin etc. It’s mostly idling away and silent but the fan kicks in pretty quickly if doing anything moderate cpu wise. The fan is loud when it starts.

I am happy with the purchase as it uses little power and it’s mostly silent for me. If it wasn’t an impulse buy based on the price a better option might of been the Aliexpress fanless N300 boxes at the low cpu end, or a one litre mini pc such as a eBay used HP Elite Mini G9 as they have better cooling so quieter.

You can add 10gb to the hp, dual NVMe, and 2.5 sata drive. A mini powerhouse https://www.servethehome.com/perfect-project-tinyminimicro-p...

I have ~ 10 NUCs in various roles, also some Gigabyte Brix. Some are servers, some are single-use developer machines (eg. I have separate ones for RHEL 7, 8 and 9), one is a desktop, one is a router.

Having owned so many over years, I've found they are fairly prone to problems and have some missing features. My main gripes are:

- Unreliable RAM. Obviously being Intel, ECC is not supported, and I have had several with bad RAM or random apparently RAM-related hanging issues. You could argue that this is nothing to do with Intel since the RAM is always from a third party (but a top quality one), but why do I only ever have this problem with NUCs and not the dozens of other machines I own?

- CMOS batteries die after a few years and are not replaceable. Or they are replaceable if you completely dismantle the machine and desolder the battery leads, wrap a new CR2032 battery in tape with leads and solder it back to the board, but who has time for that. The battery should be socketed.

- Only one 1Gbps network port.

- Confusing model numbers and huge variety. ASUS should reduce and simplify the range.

- No remote access / BMC. This would be the one feature that would make the systems 100x more useful.

- Expensive! (Luckily Red Hat paid for most of them.) The Gigabyte machines are much cheaper.

The good thing about them is they are small, quiet and use little power.

For running VMs, note that the max possible RAM is 64GB. I do run VMs on some of mine, so it is possible.

> - No remote access / BMC. This would be the one feature that would make the systems 100x more useful.

Ironically this is one of the options provided by some models in the dizzying line up. While it's not a dedicated IPMI port it uses Intel vPro for BMC like functionality. You'll pay a pretty premium for those models though.

I tried to buy one, but once I worked out what the exact model number was that had VPro I couldn't find one in stock anywhere. It should really be a standard feature, but I guess Intel didn't want to cannibalize server sales?

The power consumption of an idle "Wall Street Canyon" 12th-generation model is almost negligible. At the SoC, often less than half a watt. At the wall, less than 5 watts typical, most of which is being wasted in the AC/DC conversion.

I use a wall street canyon NUC to run proxmox (hypervisor), portainer (docker management), pteradactyl (game server hosting panel), pihole (moving off the big point of failure soon :) ), and a handful of random things here or there.

It's been great so far, fans aren't too loud, power consumption isn't killer and there's ton of headroom still, assuming no modded minecraft server taking my ram.

I have 4 older NUC8i5BEH with 64gb ram in a vpshere8 cluster. It makes a nice little lab, and it has been stable for years.

I have an i3-8109U NUC, probably purchased in 2019. I've had to replace the fan a year or two ago (found an unofficial replacement on ebay), but otherwise I haven't had any trouble with it (running Debian).

It replaced a Raspberry Pi 3, and is obviously way more performant compared to that.

For me it's been great. When I finally found RAM and an SSD that was supported(!!), the experience got rock steady. On a headless Ubuntu server I'm hosting Home Assistant, Plex (the hardware transcoding and tone mapping is fantastic on a 12th gen Intel CPU), have tested out some "arrs" and I can tell there's plenty of headroom for more applications. The only thing is the fan noise when it really gets going. But I gather the 13th gen NUCs are much quieter. Considering a chassis swap in future.

But the tradeoff for a small NUC is a big power brick.

https://androidtvbox.eu/ecs-liva-x-bay-trail-mini-pcs-suppor...

I've been using this with Debian for years. My only complain is I needed one of the HDMI fake (or real) devices for the device to boot.

I really like it's an amd64 and not an ARM. Allows to run software released as binary for Linux desktop.

I have a USB-3 hard disk convected (Toshiba) and that's the slowest thing on the device.

Yes, and it’s excellent.

Scored my model for €450, barely used. i7 8665, 32 GB RAM and 500GB SSD. It would have been around double that price new. This was about 4 years ago.

It’s quiet, rock solid and can run just about anything I throw at it. It’s even overkill for my uses, but if I get another 5 years out of it it’s incredible value for the money.

I have an HP EliteDesk Mini PC as a mini home server. It's doing a great job, but the fans get quite loud when under load. It's an older model though.

If I had to replace it, I'd probably opt for some kind of similar devices, but using a modern low-powered AMD chip instead of Intel.

I have a NUC running Debian for 8 years as a fileserver for my home, with 2 x 2T USB HD. It was slow (USB2) but fine for the intended use of mostly cold storage.

I recently replaced it with a Synology Diskstation, looking for a new job for the still running NUC.

Lenovo or HP mini PC with PCIe slot, https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/

I've got about a dozen fanless Celeron based NUCs out there for remote automation and other small scale server use. I'm a huge fan of the platform.

How are people pronouncing NUC? Like “nuck” (rhymes with “Zuck”) or “nuke” (rhymes with “puke”)?

Or nook (rhymes with book)? At work I say nuck, but most others say nook, so I'd like to get to the bottom of this!

Now I’m imagining your coworkers talking about getting nookie.

Wait, zuck and book rhyme, how are nook and nuck different?

zUck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-open_central_vowel

bOOk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_central_rounded_vowel

Must be a midwestern accent thing, I don’t pronounce book, “boooook” (as in what a ghost with a cough says)

Book/nook are not as in boo/goo, but they're also not the same as in buck/Zuck. This is not a Midwestern thing. I can't recall ever meeting a native US english speaker for whom these vowel sounds weren't distinct. Probably in some accents they blur together.

Rather, I think some may be rhyming Zuck with buck which does not rhyme with book.

Edit: oops, smolder said the same thing but I was reading a stale page without the reply...

Here are some pairs of words to show they don’t rhyme:

Pluck / took

Duck / rook

Suck / shook

Like ``news''.

it's like gif as in gif

This makes me less inclined to buy NUCs in the future. I have more faith in Intel to deliver products without cutting corners than asus. I say this with my current and previous mobos both being asus. Intel NUCs were always the premium option in the micro pc market. I’m much more likely to at least look at other integrators now that it’s an Asus NUC.

I have like an 8-10 year-old NUC and I love it.

I got another one for my mom, it's her primary PC. It's tiny, reasonably speedy with 16 GB of RAM, well-built, hasn't needed any maintenance.

ASUS makes sense, glad the NUC found a new home.

Huh? ASUS already makes PCs and mobos. Intel still makes chips.

NUC is just a chip in a small mobo in a little case.

This is just selling the name "NUC" for marketing?

Is ASUS going to maintain the PCI backplane platform for expandable NUC?

I've been a small fan (pun intended) of the Intel NUC product range, and have found them to be solid, compatible platforms for multi-OS development, provided that one sticks with the small form-factor models (c.f. Asus BeeBox range) and buys the Core i7-based barebones kits.

The Geekom Mini IT range, by all accounts, appears on the surface to be a rebadged, upspecified flavor of the Intel NUC baseboards; I wonder if there is a back story to this as regards the underlying ODM ecosystem....

Dear ASUS: please make a range of NUC with either on-board 4+ SATA lanes or a PCIx instance which can take a daughtercard which does true parallel SATA, not serialised.

TL;DR the market for home RAID/NAS is huge. We need you to stop needing us to max out with only 1 device, and sometimes M.2 keying isn't where we are. People are well beyond "2 disks is enough" in a home NAS now.

thanksbai.

The Helios64 was a serious contender with a promising future ... until the small team got hammered with pandemic and supply chain issues.

https://wiki.kobol.io/helios64/intro/

https://www.hackster.io/news/open-spec-nas-specialist-kobol-...

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/plrwos/looking...

Looking at the bandwidth numbers a PCIe 3 x4 slot (like those used for M.2 slots) should be good for 4x SATA 3 ports, no "serialization" required.

There's this https://www.tomshardware.com/news/silverstone-turns-one-m2-s... but it's only x2 and theoretically a bottleneck.

Thats my hope. So I may be "meh, we've moved on, M.2 is the universal glue" about this now.

Yes, ASUS makes one-liter small PCs with two M.2 PCIe 4.0 sockets, e.g. PN53 (AMD) or PN64-E1 (Intel Raptor Lake; the -E1 is essential, PN64 is a very different worse computer). Beelink, Minisforum and others also make similar small computers with two M.2 2280 sockets.

If the bottom cover is removed, one can add two of these adapters from M.2 key M to five SATA ports:

Delock Converter M.2 2280 Key B+M male to 5 x SATA with heat sink

https://www.delock.com/produkt/64051/merkmale.html?g=1818

In this way one can connect up to eleven SSDs/HDDs to such a small computer (it already has one SATA port). Making an improvised support for them is easy, e.g. one can reuse the removable cage from an old computer case. One can make a cut through the bottom cover for passing the SATA cables and the internal SSD/HDD cage can be removed if it gets in the way.

I long considered doing this and I the end decided storage should be an appliance not seen or heard from which is relatively self managed and hot swappable and doesn’t require too much maintenance. Qnap/synology was dropped in and hasn’t been heard from in years.

There should be a dedicated ssd nas, that would be quite cool.

Setting up local compute was worth looking at on its own.

Sincere question: How are you even going to fit more than one 2.5" drive in a NUC? These things are tiny.

Cable(s) out to an external drive holder with an ATX -> Sata uplift from a DC psu.

I run the radxa USB3->SATA bridge pi-Hat which is a jmicron chipset and with the vagueries of USB- attached drives, but SATA like speed through a serialising controller I do pretty well. I'd like to do astonishingly well.

So the use case is "yea I can't fit it inside the NUC case but I can bridge it to a small box" -or run the NUC with the lid off and re-tool the case.

if you don't care about having it all fit inside a case, then the NUC isn't really doing anything for you. just grab any motherboard you want and build yourself a heap of parts like my NAS: https://ibb.co/6W7MkL4

So, since the form factor isn't the goal here (separate box with umbilical cord, after all), what exactly is the purpose in using a NUC or similarly sized small computer?

None of this is intended to be condescending or anything, I'm just sincerely curious about the train of logic here. What you're talking about so far seems like something that would be satisfied by a custom Mini-ITX build with appropriate case/tower or something similar, so I would like to know why that isn't.

Fanless. It's about low noise. Reusing a fullsize case with a fanless mini itx board might be the way to go if the passive cooling worked out. The NAS with fan in use now has a noise penalty I want to avoid.

I've used NUC and they are remarkably well made but you're on the money: they just may not be a good "fit"

What you’re describing is not a product, it’s a kludge. Even if you can stomach the poor reliability of an octopus of wires, a product designed to be used like that is likely to fail EMI testing.

I’ve certainly done this with SAS Harnesses coming out the side of my tower case, but you can’t expect a company to make a product with this use case in mind. There exists SFF NAS boxes with room for many drives for this purpose.

The NAS boxes I can see either assume USB-C or don't seem to provide much clue to how to use an eSATA to connect between things. If they were easy to work with I think there would be a lot more 'use this box to house the disks and this cable to connect over to the computer' and sure, I'd use the single SATA at some saturated speed.

I live in ZFS. These box makers often assume you want to run their Raid card, and have optioned up 'to make it better' without understanding ZFS exists, uses its memory efficiently (ignore the 'not on less than 4GB' thing its highly specific to some time in history and de-dupe) and wants a dull-as-ditchwater HBA to talk to the drives. Or, worse yet, they embed the CPU and you buy their packaged solution with their suite of apps and their model of GUI. Like the NAS I moved off, which had a sparc CPU and ceased being able to run, aside from which it was locked to <2TB drives.

You're not wrong btw. I am just saying "no, the home NAS space isn't as easy as you say, if you want to run ZFS yourself" unless I have missed a key term to search for, getting standalone drive enclosures.

I can believe I am not the market. Mainly because very few SBCs have more than one SATA slot, even less more than 2 and many of the M.2 keyed sata cards are listed in a homebrew filestore page with "odd chip, drivers uncommon" -If I was the market I am sure by now, more of them would be mainstream and more web pages would say "sure: its easy!"

Pretty much any HBA has a passthrough mode. It’s what I’m using with my HP micro server gen8 to run Unraid.

I have the system76 branded nuc and it works pretty well. Glad to see the line won't just be discontinued

Have to say my experience with Intel and ASUS lately has just been one of shoddiness/instability- 12900ks + z690 desktop build has been pretty unstable just trying to enable the advertised features in the bios (xmp for instance). So I wish them better luck this time..

XMP comes with no guarantees. If you are unlucky in terms of CPU silicon, or your motherboard has suboptimal ram signal quality, you will need to turn down from the XMP speed to achieve stability. You can improve your odds of stability at high freq buying motherboards known for good ram speeds but for the CPU it's always a lottery.

The 9700k I had was one of those unlucky chips that just couldn't do faster than 3200mhz RAM without occasional issues.

You’re correct. That said it’s kind of wild to me that the silicon lottery has stayed strong. They ought to be made to disclose when they are selling overclocker models that will not really overclock that well. Doesn’t seem right to have to pay flagship prices when they know they’re selling you something that won’t reach that level. At least package it as a lesser SKU or something imo

Here’s hoping this leads to another line of affordable small computers like their much-loved Eee series.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee

What I find most interesting is not the use case of a standalone, small, cheap desktop computer: it's what this enables other industries to achieve.

See for example, what Korg is doing in the electronic music industry with a Raspberry-based platform: the OpSix, Modwave and Wavestate are a whole new line of affordable desktop synthesizers with powerful capabilities. Couple that with something like Roland Cloud and you could end up with a cloud-aware synth that could automatically download new sounds and features on demand, all under a subscription model without the need of a tethered PC because the device is a PC.

I use a Nuc as my main desktop machine and LOVE not having the giant box under my desk anymore. I'm thrilled that the line will continue, because I'd have another when it's time to replace this one.

I really liked having a Mac Mini. I might pick one up in the future considering how competent Apple’s GPUs have a potential of getting. Big hopes for M3.

Meanwhile there's also the Gigabyte Brix.

https://www.gigabyte.com/au/Mini-PcBarebone

While in the past I have used a pair of Gigabyte Brix with good results, I no longer consider them for any new purchase.

The reason is that all the Gigabyte Brix are designed for a maximum working ambient temperature of 35 Celsius degrees. Where I live, in Europe, the ambient temperature is frequently higher than that.

Now, a condition for buying any new computer is to have a maximum working ambient temperature of at least 40 Celsius degrees, like it was true for most Intel NUC models.

I uses a NUC9 with hackintosh as my music production workstation. Although Apple is phasing out x86, it still have a lifespan of abput 2 to 3 years until Logic Pro no longer works.

Does Logic Pro phone home to startup? If not you could just have a much longer lifespan provided you don't care about updating Logic and the underlying OS, which is ok if that box is not connected to vulnerable machines and the internet.

I specifically chose the i7 version of the NUC 9 Extreme Kit aka Ghost Canyon, just because MBP Late 2019 has the i7-9750H (spoiler alert: they have the same CPU), so it is still pretty decent in terms of spec, but I don't get the chance to try out the new AI stuff on Apple Silicon.

Another thing though, I attached my 6600 XT ITX card into the Ghost Canyon so it can also carry out huge heavylifting of video editing, which I planned on using Final Cut Pro for such so.

Unfortunately, Apple removed the Broadcom drivers/kext in the latest public beta, the macOS Sonoma apparently raised the supported devices to 2017 and that's when Apple started to use custom built-in chip from Broadcom which can't be used as a M.2. Wifi module. Apple is fucking with most of the Hackintosh users this way and it is clear they waited for a long time.

So, until we can find a way to inject the legacy Broadcom drivers into Sonoma, the Hackintosh network connectivity situation is uncertain and dire.

> 6600 XT ITX card

What is an ITX card? I assume that should say pcie card?

It's something like this

https://www.asrock.com/Graphics-Card/AMD/Radeon%20RX%206600%...

Single fan, low profile, high cost.

Low profile? It seems to use the space of a second pci slot at least for cooling according to the picture.

I wanted to understand what NUC is and what it is used for… but after 13th mention of “NUC” (as if we all knew wth it was), I just gave up. Bad marketing always hurts more than help.

Next Unit of Computing; basically a computer system that's been pushed to the limit of size vs performance using client CPUs. It's only of those classic computer industry TLAs (three letter acronyms) where they assume everyone knows what it means, even though you'd never work it out on your own.

thank you!

I can only guess that ASUS was probably already acting as an OEM for the NUC line and is just taking on the responsibility for updates. ASUS has already produced several lines of mini sized computers, so not too surprising that they'll make them.

I am slightly surprised that they're taking on the mantel of NUC though. Probably more about getting the Trademark than anything else. I wonder if this means "NUC" as a brand will stay exclusively Intel though.

I picked up a stack of nucs that a previous employer was about to recycle most of them i5s one i7. Turned them into a small kube cluster on my desk, they run my plex setup, email, mastodon server, other web applications, etc. Little things just keep humming along like no-ones business.

Was pretty saddened to hear that intel was looking at getting out of the business but glad to see asus picking up a license.

It's funny and sad how the NUC started as a super small form factor device but eventually ended up as mini-ITX. Intel's own models have been mini-itx for years now.

That said, I see zero reason to buy anything Intel as AMD is spanking them pretty much everywhere. That may change soon if rumours of hoarding all the latest EXE machines are true.

Most NUCs aren't anywhere near as large as a mini-ITX. The larger ones are the enthusiast models that nobody bought. The NUCs they actually sold millions of are the ones that are 4 inches square and an inch tall.

Other than gaming the only 3 intel machines I bought is intel stick like and later small box shape machine. I think it must be quite successful as I am a mac person. Sad to see it gone because it has its use.

Surprise to see it survive. Strange. Does intel has a network to know. I start to worry now.

How is ASUS build quality these days?

Hard to tell, but here's some anecdata:

I cooked the LCD panel in my ASUS G14 laptop because apparently sleep mode means 100% CPU mode.

Some bits of hardware are great(like the chassis and heat sinks - with a Ryzen 4800HS you can browse the internet with fans shut off through third party software), some suck(e.g. keyboard lighting, LCD back cover), but overall for me it's the firmware that spoils everything.

Battery charging limit sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, so I occasionally end up with a full charge, because that's apparently governed by the aptly named MyASUS app which may or may not actually work on any given day.

I took the opportunity to repaste the thing when I broke the fans(available only via AliExpress - the official parts store doesn't have anything useful), because after less than two years the paste was already flaking, causing overheating.

I "solved" the problem of the iGPU going at 100% frequency at all times by setting the dGPU as the preferred one(!) - achieving a jump from 2.5h to 5h battery life, when it used to be close to 10h before firmware/OS updates. The culprits could be: ASUS, Windows or AMD - no idea which though.

I have a cheap Vivobook laptop, it's fine. At least it looks more robust than the cheap Lenovo I had before... Obviously none of them are as robust as my old 2012 DELL which I dropped many times on the floor without even scratching it or damaging the screen. But the latter is also way heavier and its performances just can't match a Ryzen 5.

Varies by cost as they have a range from cheap to premium. Their cheap is a higher quality than Lenovo’s cheap, if that’s any benchmark.

Asus gear just seems to keep working

The Zenfone 10 seems pretty high quality.

I have a hard time shopping for NUCs (or really anything that comes in "product lines" instead of just having numbers). How am I to know if Bronze Puddle is faster than Medicated Jackrabbit, and where does Broad Jump fit into that ranking?

Where is the ARM equivalent or put another way budget Linux Apple Mini competitor?

Try looking at ARM Embedded Single Boards. They're only ever marketed to industry for smart automation/IoT systems, but effectively fill the niche you're looking for: https://uk.farnell.com/c/embedded-computers-education-maker-...

I've saved a few during my years of lab management as they ran our infrastructure, and they're cracking PCs. Sometimes I run into fringe issues with drivers, but never anything major. Pretty much all validated on Linux OS too, so better support than most client PCs.

Raspberry Pi and its various competitors... the problem is you can't just go and buy ARM CPUs or boards if you're not either willing to upfront serious amounts of cash or have personal relations to Qualcomm and friends (which is how RPi got their in).

You have a couple top tier vendors when it comes to actually performant SoCs:

- Apple, which exclusively produces for their own lineup, and has inarguably the best-performing chips by far in raw performance and power efficiency to a tune they're outperforming Intel

- Samsung, which use (almost) all their production for their own phones, tablets and TVs - I'm not aware of Samsung SoCs ending up in any third party product

- Annapurna Labs, which belong to Amazon for a few years now, and whose SoCs end up being used in servers (both AWS themselves and third parties, QNAP uses a fair few of their models)

- Qualcomm and Broadcom, who won't return your calls unless you're talking millions of dollars in volume, have all their documentation behind NDAs and have serious deviations from any kind of standards which is what makes supporting them in Android forks a huge pain in the ass, and even the RPi chipset lacks behind severely in something as basic as PCIe, see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150697

- Mediatek and Rockchip which are even worse than the above two regarding documentation/standards/BSP quality, but you seem to stand a chance acquiring one of their chips even if you're small volume - almost all el-cheapo/gongkai devices and RPi competitors are based on their chips

- NVIDIA with their Tegra lineup which seems to be used only on the Nintendo Switch, a few settop boxes and automotive

That's more than in the x86/64 ecosystem on paper, where the only players left in town are Intel and AMD... but these are based on some common standardized core around BIOS/UEFI/PCI, there is no such thing in the entire ARM space. If you want to design a device using ARM, you're left either relying on a more-or-less open BSP from the vendor or doing everything including the bootloader yourself, and it's left to each SoC/board vendor on how to wire stuff like sensors (yes, I'm aware of device trees, but they don't come close to the easiness of x86/64). In total, it's a fuckton of work for very low gain as the market share for desktop ARM (Apple aside) just isn't there.

> Apple, which exclusively produces for their own lineup, and has inarguably the best-performing chips by far in raw performance and power efficiency to a tune they're outperforming Intel

Also limited in terms of running Linux on it, since the poster you replied to asked about that.

At least the incentive for highly skilled reverse engineers is there and it's showing in pretty solid support [2] and contributions.

For example Apple is known for re-using SoC blocks across many generations - according to an (admittedly unsourced, but I've seen it stated multiple times) HN comment [1], the UART has been the same since the first iPhone through all the years past including M1/M2 machines, whereas Samsung alone has four incompatible variations, and all the other vendors each have their own idea as well, while the entirety of x86 can be spoken to in bare-metal assembler.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28768942

[2] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support

> Apple [...] has inarguably the best-performing chips by far in raw performance and power efficiency

This is overstated. There are some benchmarks M2 does amazingly at, partly due to a super wide memory bus shared by the GPU. Power efficiency on performance desktop x86 is much worse than M2, but efficiency is comparable with lower TDP x86 SKUs and server chips.

If you're comparing M1/M2 chips to apple x86, you are looking at obsolete x86. Otherwise, I think it's buying into the hype just a bit much to say x86 is inarguably behind by far.

It's wild to me there's no clear answer for this; it seems like such an obvious product! Raspberry Pi is neat but not quite powerful enough, particularly when it comes to disk IO.

Raspberry Pi and their clones come close

There are many nice NUC like devices on Amazon. BeeLink makes some good ones with both Intel and AMD.

I think this is a great end result for the NUC. Asus makes some good stuff and they can probably push the NUC some more for reasonable prices.

Beelink devices are great. Super powerful for the price.

I wish they sold ARM ones. I've been wondering if it'd be possible to put a full arm linux desktop distribution on one of their 'super console x king' devices, which seem to be a rebranded Beelink GT King which they used to offer the ability to install arbitrary linux distro's on.

+1 for BeeLink stuff. I was surprised how tiny they were and yet still powerful!

Good. I love the NUCs and I hope the pricing becomes much more competitive. A bare bones Quad i5 on a little PCB in a plastic box with a wall wart should not cost $400. I can buy an new i5 laptop for that.

This is really a best case outcome. NUCs are great but Intel is sort of a lousy manufacturer to get PC support from, and ASUS is already on the premium end of consumer PC brands.

I'm happy they are partnering with Asus. Not as happy if it means Asus products such as the PN5x series with AMD processors will get the axe.

Very interesting move to do it with Asus seeing as I've been using both NUCs and Asus PN5x mini PCs these last 3 years.

I hope that doesn't affect AMD 8-core mini PCs from ASUS as a part of the deal...

What is an example of a NUC product? Get I get one at newegg?

Aren't ASUS mini PCs manufactured by the GEEKOM?

Lots of blah but no details

ASUS FTW!

I feel like it’s really hard to justify one of these in light of m2 Mac minis. High usage memory applications?

Are the minis upgradeable? My nuc now has an nvme drive and a 2.5" ssd, and I've upped it to 32gb ram for some light vmware work.

On the other side of spectrum I have a few cheap nucs with celeron for media tv and streaming purposes.

If I read it correctly, Mac mini is 800cad for 8gb ram and 256 sdd.

I understand, but I feel like nucs always end up at this weird, “I’m going to drop 200 on ram, 200 on a ssd and have a 700-900 dollar thing that has no second hand value and really isn’t that powerful”. I remember throttling being an issue as well. Add a custom heat sink and some thermal paste? (50-100 more..)

It just feels like you’re paper cutting your way into a more expensive system. Not sure on small form factor pcs otherwise though. Hp z2 minis always seemed neat and typically have a promo code that works with a bare config you can bring your own ram/disk + Linux.

Have you seen the prices of RAM and SSDs lately? You can get name brand 32gb of DDR5 and a 1 TB NVME drive for a little over $100. Apple is literally charging 1000% markup on these upgrades.

"No second hand value"?

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=NUC11TNKi7&_s...

I can understand that perception. Depends on situation I suppose. I find that a) ram and ssd prices are way more affordable than that b) I always seem to have some around anyway - The circle of upgrades! And c) I wish second hand value was low, I'd be buying them like candy, but it isn't :-/

They can be nice as small servers. OSX is not as suited to server usage as a BSD or Linux and doesn’t have expandable storage - NUCs have additional m2 or sata drive ports. The NUCs also cost less.

Or if you want more than 256 gigs of storage built in. The Mini’s pricing makes no sense at all if it’s not Base or with the M2 Pro.

Much better as home-servers (450~ euros for a barebone 1340p is a pretty good deal). They have really good IO and linux support.

if you're using these in any sort of volume, then the $4-500 of savings is significant.

also, if you're not using MacOS then having hardware that's actually compatible with your OS is nice. all respect to the asahi linux folks, but i'm not going to give that to my customers.

How so?

Depends on the application, but for base line Apple silicon mac minis, ram is like lungs, even if the cpu/legs are super fast.

The max studio m1 max on the other hand is worth looking at.

Operating systems other than MacOS? (Well, Asahi is pretty impressive but it is only a couple years old).

Base price is $599 for 8GB and 256GB of storage. A NUC with more storage isn't that expensive.

There are advantages if the M2 is what you want, but CPU/GPU aren't always the thing to optimize for here.

My 8/256 NUC setup cost $230, the cheapest 8/256 Mini is $825 here. Easiest choice to justify ever.

What if you just don't want os x?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com