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Comment by RandomBK | Hacker News Reader

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).

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> 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.

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.

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

Turing pi 2

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That’s good to know, I guess that the shitty HP build quality only applies to consumer intended products. Just another example of why refurbished or used enterprise equipment is the way to go.Thanks!

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.

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..

The main reason is that hiring a bunch of new developers will be 100x more expensive than spending a little extra on a Windows/x86 machine.

Sure the are...

1. LoB apps need to be run not just on a computer that only shows a screen, but in other contexts, there is no reason to develop a whole new app just for that purpose.

2. Developers who are only used to working with Win API's like WPF, DotNet, etc. or other frameworks that are windows only Why would we want to employ whole new dev team just to maintain that app separate from the apps that run on our Laptops and normal computers

3. Management Tools. If my entire fleet of computers is managed by ConfigMgr and controlled by Group Policy and Compliance Setting why would I want to spin up a completely separate management system like Ansible or something just to control these machines when I could have them integrated into my existing tool set of which my helpdesk and everyone else is trained to use?

I can probably come up with 5 or 10 more reasons

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.

Would a Mac mini work?

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

Nucs, or USFF's are quite performant.

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.

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.

Or, just as a wild thought, stay away from overpriced hardware.

What’s overpriced about the base model Mac mini? I agree that Apple way overcharges for upgrades, but the base model looks reasonably priced to me.

I dunno, the fact that you can get a much beefier machine for the same price?

I wouldn’t say much beefier.

They’re $599 at full price and easily found on sale for $500 or less.

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.

> as small a form factor as possible

This is what I want. And the Mac Mini does it better than the nuc as the power bricks the Nucs use are big, ugly and annoying to deal with.

It's hard for me to put my finger on it exactly but at this point NUCs just feel more hackable. For me, that's why the mini is not a satisfactory replacement.

If you want a little kube node, if you prefer the way ubuntu and debian upgrade over the way osx upgrades (and have the linux experience be decent), if you want to shuck it and slap the board in a robot and run ROS, if you want it to be a steam box with an eGPU, there's a bunch of things NUCs do well / places they fit that mac minis don't quite (yet, at least).

Mac minis are great but they're not the same thing. The "tight hand" of Apple makes them great but also limits them. Like you probably can do all the above, with sufficient effort but is not a first class experience, in the same way that an orange pi is not a raspberry pi.

The last mac minis i worked with were the final gen intel ones. Very similar to a NUC, you could run whatever linux on them fine (and even windows with the bootcamp drivers). I think we'll get to m* series mac minis running linux eventually, it's just going to take some time to get it all ironed out.

My fairly old NUC has a fanless case, 2TB NVMe, 64GiB RAM, and a VESA mount hiding it behind my screen.

I see there are aftermarket VESA mounts for the mini, and I suppose you can tape or glue the disk to it somehow.

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.

Such hacks just to get trapped in apples ecosystem? How can that be appealing?

How are you trapped in the ecosystem?

A Mac Mini can run more software than any of their competitors (you can’t install macOS on a VM on a Windows or Linux host but the reverse is possible).

Even on the hardware side you are free to connect third party drives, monitors, keyboards, etc…

You can actually install Mac os in a VM on Linux or Windows. It's not a technical issue, it's that Apple tries to make it hard to do so.

Yeah, it’s a legal issue.

My point mostly was that if you buy a Mac Mini, you aren’t really trapped.

The kind of mental gymnastics people go through...

Maybe I misunderstood what you meant by ecosystem and trapped. Care to elaborate?

*That's much slower and higher latency than the internal storage.

And where do you plug in the extra RAM?

This thread is talking about HTPC, and I'm wondering what the use case is where you need lots of RAM and the speed/latency of an internal NVMe drive.

My HTPC is about 12 years old, and I'm pretty sure that the internal SATA SSDs are slower than a modern external USB3.1 drive. Yet it does everything I ask of it with no noticeable delay.

>This thread is talking about HTPC

No, the thread is not mentioning HTPCS but about NUCs, which can also be used to do productivity work/games, not just watching movies, so exqueeze me that I want/need a system with 16GB of RAM and some decent storage in mid-2023 to be productive and am not contempt with the bare minimums of 8GB/256 and being price gouged for any drop over that.

You are exqueezed. While the overall topic is about NUCs, this particular thread of conversation appeared, to me, to be about HTPCs. Nevertheless, the existence in the marketplace of computers with underwhelming specification does not in any way diminish your techno-self-worth or invalidate your needs and desires.

Not if you use Thunderbolt 4 SSD (enclosure)

Yes, spend $600 on an base iMac Mini then spend $800 on an TB SSD with $200 worth of NVME inside it because ... logic ???

Meanwhile a 12th-Gen NUC with 16GB RAM and 500GB SSD costs ~$240 on Amazon, and you can replace the internal RAM and SSD with whatever size and models you want.

A 1 TB NVME SSD is like $40 retail these days.

He said external TB SSDs not USB SSDs. Check how much those cost. TB SSD of 4TB is like $1000.

Hold on a sec. I said enclosure such as https://www.amazon.com/USB4-Enclosure-40Gbps-Compatible-Thun... Then you can put whatever nvme ssd you want. It'll most likely cost around $500 at most.

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.

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.

For noise, you could budget about $100 for a fanless case for the NUC.

Wouldn’t it run slow? The Intel CPU data sheet says it emits 95W of heat in "turbo" mode. Is there fanless NUC cases capable to dissipate that amount of heat, without even thinking about the other sources of heat?

You don't design your cooling system to maintain peak turbo consumption. Thermal Design Power is 45W.

Why not? With max 45W it would throttle a lot under heavy loads.

This is not a bitcoin mining rig. And no, it wouldn't start to throttle, it would stop turbo. And the primary purpose of turbo is to get short bursts that the CPU might not even be able to maintain regardless of cooling system.

Designing the cooling system to keep up with that is by definition overkill. Which might be fine! Overkill can be fun. But it kind of goes in the face with a small system like a NUC.

Alright, but if you stop the turbo mode doesn't that invalidate a lot of CPU benchmarks? Is the CPU much slower than what we could believe it is in real life?

But fair enough, let's assume 45W and not 95W. It's still a lot more than the Mac Mini.

You won't stop the turbo mode, it is still working as designed...

Yes, for the first time in eternity apple has an edge in hardware. The solution is obviously to go all in in their walled garden ... profit?

You pick software ecosystem first, then you pick the hardware to run it. As such NUC vs. Mac Mini is apples vs. oranges.

If you already run ARM Linux VMs, it’s not much differences. The VMs host will run macOS instead of Linux but that’s not the end of the world.

As if the typical use case is to run ARM Linux VMs... But fine.

The typical solution, if VMs are your use case, is to use a hypervisor, such as XCP-NG, proxmox, ESXi etc. But if you want to shoehorn in OS X just for the sake of it, sure, that will work. But I guess you'd have to be pretty deep into apples ecosystem to even consider that.

And with VMs you typically want RAM and disk-space, and if you pick such a closed ecosystem that is going to be a real bummer.

If most of the devops people already use macs, it’s not too crazy.

But that’s a good point. I would say that we are in the DIY infrastructure world as deploying VMs on a Mac mini or NUC isn’t really following the industry best practices, but installing proxmox on a amd64 box is probably easier.

The VMs that mac-wielding DevOps guys deploy don't go into their laptops.

>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.

I'm responding to the guy who suggested a mac mini, not a laptop.

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.

That’s less of an issue than the price.

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

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

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.

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

Definite typo - meant HP, thanks!

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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 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

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

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).

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.

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 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.

> 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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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