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.
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...
Dell has the optiplex
Go has the elitedesk and pro desk
All in mini/usff formfactor similar to the size of a Mac mini.
Still the NUC size machines have their place, even the small chromeboxes, etc.
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.
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.
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.
So many cores and threads for so few watts.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Aside: been using NVidia Shield TV(s) and Kodi for local/nas media.
Nucs, or USFF's are quite performant.
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.
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.
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.
They’re $599 at full price and easily found on sale for $500 or less.
Personally I have a USB disk plugged into my router and my HTPC just grabs files over the network.
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.
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.
I see there are aftermarket VESA mounts for the mini, and I suppose you can tape or glue the disk to it somehow.
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…
My point mostly was that if you buy a Mac Mini, you aren’t really trapped.
And where do you plug in the extra RAM?
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.
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.
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.
You have to be in a completely distorted reality field to choose Apple in these circumstances.
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.
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.
But fair enough, let's assume 45W and not 95W. It's still a lot more than the Mac Mini.
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.
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.
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.
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 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