Intel NUC
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The last time I bought a desktop PC was about two years ago and I did not look at what is currently available until yesterday. Now I find variations of the mini Intel NUC PC everywhere. Looks good, lots of configuration options. Any user comments?
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VE2 wrote:
Any user comments?
Are you seeking comments on your comments, or is there implied question in there somewhere? We all have access to the same information, so you're either going to get a reply with Google search results, or an actual reply that was taken from a specific Google search result. If you're simply wanting to know what to buy, simply go with the most you can afford.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him." - James D. Miles
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The last time I bought a desktop PC was about two years ago and I did not look at what is currently available until yesterday. Now I find variations of the mini Intel NUC PC everywhere. Looks good, lots of configuration options. Any user comments?
73
Users always have comments. Some of them are actually usable. And a few are even printable!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Users always have comments. Some of them are actually usable. And a few are even printable!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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The last time I bought a desktop PC was about two years ago and I did not look at what is currently available until yesterday. Now I find variations of the mini Intel NUC PC everywhere. Looks good, lots of configuration options. Any user comments?
73
You get what you pay for. A cheap PC with no cooling and a tiny motherboard, which will make impossible to install any good sound card or video card. No cooling means overheating and life-span of a couple of years or so. All you can do is upgrade your hard drive, probably only one and add some memory. Some people use their PCs to browse the internet and to send e-mail. If that is what you need, go ahead. When I buy a PC I go to a custom PC builder web site and select some quality components in a big box with water cooling. Like this per example: [SABRE GTX - 4K Star Citizen Battle Station](http://www.extreme-pc.ca/showproduct.asp?productid=370123&menu1id=10&menu2id=5&menu3id=40) And then stick with it for 5+ years gradually upgrading components as needed.
throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.
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The last time I bought a desktop PC was about two years ago and I did not look at what is currently available until yesterday. Now I find variations of the mini Intel NUC PC everywhere. Looks good, lots of configuration options. Any user comments?
73
It's a nice toy but overpriced (big time) for the features you have...
Skipper: We'll fix it. Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this? Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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OriginalGriff wrote:
Users always have comments. Some of them are actually usable. And a few are even printable!
Printable users! Figured that was still a few years away.
Signature ready for installation. Please Reboot now.
What? You don't have a BioPrinter? :omg:
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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The last time I bought a desktop PC was about two years ago and I did not look at what is currently available until yesterday. Now I find variations of the mini Intel NUC PC everywhere. Looks good, lots of configuration options. Any user comments?
73
I build my own.
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What? You don't have a BioPrinter? :omg:
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
Normal 3D printers are sufficient. Just last night I have been printing the first one of my two 'users'. Vietnam Huey pilots in this particular case.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
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I build my own.
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The last time I bought a desktop PC was about two years ago and I did not look at what is currently available until yesterday. Now I find variations of the mini Intel NUC PC everywhere. Looks good, lots of configuration options. Any user comments?
73
I :love: :love: :love: my Gigabit Brix! 8 thread i7, 16GB RAM, 500GB fast write Samsung SSD, HDMI + DisplayPort video outputs, digital audio and 4 USB3 ports. A lot of goodness in a 4" x 4" x 2" package. Runs VS2015 blazingly fast and is deathly quiet. It's so small you can take it with you in your carry-on luggage when you travel by air. All you need is a keyboard, mouse and monitor. /ravi
My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com
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The last time I bought a desktop PC was about two years ago and I did not look at what is currently available until yesterday. Now I find variations of the mini Intel NUC PC everywhere. Looks good, lots of configuration options. Any user comments?
73
Wow, I'm guessing the naysayers who have responded so far have NOT used a NUC, or they simply didn't know what to expect or make of it. They certainly have their uses. There's Celeron-based NUCs that can be had for USD$125, but clearly - you can't build any sort of good machine around that, regardless of form factor. I practically spend my entire time working off of virtual machines (running on a physical host in another room, at the office 70 kms away, or on Azure), so the machine I have on my desk doesn't matter all that much. What matters to me is that I have something that's quiet, isn't a huge power draw, and doesn't generate a ton of heat. That rules out a lot of standard machines. My VM host has loud fans and is quite the heat source (bad in the summer), so I didn't want it in my home office. That machine is tucked away in another room so I don't see or hear it, and I remote into it from the NUC on my desk. I bought my first NUC (NUC5i5MYBE) almost 3 years ago when I first learned they could drive 4K monitors. So I have a 40" 4K TV as my main display running off of it, plus a 24" 1920x1200 monitor and a 27" 1920x1080 (both running off of VGA to USB 3 adapters). It boots up ridiculously fast. With an SSD and 16GB RAM, nearly everything I do locally gets an immediate response. This is fast enough to run three 1080p videos on all 3 monitors at the same time without ever dropping a single frame. It's no gaming machine, but that's not what I got it for. I've certainly used much slower laptops - it's an i5, 2.3 GHz, and 4 logical CPUs (2 cores + hyperthreading) so it's really no slouch. Since then I've purchased a second one (NUC7i5BNH) as that newer generation can handle 32GB of RAM, and my main VM host (with 64GB) was getting bogged down, and I had a need to start creating a bunch of Linux VMs. And I didn't want another loud, power-hungry beast running 24/7. While I don't run VS itself on it, given that some people are okay coding on old(ish) laptops, I could certainly see someone doing that on a NUC. And, they support virtualization, so even one with "merely" 16GB of RAM will do if you don't need a bunch of heavyweight VMs. YMMV, but please - nobody will convince me there's no place for them.
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You get what you pay for. A cheap PC with no cooling and a tiny motherboard, which will make impossible to install any good sound card or video card. No cooling means overheating and life-span of a couple of years or so. All you can do is upgrade your hard drive, probably only one and add some memory. Some people use their PCs to browse the internet and to send e-mail. If that is what you need, go ahead. When I buy a PC I go to a custom PC builder web site and select some quality components in a big box with water cooling. Like this per example: [SABRE GTX - 4K Star Citizen Battle Station](http://www.extreme-pc.ca/showproduct.asp?productid=370123&menu1id=10&menu2id=5&menu3id=40) And then stick with it for 5+ years gradually upgrading components as needed.
throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.
They have a fan. They have USB 3 ports. You can run as many external hard drives as you wish. Who still installs separate sound cards? The built-in Intel video chipset is more than sufficient for a lot of applications. But gaming machines, they are not. You clearly are not drawing a fair comparison. Different purposes.
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The last time I bought a desktop PC was about two years ago and I did not look at what is currently available until yesterday. Now I find variations of the mini Intel NUC PC everywhere. Looks good, lots of configuration options. Any user comments?
73
I have a 1 year old Core i5 NUC with 16Gb RAM / 1 TB SSD running Windows 10 Pro. For the first 6-8 months it hung intermittently (1 in 5 times) upon boot or very soon after. If it made it through the first few minutes it was solid for as long as it remained on. Very frustrating. After a bunch of Intel driver updates a few months back it's MUCH better. I don't want to curse it by saying it's totally fixed. Let's just say I'm cautiously optimistic.
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I have a 1 year old Core i5 NUC with 16Gb RAM / 1 TB SSD running Windows 10 Pro. For the first 6-8 months it hung intermittently (1 in 5 times) upon boot or very soon after. If it made it through the first few minutes it was solid for as long as it remained on. Very frustrating. After a bunch of Intel driver updates a few months back it's MUCH better. I don't want to curse it by saying it's totally fixed. Let's just say I'm cautiously optimistic.
Never had as much of a stutter on either of mine except for music streaming off of my LAN, but that turned out to be a player problem. As you wrote, driver updates might help - but have you also looked at upgrading the BIOS? Intel seems to do a better job of regularly providing BIOS updates than most motherboard manufacturers. That said, avoid the very recent Spectre/Meltdown updates. In this particular case, Intel's actually rolled back one of them (but then, that's not a problem specific to NUCs).
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They have a fan. They have USB 3 ports. You can run as many external hard drives as you wish. Who still installs separate sound cards? The built-in Intel video chipset is more than sufficient for a lot of applications. But gaming machines, they are not. You clearly are not drawing a fair comparison. Different purposes.
The Intel NUC machines are the Microsoft/Intel response to the popularity of the android smart TV media boxes. None of the ones I have seen have a fan, so it's a niche media center/smartTV streaming PC. Some people are happy with what is on the mother board, some are not. And I do install ASUS sound cards on my PCs, there IS a difference if paired with quality headphones.
throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.
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Never had as much of a stutter on either of mine except for music streaming off of my LAN, but that turned out to be a player problem. As you wrote, driver updates might help - but have you also looked at upgrading the BIOS? Intel seems to do a better job of regularly providing BIOS updates than most motherboard manufacturers. That said, avoid the very recent Spectre/Meltdown updates. In this particular case, Intel's actually rolled back one of them (but then, that's not a problem specific to NUCs).
I was probably too vague in my post. I've done every BIOS update that's come along (not including the most recent Spectre/Meltdown ones). So it could have been one of them that has improved things. BTW - What's the problem with the current Intel Spectre/Meltdown updates?
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The last time I bought a desktop PC was about two years ago and I did not look at what is currently available until yesterday. Now I find variations of the mini Intel NUC PC everywhere. Looks good, lots of configuration options. Any user comments?
73
At my company we have a LOT of them for people who use primarily web-based apps and MS Office. For users like those the NUCs work well. We also have a number of what we call "marquee apps" for the factory floor and we use them for some of those. If you need something that is a step up from an NUC, Zotac has little boxes that are a bit more capable. Some have pretty good graphics chips in them and cost about twice as much as an NUC. We use those when we need a bit more horsepower and connectivity like with multiple monitors and NICs.
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The Intel NUC machines are the Microsoft/Intel response to the popularity of the android smart TV media boxes. None of the ones I have seen have a fan, so it's a niche media center/smartTV streaming PC. Some people are happy with what is on the mother board, some are not. And I do install ASUS sound cards on my PCs, there IS a difference if paired with quality headphones.
throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.
Sounds like you're thinking of the Intel Compute Stick. That competes directly with the Android TV boxes, and yes, with - what, 2GB of RAM? are rather unappealing to me. Maybe the Celeron-based NUCs don't have CPU fans, but the i3/i5/i7 ones, AFAIK, all do as they, after all, are the same mobile CPUs used in laptops. [Edit] Not to detract the conversion, but: I have a neighbor who calls himself an audiophile (the type who's spent tens of thousands in receivers and amps). Personally, I'm at a loss to suggest a soundcard to him - beyond what's build into motherboards these days. ASUS isn't exactly known as a high-end audio hardware maker. While I have little doubt it's better than onboard audio, I have to ask - have you ever looked at what else is out there?
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I was probably too vague in my post. I've done every BIOS update that's come along (not including the most recent Spectre/Meltdown ones). So it could have been one of them that has improved things. BTW - What's the problem with the current Intel Spectre/Meltdown updates?
Mike Mullikin wrote:
BTW - What's the problem with the current Intel Spectre/Meltdown updates?
Oh, boy, where do I start? Have you been hiding under a rock? :-) Intel's pretty much taken down every single BIOS updates they've published so far because of "random freezes" and "more frequent unexpected reboots". Running joke is that "more frequent than 0" is indeed a very bad thing. I just happen to have installed one of the updates that has been taken down, but I haven't seen a single problem so far...so unless the situation changes, I'm not going to roll it back.
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The last time I bought a desktop PC was about two years ago and I did not look at what is currently available until yesterday. Now I find variations of the mini Intel NUC PC everywhere. Looks good, lots of configuration options. Any user comments?
73
I have a NUC configured as follows: i3 processor 240 GB SSD - O/S + other software 500 GB HDD - TFS database I use it as my TFS server (with a backup configured to another machine), and it does everything that I need it to do. It's also quiet, small, and I use Remote Desktop in order to manage it. As far as I'm concerned, it's an almost ideal solution for my needs. The NUC comes with attachments for a VESA mount. I have seen schools in Israel that use a NUC attached to the back of a monitor as PCs. Their advantage is that you need no room for the system box.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack. --Winston Churchill
