Intel NUC for the family - journey to non-portable hardware
I have become so accustomed to owning laptops that I haven’t really looked into the area Big Grey Boxes in a while. But not all PCs are big and grey, Intel has been making these cute little mini PCs, Intel NUCs. These are essentially laptop components in a tiny box and crucially, you can buy it without a disk, RAM, and operating system, so that you can customise it a bit.
These have been quite popular for HTPC or small home servers, but I needed something else, a modest computer for my mum. She doesn’t need much, mostly just browsing, some casual gaming, video streaming, messaging. The NUC looked ideal, here’s what I learned over the past few weeks.
Model
When talking about the non-gaming models, there are three to choose from - i3, i5, and i7. I would personally choose the i5 as I view it a good value for money, but, watching Robtech’s videos (thanks!), I chose the i3, as it has enough oomph, but it should run quieter than the i5.
One more thing to choose is either the “low” variant or the “high” one. There is not price difference, the higher one just allows you to plug in a 2.5” disk as an addition to your M.2 system disk. This is handy for media/build/storage/backup servers, but I was fine with the M.2, so I went with the low variant, 10i3FNK.
Components
There are just two things to choose - RAM and disk. RAM was easier, I just picked a 16 GB DDR4 2666 MHz stick, they don’t really differ much in terms of performance. The only thing to watch out for is to choose a single stick if you want to leave some space for future upgrades. I wanted to go with 8 gigs originally, but seeing how cheap RAM is these days, I opted for 16 to make the PC future proof.
In terms of disk, boy was I surprised. Fast NVMe drivers are fairly cheap and the performance is amazing. I needed 256 gigs, so I went with the Samsung EVO Plus, which is one of the most performant drives. You can save a bit by going with an ADATA, a WD Black or some other drive that may be on sale. I admit this was a bit of an overkill and if I was on a tighter budget, I would have gone with an alternative.
Peripherals
I already had a keyboard and mouse available, as well as an old monitor, but you obviously need those if you don’t have them. If you’re buying these and also use quite a few USB-A ports, I’d look for bluetooth keyboard/mouse sets as the newest NUC only has three A ports, but make sure to have a wired keyboard for OS installation.
As for monitors, make sure to look at its build before buying it, because you want accessible VESA mounts - e.g. my old Dell monitor has VESA screws built into the stand, so you cannot use both the VESA mount and the stand. And the NUC can be mounted on monitors that do support this, so if that’s something you want to enable, make sure to be careful when shopping for monitors.
Also, if you want extra USB ports, make sure to buy a USB-C enabled monitor, so that it can serve as you hub as well, but this make the build quite expensive.
Upsides
I have very little knowledge when it comes to building computers and was pleasantly surprised in terms of how little I needed to know. Just two components and off you go. You can even buy pre-built NUCs, but I didn’t know what sort of SSDs or RAM they used, so I wanted to “build” my own.
The computer is truly tiny, the footprint is lower than a CD in a case, and it runs fairly quiet. It’s not silent, which was a bit surprising in my study, which I keep pretty quiet. I could hear the fan come on and while it wasn’t annoying, it was a tiny bit surprising. At my mum’s, it wasn’t an issue one bit, because you couldn’t hear it thanks to other noise within the flat. You can also tweak the fan characteristics in the BIOS, but I didn’t want to run the NUC too hot just for a few decibels of noise.
I was also pleasantly surprised by the two USB-C ports, which will be underutilised at this point, but it’s another nice future proofing feature.
Downsides
It’s a mobile CPU, so it won’t blow you away, but for my use cases, it was more than sufficient. Apart from the fan, the only thing I can complain about is the port organisation - the two USB-A ports in the back are quite close together, so some larger flash drives didn’t fit next to my USB cable. And the front 3.5 mm jack is not terribly well positioned for speakers that will be plugged in 24/7 - it’s more of a headphone jack that you intend to plug in and out.
Verdict
For the price of roughly 1/3 of a nice ultrabook, I got a really nice machine that utilises existing peripherals I had lying around. I don’t mean to compare these two form factors, just putting it in perspective.
The new user is very happy with the machine, it runs laps around her old machine with some Celeron CPU. That’s why I wanted to pick my parts - the low-end market is full of low-performing CPUs and cheap drives, but NUCs all have Intel Core processors, which should run most office workloads just fine, and slap enough RAM for Chrome and a fast enough disk and off you go. I’m very happy with the purchase.