The actual nucs are discontinued now.... Dell, Lenovo and HP make some near similar tiny PCs and I believe some OEM bought Intel's nuc tech but can't think who at the moment.
Yeah, running a geekom it13 as Homeserver.
13.th gen i7 and 32gb is way more power than I need. Adding a external HDD cage, done.
Just need to see about longevity
I just wish some of these miniPC companies released variants with four drive bays. I don't even need a backplane, just SATA ports on the board and PSU and an integrated cage
That's a NAS.
Have a look at Terra Master F4-424 (/Pro).
It's N95/N100/N305, 8-32 GB RAM, four HDD bays and two NVMe slots.
Unlike most other NAS, you can install whatever OS you want on this one. I'm running Unraid on mine.
I actually think it's a little expensive for these specs, but I really wanted a pre-built NAS form factor, where I could install whatever OS I wanted, and this one is almost perfect. It's basically as small as a computer with four HDDs can reasonably get.
Iirc, it's only one DDR5 SODIMM slot.
Also, I noticed you wrote:
>just SATA ports on the board and **PSU** and an integrated cage
PSU is external on the F4-424, but imo, that's a good thing, as it'll mean less heat for the drives and CPU, and it's much easier to replace if it dies.
I meant more as cost cutting for the miniPC part "don't bother with a backplane, I can connect the cables myself" type of thing.
>I actually think it's a little expensive for these specs,
923+ is more expensive and less upgradable.
>Iirc, it's only one DDR5 SODIMM slot.
Huh, I thought N95 is DDR4. Still, that means 32GB of RAM should be easy.
>923+ is more expensive and less upgradable.
Absolutely, but Synology's are just expensive as shit in general. My alternative would've been building in the Jonsbo N2 case. That would've been slightly cheaper, a little bigger, but with no real warranty and much more PITA.
>Huh, I thought N95 is DDR4
According to what I've read on various forums, it's seemingly random whether you get a N100 or N95, which is a bit weird. Terra Masters marketing on F4-424 (non-Pro) seems to change between N100 and N95, too.
F4-424 Pro is definitely i3-N305, though.
All of them support DDR5, as it seems that N95/N100 both DDR4 and DDR5. Performance can be significantly better with DDR5, though.
I don't trust the clones, had a very strange RF issue with my first test of a clone nuc. That illustrates me poor testing of their products., and they never fixed it. (Bee-Link)
Intel also discontinued their first-party motherboards years ago, saying they wanted to concentrate on selling NUCs. Supermicro and Asrock Rack have done a pretty good job filling in where AMD and Intel won't sell first-party boards, but I still wish they would.
There's a lot of "1 liter PCs" out there that are small enough to use the VESA mounting screws.
Although with Covid, almost everyone just moved to laptops. With MDM and things like WSUS they can be locked down fairly tightly now.
Everyone has been making micro / tiny PCs for years and years now. You can usually spec them up to i7 16+Gb ram.
I worked at a place where we probably had 150 Lenovo Tiny M Series.
If I have to by a desktop it's going to be a tiny 99% of the time (except for CAD/GIS/3D Modeling and things we have a few of)
Power envelope is far more important than core count. Micros usually are intel T processors with a 35-watt TDP while mini/SFF have a standard 65-watt part.
I'm still a fan of micro's though, I have over 150,000 and it's far easier for our guys when they're doing moves, new sites and such.
Average office worker has at any time
2+ edge browsers constantly syncing your profile, with a bunch of tabs
2 outlook windows with mail and calendar open, also a bunch of emails open
Excel running some archaic business logic
New teams chugging the fuck along
Onedrive syncing all the time
intune doing some stuff
Some edr
Some vpn
Some logging tool
Maybe a Remote Desktop
This will murder some cpus straight up.
You forgot the third party DLP agent scanning everything, the A/V nibbing through every file and system call, separate EDR product doing the same, and we can't forget the vulnerability scanning agent.
It's both. The power efficiency curve is very much nonlinear. Up to a certain point, you'll get more done at the same wattage with more cores. With a modern AMD APU you'll get more done in 35W with eight cores than you'd get with six cores. More than eight cores at 35W starts to get dubious. On the other end, I don't think Zen cores ever scaled well past 12W per core.
I first bought them in 2014 to replace old Dell towers. They mounted on the back of the monitor and worked really well. i5s with 16-32 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD.
Absolutely, we used the M92P Lenovo Tiny Towers way back in 2011 when they sent us some demo models.
It was VESA mount and there was an optional optical drive which slotted onto the outside of the tower and plugged into a USB port.
So, it had good enough thermals that it could have a hot (CFL) LCD monitor on one side and a disc drive on the other and still perform great. I mean it was a laptop with no screen or keyboard. We deployed hundreds of them.
I'm a huge fan of the mini PC and my entire homelab / network is compromised of them. I agree, the Lenovo Tiny is the best of the bunch, I specifically chose that model for its PCI expansion so I could make the PC a small NGFW / router
I did the same at home, I've got a M720q with a Intel I350-T4V2 nic in it running pfSense. Great little machine that uses hardly any power and is basically silent.
SAME setup. Its fantastic. I almost wanted to go with a 2-port SFP card but glad I didn't because I used all 4 ports of my 4-port intel NIC and don't need anything above 1Gb anyway.
Yeah, my college had them (5th gen i5 and 8GB RAM) until recently, and when they upgraded they sold off the old ones to staff and students. Most people just use them as a server to experiment with or mess about.
I bought an i3 NUC in 2018 (pretty sure it’s a 2017 model) and have used it for:
- ESXi host with DC/file/Unifi/Veeam
- Added a pfSense vm when I got my own place. Using a USB nic one ESXi was…interesting
- Wiped, reloaded, and migrated to Hyper-V server (the free one that got discontinued) with Windows Admin Center
- Added a bunch more stuff with Docker
- Got fed up with Windows Admin Center and switched to straight Ubuntu running Docker after getting another mini PC for pfSense (with two nics this time)
It now runs pihole, unifi, and my jellyfin server/library with a USB 8tb drive. I’ve also used it for retropie concurrently with the other stuff and the onboard gpu was surprisingly capable. I think I got up to PS2 games without issue
I keep thinking about replacing it with something beefier with redundant storage but it’s been shockingly great for everything I’ve thrown at it
NUCs are popular in /r/Homelab, though drivers can sometimes be an issue with ESXi on hardware that wasn't built as dedicated server. I sure wouldn't run an RDBMS without ECC memory, but [that's a whole 'nother rabbit hole of market segmentation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V_pYA7Uq0U).
And honestly... why not? No seriously, why not?
"what if PSU fails" like many small corpos don't run rack/non rack servers with only one PSU anyway...
"but drive" even NUCs can raid multiple drives.
Is he using it on top of local existing server infrastructure or why do you view it as an issue? If a site has no server infrastructure and mainly user endpoints, I cannot see a problem with it. Just curious.
Chick-Fil-A has a three node K8s cluster in all their stores built out of NUC's (or at least they were)
[https://medium.com/chick-fil-atech/enterprise-restaurant-compute-f5e2fd63d20f](https://medium.com/chick-fil-atech/enterprise-restaurant-compute-f5e2fd63d20f)
Because "NUCs" effectively became what other brands called "Micro" "Mini" "1L" etc, Intel rather left the whole space.. Even the Compute Stick market they rather dominated in.
They are perfectly fine in general use, you can spec them very far its mostly the cpu that gets limited due to the form factor cooling, Ive been thru hundreds of them.
My wife runs a 12th Gen Micro, igpu can power 3x 1440p monitors perfectly fine for general use. Youtube etc etc.
> Compute Stick market
The extremely slow, mobile Z8300-series processors with eMMC storage? Those still have their adherents for niche applications, but the x86_64 SBC options today are orders of magnitude better.
Intel created the ["Minnow Board" x86_64 SBC line](https://linuxgizmos.com/minnowboard-turbo-dual-e-packs-quad-core-atom-m-2-dual-gbe/), but before Intel discontinued them they were always very annoying to source.
We originally were attracted to the NUCs to drive 4K displays on the iGPU with low power draw, and they did that very well.
We only ever used them to Display data from Inhouse websites. Not user driven and they ran so well we were disappointed when discontinued.
They ran 24/7, If power went out would just auto start then auto load our Auto Open Browser tasks and off it would go for another year continously.
>The extremely slow, mobile Z8300-series processors with eMMC storage? Those still have their adherents for niche applications, but the x86_64 SBC options today are orders of magnitude better.
Or even better (in terms of cost and power consumption), arm64 SBCs.
I think the NUC was more Intel trying to create a new market to sell CPU in then trying to sell NUCs. Now that every one is making Micro they are more then happy to let other people manufacture them and sell them the processors.
These are effectively the same size but benefits of all the enterprise features of an Optiplex with the convenience of a Nuc. The Nuc is great but in reality it's consumer grade kit. Perhaps that sounds unfair but the also do solid service in home labs.
Also if you're specing desktops I highly recommend the msf22 monitor stand - effectively vesa mounts a ultra small form factor Optiplex on the back of a screen. You get the small footprint of an All-in-one but still have a modular system that you can easily swap things in and out. Furthermore it comes with a shield that locks over all the rear ports so no cables can be unplugged or tampered with. Perfect in educational settings, particularly with desktop locking kit by Kensington (with master keys).
I haven't tried VMware esxi on the ultra small form factor but I'm using Debian 12 on one myself and it's rock solid so I'd guess Proxmox would be good on them if you wanted a micro sized test cluster etc.
> The Nuc is great but in reality it's consumer grade kit.
What specifically makes you say that? This week I had to swap a CMOS battery in an old NUC and attend to a dead PSU in an SFF Optiplex.
NUC is commercial, but for the longest time their general purpose was best suited for linear, controlled experiences. My last job in healthcare used them for kiosked wall PC's that showed scheduling boards, and my current job has some (NUC6i7KYK) as a part of Crestron Flex MTRoW room kits (though we're currently getting away from the NUC variety). Nothing overly intensive, just single application solutions.
Better value for most things. The cheap mini PCs come with storage, power adapter, case, and normal HDMI outputs. I only use the pi for things that need the GPIOs now, when I cant bodge it thru a USB joystick input board.
I used to sysadmin a school, and we replaced labs with old OptiPlexes with these. When management changed and decided we were going Chromebooks-only ("engineers use Chromebooks!"), I took a heap (we were disposing of them either way), and shared some with my friends who still use them.
They're great little units. Depending on workloads and budgets, I'm not entirely sure I'd run a business with them, but they definitely do a good job.
System makers want enterprise customers on the endless upgrade train. That's why you see so many posters expressing the sentiment that out-of-support gear should be retired and replaced with new equipment. Sometimes equipment does get more costly to support as it ages, but the main reason is actually withdrawal of software or firmware support.
It's why [Microsoft and the OEMs](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/q2o4zm/microsoft_exec_panos_panay_explains_how_the/) wanted Windows 11 to obsolete older hardware. I just found out this week that [Microsoft pulled 6GHz WiFi support from Windows 10](https://dongknows.com/wi-fi-6e-6ghz-intel-ax210-driver/). They claim it's for regulatory reasons tied to the location-awareness feature.
> By default, on a Windows 10 computer, the Intel AX210 adapter will work just like any Wi-Fi 6 module. You only get the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands out of it and will not see the 6GHz band at all.
> The 6GHz-ready software driver you’ll find here is one that was once available briefly for Windows 10 before it was pulled permanently—it’s the pilot driver originally intended for the OS before Microsoft changed its mind. I extracted it and recompiled it as a manual download.
> As a result, this software driver is signed — it’s verified and approved by Microsoft—and will work on Windows 10 20H2 or later.
Actually in my country the stuff a lot of people buys is to use at least 5 years, because of high cost of imported stuff (like more than 2x usa prices). And low wages -in USD -.
We run 20 year old acer desktops and the only reason we replace them next year is the W10 EOL. We put an ssd and 8gb ram in and they could honestly drive another 20 years.
My work uses several NUCs for digital signage. You could just use a Smart TV or something connected to a webpage, but you get a lot more flexibility with a full computer behind the display.
I work IT in a museum and we use them for our interactive kiosks and displays since they are so small we can often place them inside a plinth. If you don't care about gaming but want a computer plugged into your TV for streaming and light web browsing they are awesome, although for home use I think a lot of people go with apple TV or Mac Mini's. You can also get VESA mounts so they stick to the backside of your monitor or like a semi modular all in one PC.
The BIOS updates can be a bit more of a monster, had a batch I was updating and 4 of the 6 I upgraded failed the BIOS update bricked and I had to download a special BIOS update and had to swap a jumper to clear it then without any video I was expected to boot it while holding down a key on startup and blindly choose the second option (pressing 2) while not seeing anything then wait 20 minutes and hope the machine restarts and has video again after blindly taking an update. When they're working they are slick little machines, they even did a gaming version that could take a full sized GPU.
We are an manufacturing shop, we have some massive machines, but our shop is dirty, we can’t use a standard PC because they fry with the oil, grease, and metal chips in the air.
We used to use some cheap fanless PCs similar to the NUC but they weren’t great, I now use a fanless made by Protectli, it has 6 NIC and is marketed as a networking device, but it has an i5 in it that runs win10 with no issue to run the connection to the machines and to the network to get their files.8
We had a lot of problems with them when it came to group policy and they often for whatever reason would just fall out of AD. I personally am not fond of them. I'm tempted to office space a couple of them once we finish retiring them.
I wish it was just software issues with them. We definitely had AD issues, but the worst was the hardware issues. The power supplies failed, the HD's failed, and they decided to reboot themselves randomly *a lot.* We had them in classrooms and got more than a few perturbed professors complaining about them rebooting in the middle of class.
We use the Dell Optiplexes Micros. They worm well for your average office user who isn't doing engineering, media creation, gaming etc.
It was nice moving from larger tower computers and getting them off the ground. Way less dust to deal with.
I've been using NUCs in my organization for the past seven years. My organization runs a number of group homes with limited office space, so the NUC's footprint was a godsend. I later rolled them out to our headquarters, and they've been well-received. Now that our shop is moving to M365 and Windows 11, we've had to replace all of our PCs. We were uncomfortable going with the ASUS devices, so we wound up going with 14th generation Dell micro devices. Somewhat bigger than the NUCS, but still small enough for our purposes. But the Intel NUCs were very, very good for us.
Some will work, others will sort of work. A nix based virtualization platform solves the lack of drivers tho so in theory if you end up with a model windows doesn’t like you could slap proxmox on and windows wouldn’t care one bit.
Now performance of that setup on the other hand…. Will probably have you frothing with hate for NUCs eventually.
We bought a bunch of NUCs last summer as desktops for our summer interns. We keep finding uses for them. They're great, big fan.
I've made DIY thin clients out of them, used them for a bunch of projects, recycled a few for this year's group of interns.I even have 3 setup as a mini Proxmox cluster that I'm using to forward deploy some VMs on in a building we're taking over while we wrangle the rest of the IT move.
I find them unbelievably powerful little things.
They are bloody excellent for small jobs where something simply needs to be tucked into a cupboard.
They are widely used for small jobs where a bit more power than a Raspberry Pi is needed, but a full blown server is a waste. Displays, prompts, public kiosks, big monitors, little home servers, backup NAS's... the form factor is lovely too.
They are PERFECT for the office workers desks. I love the way I can ziplock them onto the backs of TVs and monitors. It keeps everything neat and quite cable-free.
I'm surprised business is still welded to "PC's" form factor for their boring needs. How many office workers need an Nvivia GPU? None... a bit of GPU to handle/offload some work, but nothing that any gamer would consider decent!
I have a couple Dell MFF Optiplex lil guys that I pulled from the e-waste pile, one is my daily driver and the other is plugged into the living room TV. They're fine for what they are, and I appreciate how little space they occupy. Part of me still yearns for a big tower battlestation though.
They're fine for a tiny desktop and especially good for places requiring small machines like kiosks, trade shows, signage and such. At one point Chick-Fil-A ran k8s clusters on these at each location. They're decent for home labs too. You do pay a bit extra for the convenience in size, but overall good machines.
we used SFF dells as desktops. we almosy went the 1L form factor (lenovo m90) but were worried about heat. however i feel for what our users do they wouldn’t be a problem since our graphics dept has custom built rigs.
i got a M90q gen3 i5-12500 coming this week and am pumped!!! 2 x 1TB pcie4 drives, maybe a 2 TB 2.5 ssd and 32gb of ram for under $550 (ebay/used but)
>i got a M90q gen3 i5-12500 coming this week and am pumped!!! 2 x 1TB pcie4 drives, maybe a 2 TB 2.5 ssd and 32gb of ram for under $550 (ebay/used but)
Wow!!!
The same machine will cost like $1000 if imported in my country.
yea it was a great deal, $325 for just the m90q gen 3 (came with 16gb ddr5, i5, no wifi or ssd). had an extra 1 TB pcie ssd laying around, ordered a wifi 6e card and antenna kit, 16gb ddr5, another 1 Tb pcie (love thst it has two pcie4 slots and a sata 2.5ssd bracket) and the hdmi flex port brining total to around $500-$550. should last me a good five plus years.
finally replacing my old dell 9020 running a fourth gen i7 ive had for nearly ten years now.
Heat isn't an issue in terms of causing crashing, but they get noisy with high CPU. For my personal machines, I used to use an M720q for with an i7 low-power variant for around 6 tears and now use a ThinkStation P360 with an i7-12700 (not the low power one). I do video encoding in Davinci Resolve with the P360 using the iGPU, multi-hour renders have never caused any problem, but the fan runs full tilt the entire time. The fans are like laptop fans for a noise reference.
Had a lot of i5 ThinkCentre's in users' hands over the years and they generally stay fairly quiet for typical daily business user use, but you can hear the fan randomly spin up for a few seconds and then down to non-audible.
I bought a 7th gen i7 off eBay a few years ago and dropped Ubuntu server on it for Plex. Never had any issues with it. Love the small form factor systems!
What was aggravating was if they stopped powering on, there was no troubleshooting its just a paperweight. This is a problem with micro PCs in general like I had a personal Gigabyte Brix that was only lightly used and just stopped powering on. A different DC adapter made no difference. At least with an SFF a power supply and conceivably even a motherboard is swappable. They are as disposable as iPhones.
Maybe another brands are ok for office pc / signaling / digital kiosk. The most small and price convenient are (ad example) mini pcs with n100 cpu. Low power and enough for light use. In YT I saw unboxing and test in some notebooks with n100, looks good. Off course you have another cpus and a lot of brands...
I am replacing every desktop in my organization with ThinkStation P3 Tiny’s. Plenty of power for any user that currently has a desktop and the footprint is great for some of smaller workspaces.
We love NUCs in Industrial Manufacturing. We have industrial equipment that requires a larger 24in display on a VESA mount for operators to use, so we mount NUCs on VESA brackets with the monitors and use them with Windows to run the vendor software for it. Laptops wouldn't work in the environment nor are the displays big enough, and don't require batteries, and AIO's are too bulky. I have 10 of these setup at our site. The software also requires Ethernet to a PLC controller, which they have too.
I work in R&D aviation and I tried using them. The dirty power in our chase plane caused the nuc to loose bios time. Have you ever pulled the bios battery on one of those things...
Other than that they were fine
> Have you ever pulled the bios battery on one of those things...
I just replaced the CMOS battery on an old one this week -- not fun. The one-liter machines are easier to work on, but the various SBCs are even easier.
Used them years ago as kiosk/shared computers and absolutely loved them for it. Bolted straight to the back of a monitor and it was our ghetto all in one solution lol
Restaurants deployed them in droves for smart menus, kitchen video systems and some POS. They were cheap and effective, leaps better than compute sticks. When Intel got out of the game it left a vacuum for restaurant tech.
we have a bunch of Logitec Teams MTR's that are leveraging Lenovo mini-PC's which are basically this. they work really well.
i also use a [Minisforum MS-01](https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01) at home as my Plex server and NAS, 2 x 10Gbps and 2 x 2.5Gbps networking make it awesome for that sort of thing.
Honestly... I think the name was to dumb for mainstream.
It was a nerd name for a nerd tool, that could have been more widely used if someone had marketed more widely.
NUCs have their uses. Logitech used them in their first two generations of their Teams room setups and they’re nothing but misery.
The slightly bigger variants like the HP EliteDesk Mini or Dell Micro devices are pretty rock solid. In evaluation, I prefer HP’s lineup ‘cause they include USB-C etc. I honestly see no reason not to have this format as default fixed device.
HP’s DeskMini has two nvme drives + optional sata 2,5in expansion, all in that little box…
A couple downsides to NUCs and tiny PCs is they walk away much easier and also overheat easier. Because of this we have gone with the next step up in size.
NUC's are a discontinued product lineup, at least for the Intel variety. The naming lives on with ASUS, however. That aside, there are a number of alternatives in the market, though at a slightly higher price-point than what Intel hit at.
* Dell Optiplex Micro
* Lenovo ThinkStation Tiny
* HP Pro/EliteDesk DeskMini/DM
* Fujitsu Esprimo Q series lineup
There are also a slew of companies with more NUC-inspired box/cube PCs with anything ranging from a Celeron N100 to mobile i9 processors as well, many of which get coverage in the homelabbing YouTube channels.
because tiny pcs are almost impossible to repair/upgrade. yes, I know that many of them have upgradable RAM and SSD.
so yes, we use mini/micro pc for basic-office-workstation that can be replaced easily and only if physical space is a problem.
Because they were/are overheating piles of garbage that had higher than normal failure rates compared to equivalent offerings from the big 3 OEMs (Dell, Lenovo & HP) and for many years they had very few higher-spec configs available in their range (the majority of the CPUs in them were the low power T/U/Y models) so they were basically unusable for any remotely intensive workloads.
In the last 5-8 years or so, the SFF/USFF offerings from the big 3 OEMs have completely surpassed the Intel NUCs in both value, performance, form-factor, configurability and expandability.
Every single time I encounter an Intel NUC in any environment, I recommend to the client that they nuke it from orbit and immediately replace it with something that's actually enterprise-grade.
What niche do they fill in an office environment though? Barely cheaper than a notebook, which also enables people to work remotely or on trips. Not a replacement for a workstation either.
Don’t get me wrong. I like NUCs. They are great toys for development, trying out things or like a little home media server etc. For office use I don’t quite see the appeal.
- They had a highish failure rate when we deployed them in 2018
- Theyre not that serviceable. If it fries you replace the whole thing.
- Theyre loud and high pitched.
- They use laptop grade CPUs.
- They have odd issues at the BIOS level. And since theyre not that mass deployed researching support issues was less helpful than dell. Just weird quirky things that make you appreciate the stability of dell/hp bioses.
- They make for great home labs. They make for great signage/vc room machines.
- i did wish we replaced some of our lighter used servers with these. A DC or FS thats used by <100 people would run just fine.
We did a batch of NUC clients in 2015. They came bare, and we fitted 16GiB of DDR3 and SSDs. Very nice overall, though we did have some fans dying around the five year mark, including my own dogfooded desktop.
When that got replaced, it was with an AMD HP Elitedesk one-liter micro. About the same, not counting the CPU/GPU, except for a bit more ports and expansion.
They were decent little machines but they seemed to develop personality atleast the ones we used at my last job. The skull canyon was cool though. That job also mandated users run PC's 24/7 so that may have lead to the issues to.
HP Mini, Dell Micro, Lenovo Tiny
They're been around for a long time now and they are enterprise ready with good warranties and tools to maintain large fleets.
We used them for almost every staff that didn't travel... until COVID and we all started to WFH. Since then we've bene replacing NUCs with laptops in the normal replacement cycle as staff like to have hybrid office/WFH.
We use them as an appliance running 1-2 VMs for on-prem installs for customers, but most of our in-house NUCs have been replaced now in favour of laptops.
I still keep my old Ryzen7 NUC around in case I need a few more cores of compute for experiments. Generally I like them but they do use mobile processors
We give some of our non-travelling WFH users NUCs configured as thin clients.
No shell, just a script that connects back to on-site RDS infrastructure.
Not a NUC specifically but I almost exclusively use the lenovo tiny PC's along with the Lenovo tiny in one monitor. Makes for a nice modular package that gives an AIO feel.
I don't care about formfactor, but I require and am willing to pay for next business day on site support on my workstations. Something breaks and I call Dell and a tech is on site the next day to fix.
I would never deploy consumer level NUC's just because of that.
All the NUCs I purchased had power issues, fried the motherboard or power supply would go bad. I’m using Dells Optiplex micro and it’s been working out well.
I've used a few as desktops over the years, they're fine. We also sell some as endpoint companions to some of our products. The main problem is we pretty much have to spec out new models every time we order them because they're consumer-grade and processors, motherboards, and I/O ports are constantly changing.
We use them as headless probes, emergency deploys, etc. Most of our end users get laptops for portability, and the only desktop users are those who need custom build/heavy processing like graphics/CAD. Seen a few clients and third party vendors deploy these as their remote gateway (and some light tasks, monitoring their own software, etc).
Cons? maybe driver support?
Use them heaps they are great, heaps of choice even with i7 CPUs, and they get 8 or is it now 10 years of guarantied support. Use them in environments where a laptop or all-in-one isn’t relevant or is a liability. I prefer a ChromeBox, they’re proven to be little effort for customisation and zero maintenance.
I just deployed a bunch of 13s as dedicated mission control VoIP clients. They have no issues running rhel8 with the STIG profile with just an i3 and 8gb of RAM. The ones they're replacing are 6th gens with a Celeron, and while they're a little pokier, they've been mostly reliable.
Ya know that is probably why I thought it was so neat.
Planning to use it at home for a game server that I can leave on 24/7. It drawing so little and being a capable box? Seems perfect
Laptops are more modular and the price difference isn't that big if you factor in the cost for a monitor to go with the nuc, if you don't need to move around much nucs are a great option though.
We have about 200 running as thin clients.
No shell (Explorer) just a loop that presents the MSTSC login screen.
Sadly they will all have to go by October 2025 when Windows 10 goes EOL.
This is the first time in ages that getting a new version of Windows basically means throw away your PC.
I have as far back as Optiplex 790s still running with upgraded ram and ssds. I recently had to buy 42 new desktops to get ahead of Oct 2025.
We use them here. Works fine, just make sure the room is DUST PROOF. They are really not a fan of dust and will overheat if not taking care of. We have like a stock of 25 dust spray can in our office just for them.
SW dev here. Used to work at a Mac shop (ugh) but would occasionally have need for a windows box for a project. IT got us NUCs. Great little device. Highly recommend for stationary workstations.
Where I work we use(d) NUCs for various purposes, like players for promo displays, digital signage or even teams conference room controls.
Due to running 24/7 they die out now and get replaced with Lenovos.
Technically yes it does.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=53898
Practically though raspberry pi is made for stiff like this with the default os.
I work for Microsoft and you can only use certified hardware for standardized AV environments... a.k.a. x86 compatible PCs, we don't have time to rewrite that for ARM.
Also... Microsoft doesn't have money for that. Every cent goes into AI.
I literally posted a link above of a windows os that I've installed and used on Raspberry pi. But yeah. I also said raspberry pi is made with the default os to do this.
Here's a link to how to do that.
https://www.pickcel.com/learn/setting-up-digital-signage-with-raspberry-pi/#:~:text=Raspberry%20Pi%204%20as%20a,cloud%2Dbased%20digital%20signage%20project.
Because intel isn't making the NUC anymore and windows iot core is in extended support.
So not sure what you were replying to.
They're great. The factory I work in bought a load for the assembly benches for supplies and manuals. If one breaks, swap it out and reimage. very easy indeed.
The models with mini-hdmi were annoying - I had to deal with a few cables that broke just from the weight of the cable on the connector. And we had quite a few drives die in the more recent models for no apparent reason. It's certainly convenient to be able to easily mount a computer to the back of a monitor, though.
For me, this stuff all comes down to how much work it is. I could never get the cost low enough to justify the workload to build and deploy. By the time I bought the machine, RAM, and storage and OS licensing, I maybe would save $100 if that compared to the Dell Micros. But with Dell, I don’t have to pay someone to build it, I don’t have to pay someone to setup the OS and possibly track down drivers, I have a functioning PC the minute it is in the office, I don’t have to track Windows licenses myself, and I have a 5 year warranty to boot. Not to mention all the automation Dell has for tracking base config, drivers, and warranty info by service tag. It’s one of those things where it’s cheaper acquisition cost, but higher total cost of ownership.
We used them for a few years and have moved away from them to the Lenovo tiny micros.
As far as I can tell, they stuck with similar cooling while increasing the TDP which helped to reduce the life of the system. They ran hot and failed quickly. No easy way to actually to clean the exhaust due to the way its built. The warranty took weeks and it would fail again within the year. 6th gen lasted longer than the later generations of NUC from what we had, likely due to the lower TDP & heat compared to the newer models.
The idea was good, the implementation wasn't, at least if you went for the higher tier CPUs.
Depends on use case.
For normal users, most are better served with a laptop anyway.
If it’s a terminal/PoS system, more and more are switching to iPads/tablets
So the market for these devices has been shrinking
I love them for my clients as I commute by train into the city. If the problem is that bad at the end of the day, I bring it home say I’ll see you in the morning.
About 10 years ago, the cloud architect for my company had a cluster of 4 nucs on his desk. It was his development environment.
It was running kubernetes. So he could test deployments there.
Our MSP division uses it for local NPM/SAM monitors that essentially act as proxies/collectors for remote sites. They work well for them.
We used them as low-power QRadar servers (specifically disconnected log collectors) and had mixed results. The initial deployment of five were fine, then a sixth came onboard. The initial NUCs we used at the time (I think Gen 7 or 8?) was discontinued. We picked up a new generation. Worst. experience. ever.
Granted, people (including me) made assumptions that it would work based on previous experience and the fact that it was relatively 'normal' hardware under the hood. General spec RAM, CPU, & Storage. Forget what board/NIC. Ended up compiling the drivers on the platform to make the NIC work. It was both an unpleasant experience and a fruitless one. Ultimately, we decided not to send it because we had absolutely zero support if it went tits up on site. (The site was remote, even for the client. Couple hour drive from the customers HQ. We were a 6-hour drive away to get on site.)
TLDR: Do your research ***before*** you buy them and make sure your use case is supported. If not, NUCs are a specific niche and the amount of support you'll get for it is slim-to-none.
A lot of it, from what i see, is a lack of support. If the hardware goes down, you can't just call them up and perform a. Hot swap or even repair it and get it back up.
Also, it's good to have standards in your environment. When you ha e a bunch of random NUCS along with desktops and laptops, it's harder for you to keep up with maintenance.
When all users are fully allowed to both wfh and office locations as they and their managers see fit, why would I get users desktop devices (even if they're very small).
I do agree that they're nice though. Set one up for my grandfather many years back and it's been putting in work.
I have deployed and supported around 100 NUCs in my environment, all via pxe os deployment (SCCM) and they lasted through there 7 year warranty with very few issues. Now being phased out as laptops are more versatile. Thay said, i had great vendor support and would have no problem running NUCs if speced for future needs, i5 and 16gb ram minimum.
It all depends on the workload. We mainly use them for things like trade fairs and sometimes employ them as servers for testing purposes. Unfortunately, if there's too much load for too long, they will throttle the CPU quite a bit so not that much fun for continuous heavy use.
But all in all, it is mind-blowing what can be done in such a small form factor.
Drivers were always the biggest issue I had when working with these. They didn't get the market penetration needed for these massive companies to maintain them.
I was looking at ASUS site, is it just me or is the marketing all funky?
They are marketed as "build your own" but when I go through their catalog it's all pre-selected stuff?
We used to use the Intel branded NUCs to display our monitoring dashboards at work on wall mounted TVs. However, the best part was the cardboard boxes they came in had a small circuit with a photocell that would play the Intel jingle whenever the light hit it. I hid one in each refrigerator in the office, so every time the door opened and the light came on, it played the song. We would crack up every time we heard it from across the office. After a few months, it finally annoyed someone enough that they spent an hour and tore apart the refigerators until they found and removed them all.
Laptops are mobile. In a place like Florida, where I admin, mobility is key for half the year. While a NUC is more mobile than a desktop, it's not as mobile as a laptop. The ability to flee or go on a trip and still have the ability to stay connected is why for us. I honestly use old NUCs and Mac minis as headless servers at home when I need to. Great tech.
We have many nucs for our teams meetings room. Small, can be placed behind the big screen, works as intended. For Desktops we have Dell Precisions or Towers (with a graphics card 2x more screens)
I worked in a place that was sunsetting the Levono line of these mini-systems. They had VESA mounts, IIRC, so they could be bolted to the back of VESA mounted monitors. The number one flaw was heat dissipation. Most stopped working randomly because even the fanless ones would collect dust and then eventually overheat.
Screw NUCs, why don’t more places use raspberry pi’s? Web browsing is web browsing. When everything SaaS runs in a web browser, why are people still giving MS money?
Love RPI but sometimes the thing you need to run will run on Linux but just not Arm architecture.
Sadly though, businesses still want MS Office no matter how good Libre Office is. Particularly Outlook and Excel, they are immovable fixtures in many organisations.
The actual nucs are discontinued now.... Dell, Lenovo and HP make some near similar tiny PCs and I believe some OEM bought Intel's nuc tech but can't think who at the moment.
ASUS bought the NUC tech.
Asus bought the brand. They don't need the tech.
> They don't need the tech Asus hardware is such a mixed bag they might actually need the tech after all.
What they actually need is something that will improve their customer support.
Take that back, the Asus P2bs 440BX was rock solid and phenomenal. I'm not sure if they have kept up quality since then though. /s
And there are countless clones too
Yeah, running a geekom it13 as Homeserver. 13.th gen i7 and 32gb is way more power than I need. Adding a external HDD cage, done. Just need to see about longevity
I just wish some of these miniPC companies released variants with four drive bays. I don't even need a backplane, just SATA ports on the board and PSU and an integrated cage
That's a NAS. Have a look at Terra Master F4-424 (/Pro). It's N95/N100/N305, 8-32 GB RAM, four HDD bays and two NVMe slots. Unlike most other NAS, you can install whatever OS you want on this one. I'm running Unraid on mine.
Hmm, 550 Euro, not bad. Does it have two standard DDR4 SODIMM slots?
I actually think it's a little expensive for these specs, but I really wanted a pre-built NAS form factor, where I could install whatever OS I wanted, and this one is almost perfect. It's basically as small as a computer with four HDDs can reasonably get. Iirc, it's only one DDR5 SODIMM slot. Also, I noticed you wrote: >just SATA ports on the board and **PSU** and an integrated cage PSU is external on the F4-424, but imo, that's a good thing, as it'll mean less heat for the drives and CPU, and it's much easier to replace if it dies.
I meant more as cost cutting for the miniPC part "don't bother with a backplane, I can connect the cables myself" type of thing. >I actually think it's a little expensive for these specs, 923+ is more expensive and less upgradable. >Iirc, it's only one DDR5 SODIMM slot. Huh, I thought N95 is DDR4. Still, that means 32GB of RAM should be easy.
>923+ is more expensive and less upgradable. Absolutely, but Synology's are just expensive as shit in general. My alternative would've been building in the Jonsbo N2 case. That would've been slightly cheaper, a little bigger, but with no real warranty and much more PITA. >Huh, I thought N95 is DDR4 According to what I've read on various forums, it's seemingly random whether you get a N100 or N95, which is a bit weird. Terra Masters marketing on F4-424 (non-Pro) seems to change between N100 and N95, too. F4-424 Pro is definitely i3-N305, though. All of them support DDR5, as it seems that N95/N100 both DDR4 and DDR5. Performance can be significantly better with DDR5, though.
[удалено]
I don't trust the clones, had a very strange RF issue with my first test of a clone nuc. That illustrates me poor testing of their products., and they never fixed it. (Bee-Link)
Yah and Intel stopped supporting and it’s been a shit show with bios updates and what asus supports and what you can download
I had an asus version of the nuc and it was an absolute piece of shit. The real nuc works fine.
Intel also discontinued their first-party motherboards years ago, saying they wanted to concentrate on selling NUCs. Supermicro and Asrock Rack have done a pretty good job filling in where AMD and Intel won't sell first-party boards, but I still wish they would.
Asrock also sells motherboards with 9w mobile CPUs that are perfect for tiny remote office Proxmox boxes, management systems, etc.
Intel's desktop boards were the shit! I was legit sad when they announced their end.
There's a lot of "1 liter PCs" out there that are small enough to use the VESA mounting screws. Although with Covid, almost everyone just moved to laptops. With MDM and things like WSUS they can be locked down fairly tightly now.
yeah, I recently got some "Nuc" version AMD series 7s, wicked fast
There is also Simply NUC that makes their own mini PCs in house.
Everyone has been making micro / tiny PCs for years and years now. You can usually spec them up to i7 16+Gb ram. I worked at a place where we probably had 150 Lenovo Tiny M Series. If I have to by a desktop it's going to be a tiny 99% of the time (except for CAD/GIS/3D Modeling and things we have a few of)
Power envelope is far more important than core count. Micros usually are intel T processors with a 35-watt TDP while mini/SFF have a standard 65-watt part. I'm still a fan of micro's though, I have over 150,000 and it's far easier for our guys when they're doing moves, new sites and such.
The average office worker does not need that much performance, the low power CPUs are totally fine for most users
Average office worker has at any time 2+ edge browsers constantly syncing your profile, with a bunch of tabs 2 outlook windows with mail and calendar open, also a bunch of emails open Excel running some archaic business logic New teams chugging the fuck along Onedrive syncing all the time intune doing some stuff Some edr Some vpn Some logging tool Maybe a Remote Desktop This will murder some cpus straight up.
You forgot the third party DLP agent scanning everything, the A/V nibbing through every file and system call, separate EDR product doing the same, and we can't forget the vulnerability scanning agent.
You must not deal with the average office chrome user.
Just give them a additional ssd as swap RAM
Completely disagree. Basic users here, i5 needed, 8gb ram not enough. All the Microsoft tools are sucking up lots of ressources these days.
It's both. The power efficiency curve is very much nonlinear. Up to a certain point, you'll get more done at the same wattage with more cores. With a modern AMD APU you'll get more done in 35W with eight cores than you'd get with six cores. More than eight cores at 35W starts to get dubious. On the other end, I don't think Zen cores ever scaled well past 12W per core.
I first bought them in 2014 to replace old Dell towers. They mounted on the back of the monitor and worked really well. i5s with 16-32 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD.
Are you me? I did exactly that in 2014 during a refresh, worked really well.
I did about 350 of them from September to December of that year. Is that what you did?
Absolutely, we used the M92P Lenovo Tiny Towers way back in 2011 when they sent us some demo models. It was VESA mount and there was an optional optical drive which slotted onto the outside of the tower and plugged into a USB port. So, it had good enough thermals that it could have a hot (CFL) LCD monitor on one side and a disc drive on the other and still perform great. I mean it was a laptop with no screen or keyboard. We deployed hundreds of them.
I'm a huge fan of the mini PC and my entire homelab / network is compromised of them. I agree, the Lenovo Tiny is the best of the bunch, I specifically chose that model for its PCI expansion so I could make the PC a small NGFW / router
Comprised. Compromised has a bit of a different meaning :)
Whoa... My network is secure, I SWEAR!!!! Lol, *comprised* yes
I did the same at home, I've got a M720q with a Intel I350-T4V2 nic in it running pfSense. Great little machine that uses hardly any power and is basically silent.
SAME setup. Its fantastic. I almost wanted to go with a 2-port SFP card but glad I didn't because I used all 4 ports of my 4-port intel NIC and don't need anything above 1Gb anyway.
have a client that has a freakin SQL server running on one.
Curious hows that working out for them. I know it sounds like a bad idea on paper. But ive run non production servers with them and they work great.
I have three DCs. One running on an on-prem VM, one running on an Azure VM, and a third DC running on an i5 NUC at one of our off-site locations.
Yeah, my college had them (5th gen i5 and 8GB RAM) until recently, and when they upgraded they sold off the old ones to staff and students. Most people just use them as a server to experiment with or mess about.
I bought an i3 NUC in 2018 (pretty sure it’s a 2017 model) and have used it for: - ESXi host with DC/file/Unifi/Veeam - Added a pfSense vm when I got my own place. Using a USB nic one ESXi was…interesting - Wiped, reloaded, and migrated to Hyper-V server (the free one that got discontinued) with Windows Admin Center - Added a bunch more stuff with Docker - Got fed up with Windows Admin Center and switched to straight Ubuntu running Docker after getting another mini PC for pfSense (with two nics this time) It now runs pihole, unifi, and my jellyfin server/library with a USB 8tb drive. I’ve also used it for retropie concurrently with the other stuff and the onboard gpu was surprisingly capable. I think I got up to PS2 games without issue I keep thinking about replacing it with something beefier with redundant storage but it’s been shockingly great for everything I’ve thrown at it
NUCs are popular in /r/Homelab, though drivers can sometimes be an issue with ESXi on hardware that wasn't built as dedicated server. I sure wouldn't run an RDBMS without ECC memory, but [that's a whole 'nother rabbit hole of market segmentation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V_pYA7Uq0U).
ain't nobody got time for Broadcom shenanigans.
Ouch
And honestly... why not? No seriously, why not? "what if PSU fails" like many small corpos don't run rack/non rack servers with only one PSU anyway... "but drive" even NUCs can raid multiple drives.
A client of my employer uses one for a configuration manager distribution point. Yes, it does sometimes cause me emotional pain.
Is he using it on top of local existing server infrastructure or why do you view it as an issue? If a site has no server infrastructure and mainly user endpoints, I cannot see a problem with it. Just curious.
A previous workplace used Dell Optiplexes with additional RAM and a bigger drive for DPs at remote sites, they worked well enough
Please say it's at least a 3 node cluster for HA etc.
Chick-Fil-A has a three node K8s cluster in all their stores built out of NUC's (or at least they were) [https://medium.com/chick-fil-atech/enterprise-restaurant-compute-f5e2fd63d20f](https://medium.com/chick-fil-atech/enterprise-restaurant-compute-f5e2fd63d20f)
Is that considered extreme overkill?
I guess they're using k3s. I guess if it's also handling their pos systems, no.
Because "NUCs" effectively became what other brands called "Micro" "Mini" "1L" etc, Intel rather left the whole space.. Even the Compute Stick market they rather dominated in. They are perfectly fine in general use, you can spec them very far its mostly the cpu that gets limited due to the form factor cooling, Ive been thru hundreds of them. My wife runs a 12th Gen Micro, igpu can power 3x 1440p monitors perfectly fine for general use. Youtube etc etc.
> Compute Stick market The extremely slow, mobile Z8300-series processors with eMMC storage? Those still have their adherents for niche applications, but the x86_64 SBC options today are orders of magnitude better. Intel created the ["Minnow Board" x86_64 SBC line](https://linuxgizmos.com/minnowboard-turbo-dual-e-packs-quad-core-atom-m-2-dual-gbe/), but before Intel discontinued them they were always very annoying to source. We originally were attracted to the NUCs to drive 4K displays on the iGPU with low power draw, and they did that very well.
We only ever used them to Display data from Inhouse websites. Not user driven and they ran so well we were disappointed when discontinued. They ran 24/7, If power went out would just auto start then auto load our Auto Open Browser tasks and off it would go for another year continously.
>The extremely slow, mobile Z8300-series processors with eMMC storage? Those still have their adherents for niche applications, but the x86_64 SBC options today are orders of magnitude better. Or even better (in terms of cost and power consumption), arm64 SBCs.
I think the NUC was more Intel trying to create a new market to sell CPU in then trying to sell NUCs. Now that every one is making Micro they are more then happy to let other people manufacture them and sell them the processors.
Dell micros all day
These are effectively the same size but benefits of all the enterprise features of an Optiplex with the convenience of a Nuc. The Nuc is great but in reality it's consumer grade kit. Perhaps that sounds unfair but the also do solid service in home labs. Also if you're specing desktops I highly recommend the msf22 monitor stand - effectively vesa mounts a ultra small form factor Optiplex on the back of a screen. You get the small footprint of an All-in-one but still have a modular system that you can easily swap things in and out. Furthermore it comes with a shield that locks over all the rear ports so no cables can be unplugged or tampered with. Perfect in educational settings, particularly with desktop locking kit by Kensington (with master keys). I haven't tried VMware esxi on the ultra small form factor but I'm using Debian 12 on one myself and it's rock solid so I'd guess Proxmox would be good on them if you wanted a micro sized test cluster etc.
> The Nuc is great but in reality it's consumer grade kit. What specifically makes you say that? This week I had to swap a CMOS battery in an old NUC and attend to a dead PSU in an SFF Optiplex.
NUC is commercial, but for the longest time their general purpose was best suited for linear, controlled experiences. My last job in healthcare used them for kiosked wall PC's that showed scheduling boards, and my current job has some (NUC6i7KYK) as a part of Crestron Flex MTRoW room kits (though we're currently getting away from the NUC variety). Nothing overly intensive, just single application solutions.
Ultra SFF is the new Pi5 - there I said it
Better value for most things. The cheap mini PCs come with storage, power adapter, case, and normal HDMI outputs. I only use the pi for things that need the GPIOs now, when I cant bodge it thru a USB joystick input board.
I used to sysadmin a school, and we replaced labs with old OptiPlexes with these. When management changed and decided we were going Chromebooks-only ("engineers use Chromebooks!"), I took a heap (we were disposing of them either way), and shared some with my friends who still use them. They're great little units. Depending on workloads and budgets, I'm not entirely sure I'd run a business with them, but they definitely do a good job.
>When management changed and decided we were going Chromebooks-only In my country stuff is replaced only is very old or is broken (and not fixable).
System makers want enterprise customers on the endless upgrade train. That's why you see so many posters expressing the sentiment that out-of-support gear should be retired and replaced with new equipment. Sometimes equipment does get more costly to support as it ages, but the main reason is actually withdrawal of software or firmware support. It's why [Microsoft and the OEMs](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/q2o4zm/microsoft_exec_panos_panay_explains_how_the/) wanted Windows 11 to obsolete older hardware. I just found out this week that [Microsoft pulled 6GHz WiFi support from Windows 10](https://dongknows.com/wi-fi-6e-6ghz-intel-ax210-driver/). They claim it's for regulatory reasons tied to the location-awareness feature. > By default, on a Windows 10 computer, the Intel AX210 adapter will work just like any Wi-Fi 6 module. You only get the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands out of it and will not see the 6GHz band at all. > The 6GHz-ready software driver you’ll find here is one that was once available briefly for Windows 10 before it was pulled permanently—it’s the pilot driver originally intended for the OS before Microsoft changed its mind. I extracted it and recompiled it as a manual download. > As a result, this software driver is signed — it’s verified and approved by Microsoft—and will work on Windows 10 20H2 or later.
Actually in my country the stuff a lot of people buys is to use at least 5 years, because of high cost of imported stuff (like more than 2x usa prices). And low wages -in USD -.
We run 20 year old acer desktops and the only reason we replace them next year is the W10 EOL. We put an ssd and 8gb ram in and they could honestly drive another 20 years.
Name checks out.
Hey, it's me. Your friend
Just make sure you get something with a fan. The fanless (quiet) ones will die prematurely
My work uses several NUCs for digital signage. You could just use a Smart TV or something connected to a webpage, but you get a lot more flexibility with a full computer behind the display.
I work IT in a museum and we use them for our interactive kiosks and displays since they are so small we can often place them inside a plinth. If you don't care about gaming but want a computer plugged into your TV for streaming and light web browsing they are awesome, although for home use I think a lot of people go with apple TV or Mac Mini's. You can also get VESA mounts so they stick to the backside of your monitor or like a semi modular all in one PC. The BIOS updates can be a bit more of a monster, had a batch I was updating and 4 of the 6 I upgraded failed the BIOS update bricked and I had to download a special BIOS update and had to swap a jumper to clear it then without any video I was expected to boot it while holding down a key on startup and blindly choose the second option (pressing 2) while not seeing anything then wait 20 minutes and hope the machine restarts and has video again after blindly taking an update. When they're working they are slick little machines, they even did a gaming version that could take a full sized GPU.
I worked for one company that issued them to folks who didn't want Macbooks (2013-2016 -ish). They were perfectly decent units for desktop use.
We are an manufacturing shop, we have some massive machines, but our shop is dirty, we can’t use a standard PC because they fry with the oil, grease, and metal chips in the air. We used to use some cheap fanless PCs similar to the NUC but they weren’t great, I now use a fanless made by Protectli, it has 6 NIC and is marketed as a networking device, but it has an i5 in it that runs win10 with no issue to run the connection to the machines and to the network to get their files.8
> Any cons to consider? They tend to be loud and high pitched (annoying) when under load.
And they usually run mobile processors which are nerfed compared to a proper desktop CPU at the same price.
Yeah I mean a NUC is basically a notebook without screen or keyboard...
I'm using that exact unit on my desk right now. Works great.
We used NUC's and they sucked ass. Constant problems with every aspect of them.
We had a lot of problems with them when it came to group policy and they often for whatever reason would just fall out of AD. I personally am not fond of them. I'm tempted to office space a couple of them once we finish retiring them.
I wish it was just software issues with them. We definitely had AD issues, but the worst was the hardware issues. The power supplies failed, the HD's failed, and they decided to reboot themselves randomly *a lot.* We had them in classrooms and got more than a few perturbed professors complaining about them rebooting in the middle of class.
We use the Dell Optiplexes Micros. They worm well for your average office user who isn't doing engineering, media creation, gaming etc. It was nice moving from larger tower computers and getting them off the ground. Way less dust to deal with.
I've been using NUCs in my organization for the past seven years. My organization runs a number of group homes with limited office space, so the NUC's footprint was a godsend. I later rolled them out to our headquarters, and they've been well-received. Now that our shop is moving to M365 and Windows 11, we've had to replace all of our PCs. We were uncomfortable going with the ASUS devices, so we wound up going with 14th generation Dell micro devices. Somewhat bigger than the NUCS, but still small enough for our purposes. But the Intel NUCs were very, very good for us.
I have never used a NUC where my immediate thought was "you know what? I should get more of these!"
Are any of the NUC like devices certified for Windows server OS? Fully Windows shop and need a few small device at remote office as probes.
Some will work, others will sort of work. A nix based virtualization platform solves the lack of drivers tho so in theory if you end up with a model windows doesn’t like you could slap proxmox on and windows wouldn’t care one bit. Now performance of that setup on the other hand…. Will probably have you frothing with hate for NUCs eventually.
We use similar mini PCs from hp in our fulfillment center.
We bought a bunch of NUCs last summer as desktops for our summer interns. We keep finding uses for them. They're great, big fan. I've made DIY thin clients out of them, used them for a bunch of projects, recycled a few for this year's group of interns.I even have 3 setup as a mini Proxmox cluster that I'm using to forward deploy some VMs on in a building we're taking over while we wrangle the rest of the IT move.
I find them unbelievably powerful little things. They are bloody excellent for small jobs where something simply needs to be tucked into a cupboard. They are widely used for small jobs where a bit more power than a Raspberry Pi is needed, but a full blown server is a waste. Displays, prompts, public kiosks, big monitors, little home servers, backup NAS's... the form factor is lovely too. They are PERFECT for the office workers desks. I love the way I can ziplock them onto the backs of TVs and monitors. It keeps everything neat and quite cable-free. I'm surprised business is still welded to "PC's" form factor for their boring needs. How many office workers need an Nvivia GPU? None... a bit of GPU to handle/offload some work, but nothing that any gamer would consider decent!
I have a couple Dell MFF Optiplex lil guys that I pulled from the e-waste pile, one is my daily driver and the other is plugged into the living room TV. They're fine for what they are, and I appreciate how little space they occupy. Part of me still yearns for a big tower battlestation though.
Expensive, tend to walk away...
They're fine for a tiny desktop and especially good for places requiring small machines like kiosks, trade shows, signage and such. At one point Chick-Fil-A ran k8s clusters on these at each location. They're decent for home labs too. You do pay a bit extra for the convenience in size, but overall good machines.
we used SFF dells as desktops. we almosy went the 1L form factor (lenovo m90) but were worried about heat. however i feel for what our users do they wouldn’t be a problem since our graphics dept has custom built rigs. i got a M90q gen3 i5-12500 coming this week and am pumped!!! 2 x 1TB pcie4 drives, maybe a 2 TB 2.5 ssd and 32gb of ram for under $550 (ebay/used but)
>i got a M90q gen3 i5-12500 coming this week and am pumped!!! 2 x 1TB pcie4 drives, maybe a 2 TB 2.5 ssd and 32gb of ram for under $550 (ebay/used but) Wow!!! The same machine will cost like $1000 if imported in my country.
yea it was a great deal, $325 for just the m90q gen 3 (came with 16gb ddr5, i5, no wifi or ssd). had an extra 1 TB pcie ssd laying around, ordered a wifi 6e card and antenna kit, 16gb ddr5, another 1 Tb pcie (love thst it has two pcie4 slots and a sata 2.5ssd bracket) and the hdmi flex port brining total to around $500-$550. should last me a good five plus years. finally replacing my old dell 9020 running a fourth gen i7 ive had for nearly ten years now.
Heat isn't an issue in terms of causing crashing, but they get noisy with high CPU. For my personal machines, I used to use an M720q for with an i7 low-power variant for around 6 tears and now use a ThinkStation P360 with an i7-12700 (not the low power one). I do video encoding in Davinci Resolve with the P360 using the iGPU, multi-hour renders have never caused any problem, but the fan runs full tilt the entire time. The fans are like laptop fans for a noise reference. Had a lot of i5 ThinkCentre's in users' hands over the years and they generally stay fairly quiet for typical daily business user use, but you can hear the fan randomly spin up for a few seconds and then down to non-audible.
makes sense about fans! thx for the notes. i was eyeing that p360 but ended up with the m90q since it was such a deal.
I bought a 7th gen i7 off eBay a few years ago and dropped Ubuntu server on it for Plex. Never had any issues with it. Love the small form factor systems!
What was aggravating was if they stopped powering on, there was no troubleshooting its just a paperweight. This is a problem with micro PCs in general like I had a personal Gigabyte Brix that was only lightly used and just stopped powering on. A different DC adapter made no difference. At least with an SFF a power supply and conceivably even a motherboard is swappable. They are as disposable as iPhones.
I thought the dell 7090 uff was a pretty cool idea My staff are highly mobile so laptops were the right choice. They all get 5G onboard.
Maybe another brands are ok for office pc / signaling / digital kiosk. The most small and price convenient are (ad example) mini pcs with n100 cpu. Low power and enough for light use. In YT I saw unboxing and test in some notebooks with n100, looks good. Off course you have another cpus and a lot of brands...
I am replacing every desktop in my organization with ThinkStation P3 Tiny’s. Plenty of power for any user that currently has a desktop and the footprint is great for some of smaller workspaces.
We actually put them in for basic workstation. They come in Celeron to I9. They even have the option for discrete graphics.
We love NUCs in Industrial Manufacturing. We have industrial equipment that requires a larger 24in display on a VESA mount for operators to use, so we mount NUCs on VESA brackets with the monitors and use them with Windows to run the vendor software for it. Laptops wouldn't work in the environment nor are the displays big enough, and don't require batteries, and AIO's are too bulky. I have 10 of these setup at our site. The software also requires Ethernet to a PLC controller, which they have too.
I work in R&D aviation and I tried using them. The dirty power in our chase plane caused the nuc to loose bios time. Have you ever pulled the bios battery on one of those things... Other than that they were fine
> Have you ever pulled the bios battery on one of those things... I just replaced the CMOS battery on an old one this week -- not fun. The one-liter machines are easier to work on, but the various SBCs are even easier.
Used them years ago as kiosk/shared computers and absolutely loved them for it. Bolted straight to the back of a monitor and it was our ghetto all in one solution lol
Restaurants deployed them in droves for smart menus, kitchen video systems and some POS. They were cheap and effective, leaps better than compute sticks. When Intel got out of the game it left a vacuum for restaurant tech.
we have a bunch of Logitec Teams MTR's that are leveraging Lenovo mini-PC's which are basically this. they work really well. i also use a [Minisforum MS-01](https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-ms-01) at home as my Plex server and NAS, 2 x 10Gbps and 2 x 2.5Gbps networking make it awesome for that sort of thing.
Honestly... I think the name was to dumb for mainstream. It was a nerd name for a nerd tool, that could have been more widely used if someone had marketed more widely.
NUCs have their uses. Logitech used them in their first two generations of their Teams room setups and they’re nothing but misery. The slightly bigger variants like the HP EliteDesk Mini or Dell Micro devices are pretty rock solid. In evaluation, I prefer HP’s lineup ‘cause they include USB-C etc. I honestly see no reason not to have this format as default fixed device. HP’s DeskMini has two nvme drives + optional sata 2,5in expansion, all in that little box…
A couple downsides to NUCs and tiny PCs is they walk away much easier and also overheat easier. Because of this we have gone with the next step up in size.
NUC's are a discontinued product lineup, at least for the Intel variety. The naming lives on with ASUS, however. That aside, there are a number of alternatives in the market, though at a slightly higher price-point than what Intel hit at. * Dell Optiplex Micro * Lenovo ThinkStation Tiny * HP Pro/EliteDesk DeskMini/DM * Fujitsu Esprimo Q series lineup There are also a slew of companies with more NUC-inspired box/cube PCs with anything ranging from a Celeron N100 to mobile i9 processors as well, many of which get coverage in the homelabbing YouTube channels.
because tiny pcs are almost impossible to repair/upgrade. yes, I know that many of them have upgradable RAM and SSD. so yes, we use mini/micro pc for basic-office-workstation that can be replaced easily and only if physical space is a problem.
Because they were/are overheating piles of garbage that had higher than normal failure rates compared to equivalent offerings from the big 3 OEMs (Dell, Lenovo & HP) and for many years they had very few higher-spec configs available in their range (the majority of the CPUs in them were the low power T/U/Y models) so they were basically unusable for any remotely intensive workloads. In the last 5-8 years or so, the SFF/USFF offerings from the big 3 OEMs have completely surpassed the Intel NUCs in both value, performance, form-factor, configurability and expandability. Every single time I encounter an Intel NUC in any environment, I recommend to the client that they nuke it from orbit and immediately replace it with something that's actually enterprise-grade.
We use NUCs as MDT servers. They work pretty well.
What niche do they fill in an office environment though? Barely cheaper than a notebook, which also enables people to work remotely or on trips. Not a replacement for a workstation either. Don’t get me wrong. I like NUCs. They are great toys for development, trying out things or like a little home media server etc. For office use I don’t quite see the appeal.
I can get a micro PC from dell with 64gb of memory and 3 year on site support, why would you buy a NUC?
- They had a highish failure rate when we deployed them in 2018 - Theyre not that serviceable. If it fries you replace the whole thing. - Theyre loud and high pitched. - They use laptop grade CPUs. - They have odd issues at the BIOS level. And since theyre not that mass deployed researching support issues was less helpful than dell. Just weird quirky things that make you appreciate the stability of dell/hp bioses. - They make for great home labs. They make for great signage/vc room machines. - i did wish we replaced some of our lighter used servers with these. A DC or FS thats used by <100 people would run just fine.
No tpm
What?
?? not true. depends on what year and models. anything from 5 years ago will have/should have tpm 2.0
We did a batch of NUC clients in 2015. They came bare, and we fitted 16GiB of DDR3 and SSDs. Very nice overall, though we did have some fans dying around the five year mark, including my own dogfooded desktop. When that got replaced, it was with an AMD HP Elitedesk one-liter micro. About the same, not counting the CPU/GPU, except for a bit more ports and expansion.
They were decent little machines but they seemed to develop personality atleast the ones we used at my last job. The skull canyon was cool though. That job also mandated users run PC's 24/7 so that may have lead to the issues to.
HP Mini, Dell Micro, Lenovo Tiny They're been around for a long time now and they are enterprise ready with good warranties and tools to maintain large fleets.
Use to have to configure the logitech NUC's a few years ago, straight out the box they'd run like shit. So fucking slowwwwwwwwwwwww.....hated them
They're a great replacement for towers or full size desktops for users that need general compute and don't need a laptop.
We used them for almost every staff that didn't travel... until COVID and we all started to WFH. Since then we've bene replacing NUCs with laptops in the normal replacement cycle as staff like to have hybrid office/WFH. We use them as an appliance running 1-2 VMs for on-prem installs for customers, but most of our in-house NUCs have been replaced now in favour of laptops. I still keep my old Ryzen7 NUC around in case I need a few more cores of compute for experiments. Generally I like them but they do use mobile processors
We give some of our non-travelling WFH users NUCs configured as thin clients. No shell, just a script that connects back to on-site RDS infrastructure.
Not a NUC specifically but I almost exclusively use the lenovo tiny PC's along with the Lenovo tiny in one monitor. Makes for a nice modular package that gives an AIO feel.
I don't care about formfactor, but I require and am willing to pay for next business day on site support on my workstations. Something breaks and I call Dell and a tech is on site the next day to fix. I would never deploy consumer level NUC's just because of that.
All the NUCs I purchased had power issues, fried the motherboard or power supply would go bad. I’m using Dells Optiplex micro and it’s been working out well.
I've used a few as desktops over the years, they're fine. We also sell some as endpoint companions to some of our products. The main problem is we pretty much have to spec out new models every time we order them because they're consumer-grade and processors, motherboards, and I/O ports are constantly changing.
ASRock 4x4
We use them as headless probes, emergency deploys, etc. Most of our end users get laptops for portability, and the only desktop users are those who need custom build/heavy processing like graphics/CAD. Seen a few clients and third party vendors deploy these as their remote gateway (and some light tasks, monitoring their own software, etc). Cons? maybe driver support?
Use them heaps they are great, heaps of choice even with i7 CPUs, and they get 8 or is it now 10 years of guarantied support. Use them in environments where a laptop or all-in-one isn’t relevant or is a liability. I prefer a ChromeBox, they’re proven to be little effort for customisation and zero maintenance.
I'd like to test one of them with Linux. Efficient OS for tiny hardware. Everything in the cloud. Perfect.
I see people use them mostly for homelabs.
NUC will likely vanish pretty quickly now, no tpm so no win 11, at least ours.
I just deployed a bunch of 13s as dedicated mission control VoIP clients. They have no issues running rhel8 with the STIG profile with just an i3 and 8gb of RAM. The ones they're replacing are 6th gens with a Celeron, and while they're a little pokier, they've been mostly reliable.
Dell Micros are really nice.
I’ve got 2 running at home with Proxmox running a few VMs. They use next to no power
Ya know that is probably why I thought it was so neat. Planning to use it at home for a game server that I can leave on 24/7. It drawing so little and being a capable box? Seems perfect
Laptops are more modular and the price difference isn't that big if you factor in the cost for a monitor to go with the nuc, if you don't need to move around much nucs are a great option though.
We have them in our production. Good tiny bois.
We have about 200 running as thin clients. No shell (Explorer) just a loop that presents the MSTSC login screen. Sadly they will all have to go by October 2025 when Windows 10 goes EOL.
This is the first time in ages that getting a new version of Windows basically means throw away your PC. I have as far back as Optiplex 790s still running with upgraded ram and ssds. I recently had to buy 42 new desktops to get ahead of Oct 2025.
We use them here. Works fine, just make sure the room is DUST PROOF. They are really not a fan of dust and will overheat if not taking care of. We have like a stock of 25 dust spray can in our office just for them.
SW dev here. Used to work at a Mac shop (ugh) but would occasionally have need for a windows box for a project. IT got us NUCs. Great little device. Highly recommend for stationary workstations.
I did work at a place that bought over a thousand of these so each site could have an employee kiosk for checking their time sheet and what not.
Many organizations use the Dell mini pc’s.
Where I work we use(d) NUCs for various purposes, like players for promo displays, digital signage or even teams conference room controls. Due to running 24/7 they die out now and get replaced with Lenovos.
Seems like an sbc would be more cost effective for this. Why did you not use a raspberry pi?
Windows doesn't run on it.
Technically yes it does. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=53898 Practically though raspberry pi is made for stiff like this with the default os.
I work for Microsoft and you can only use certified hardware for standardized AV environments... a.k.a. x86 compatible PCs, we don't have time to rewrite that for ARM. Also... Microsoft doesn't have money for that. Every cent goes into AI.
I literally posted a link above of a windows os that I've installed and used on Raspberry pi. But yeah. I also said raspberry pi is made with the default os to do this. Here's a link to how to do that. https://www.pickcel.com/learn/setting-up-digital-signage-with-raspberry-pi/#:~:text=Raspberry%20Pi%204%20as%20a,cloud%2Dbased%20digital%20signage%20project. Because intel isn't making the NUC anymore and windows iot core is in extended support. So not sure what you were replying to.
I've seen their drives go and their power cables.
For us it's because a laptop is more useful. Small form factor PCs have been incredibly popular though. They're also very popular for homelabs.
They're great. The factory I work in bought a load for the assembly benches for supplies and manuals. If one breaks, swap it out and reimage. very easy indeed.
The models with mini-hdmi were annoying - I had to deal with a few cables that broke just from the weight of the cable on the connector. And we had quite a few drives die in the more recent models for no apparent reason. It's certainly convenient to be able to easily mount a computer to the back of a monitor, though.
Do I have several lenovo and dell tiny ones? Yes. Do I recommend them? Nope. Its either more powerful machine or an All in One.
They are great devices for when you've outgrown raspberry pi's. It's more powerful than a pi, without using the space and power of a full rig.
For me, this stuff all comes down to how much work it is. I could never get the cost low enough to justify the workload to build and deploy. By the time I bought the machine, RAM, and storage and OS licensing, I maybe would save $100 if that compared to the Dell Micros. But with Dell, I don’t have to pay someone to build it, I don’t have to pay someone to setup the OS and possibly track down drivers, I have a functioning PC the minute it is in the office, I don’t have to track Windows licenses myself, and I have a 5 year warranty to boot. Not to mention all the automation Dell has for tracking base config, drivers, and warranty info by service tag. It’s one of those things where it’s cheaper acquisition cost, but higher total cost of ownership.
We used them for a few years and have moved away from them to the Lenovo tiny micros. As far as I can tell, they stuck with similar cooling while increasing the TDP which helped to reduce the life of the system. They ran hot and failed quickly. No easy way to actually to clean the exhaust due to the way its built. The warranty took weeks and it would fail again within the year. 6th gen lasted longer than the later generations of NUC from what we had, likely due to the lower TDP & heat compared to the newer models. The idea was good, the implementation wasn't, at least if you went for the higher tier CPUs.
Depends on use case. For normal users, most are better served with a laptop anyway. If it’s a terminal/PoS system, more and more are switching to iPads/tablets So the market for these devices has been shrinking
I love them for my clients as I commute by train into the city. If the problem is that bad at the end of the day, I bring it home say I’ll see you in the morning.
I have 3 and absolutely love them. Solid little machines. Running xenserver on them.
About 10 years ago, the cloud architect for my company had a cluster of 4 nucs on his desk. It was his development environment. It was running kubernetes. So he could test deployments there.
Our MSP division uses it for local NPM/SAM monitors that essentially act as proxies/collectors for remote sites. They work well for them. We used them as low-power QRadar servers (specifically disconnected log collectors) and had mixed results. The initial deployment of five were fine, then a sixth came onboard. The initial NUCs we used at the time (I think Gen 7 or 8?) was discontinued. We picked up a new generation. Worst. experience. ever. Granted, people (including me) made assumptions that it would work based on previous experience and the fact that it was relatively 'normal' hardware under the hood. General spec RAM, CPU, & Storage. Forget what board/NIC. Ended up compiling the drivers on the platform to make the NIC work. It was both an unpleasant experience and a fruitless one. Ultimately, we decided not to send it because we had absolutely zero support if it went tits up on site. (The site was remote, even for the client. Couple hour drive from the customers HQ. We were a 6-hour drive away to get on site.) TLDR: Do your research ***before*** you buy them and make sure your use case is supported. If not, NUCs are a specific niche and the amount of support you'll get for it is slim-to-none.
A lot of it, from what i see, is a lack of support. If the hardware goes down, you can't just call them up and perform a. Hot swap or even repair it and get it back up. Also, it's good to have standards in your environment. When you ha e a bunch of random NUCS along with desktops and laptops, it's harder for you to keep up with maintenance.
When all users are fully allowed to both wfh and office locations as they and their managers see fit, why would I get users desktop devices (even if they're very small). I do agree that they're nice though. Set one up for my grandfather many years back and it's been putting in work.
We don't deploy NUCs, but we do have a fleet of MFF from Dell. Manging the devices for moves is so much better than towers.
I have deployed and supported around 100 NUCs in my environment, all via pxe os deployment (SCCM) and they lasted through there 7 year warranty with very few issues. Now being phased out as laptops are more versatile. Thay said, i had great vendor support and would have no problem running NUCs if speced for future needs, i5 and 16gb ram minimum.
We stopped getting em cause we had a ton start having overheating issues in a short time frame
It all depends on the workload. We mainly use them for things like trade fairs and sometimes employ them as servers for testing purposes. Unfortunately, if there's too much load for too long, they will throttle the CPU quite a bit so not that much fun for continuous heavy use. But all in all, it is mind-blowing what can be done in such a small form factor.
Drivers were always the biggest issue I had when working with these. They didn't get the market penetration needed for these massive companies to maintain them.
I have used them for all conference rooms for years. Mount great behind a TV. Rock solid, but a bit expensive. I hope Asus does not screw them up.
I was looking at ASUS site, is it just me or is the marketing all funky? They are marketed as "build your own" but when I go through their catalog it's all pre-selected stuff?
We used to use the Intel branded NUCs to display our monitoring dashboards at work on wall mounted TVs. However, the best part was the cardboard boxes they came in had a small circuit with a photocell that would play the Intel jingle whenever the light hit it. I hid one in each refrigerator in the office, so every time the door opened and the light came on, it played the song. We would crack up every time we heard it from across the office. After a few months, it finally annoyed someone enough that they spent an hour and tore apart the refigerators until they found and removed them all.
Laptops are mobile. In a place like Florida, where I admin, mobility is key for half the year. While a NUC is more mobile than a desktop, it's not as mobile as a laptop. The ability to flee or go on a trip and still have the ability to stay connected is why for us. I honestly use old NUCs and Mac minis as headless servers at home when I need to. Great tech.
Chick fil a uses them in every store running kubernetes in a cluster
We have many nucs for our teams meetings room. Small, can be placed behind the big screen, works as intended. For Desktops we have Dell Precisions or Towers (with a graphics card 2x more screens)
I worked in a place that was sunsetting the Levono line of these mini-systems. They had VESA mounts, IIRC, so they could be bolted to the back of VESA mounted monitors. The number one flaw was heat dissipation. Most stopped working randomly because even the fanless ones would collect dust and then eventually overheat.
We bought a fair number of them. They worked fine. But relative to other PCs we built they didn't last as long.
Did you read and understand my comment? You probably read it, but obviously didn't understand.
You actually find them in the smart displays used in some stores.
Screw NUCs, why don’t more places use raspberry pi’s? Web browsing is web browsing. When everything SaaS runs in a web browser, why are people still giving MS money?
Love RPI but sometimes the thing you need to run will run on Linux but just not Arm architecture. Sadly though, businesses still want MS Office no matter how good Libre Office is. Particularly Outlook and Excel, they are immovable fixtures in many organisations.
> why don’t more places use raspberry pi’s? Too expensive for reasonable performance