[HN Gopher] ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel's NUC products
___________________________________________________________________
ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel's NUC products
Author : mepian
Score : 527 points
Date : 2023-07-19 01:48 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.intel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.intel.com)
| daviddever23box wrote:
| I've been a small fan (pun intended) of the Intel NUC product
| range, and have found them to be solid, compatible platforms for
| multi-OS development, provided that one sticks with the small
| form-factor models (c.f. Asus BeeBox range) and buys the Core
| i7-based barebones kits.
|
| The Geekom Mini IT range, by all accounts, appears on the surface
| to be a rebadged, upspecified flavor of the Intel NUC baseboards;
| I wonder if there is a back story to this as regards the
| underlying ODM ecosystem....
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Other than gaming the only 3 intel machines I bought is intel
| stick like and later small box shape machine. I think it must be
| quite successful as I am a mac person. Sad to see it gone because
| it has its use.
|
| Surprise to see it survive. Strange. Does intel has a network to
| know. I start to worry now.
| trd716 wrote:
| How is ASUS build quality these days?
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| I have a cheap Vivobook laptop, it's fine. At least it looks
| more robust than the cheap Lenovo I had before... Obviously
| none of them are as robust as my old 2012 DELL which I dropped
| many times on the floor without even scratching it or damaging
| the screen. But the latter is also way heavier and its
| performances just can't match a Ryzen 5.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Hard to tell, but here's some anecdata:
|
| I cooked the LCD panel in my ASUS G14 laptop because apparently
| sleep mode means 100% CPU mode.
|
| Some bits of hardware are great(like the chassis and heat sinks
| - with a Ryzen 4800HS you can browse the internet with fans
| shut off through third party software), some suck(e.g. keyboard
| lighting, LCD back cover), but overall for me it's the firmware
| that spoils everything.
|
| Battery charging limit sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, so I
| occasionally end up with a full charge, because that's
| apparently governed by the aptly named MyASUS app which may or
| may not actually work on any given day.
|
| I took the opportunity to repaste the thing when I broke the
| fans(available only via AliExpress - the official parts store
| doesn't have anything useful), because after less than two
| years the paste was already flaking, causing overheating.
|
| I "solved" the problem of the iGPU going at 100% frequency at
| all times by setting the dGPU as the preferred one(!) -
| achieving a jump from 2.5h to 5h battery life, when it used to
| be close to 10h before firmware/OS updates. The culprits could
| be: ASUS, Windows or AMD - no idea which though.
| sexy_seedbox wrote:
| The Zenfone 10 seems pretty high quality.
| j45 wrote:
| Asus gear just seems to keep working
| teamonkey wrote:
| Varies by cost as they have a range from cheap to premium.
| Their cheap is a higher quality than Lenovo's cheap, if that's
| any benchmark.
| keithnz wrote:
| Anyone using a NUC as a mini home server? How is it? or if you
| use something else as mini server what? and why?
|
| I keep thinking of getting something which I can run multiple vms
| as needed for things like game servers, hosting docker
| containers, etc. load it up with a bunch of memory. I don't want
| anything too big/power hungry given most of the time it would
| likely sit idle.
| transpute wrote:
| Lenovo or HP mini PC with PCIe slot,
| https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/
| valid4life wrote:
| I use a wall street canyon NUC to run proxmox (hypervisor),
| portainer (docker management), pteradactyl (game server hosting
| panel), pihole (moving off the big point of failure soon :) ),
| and a handful of random things here or there.
|
| It's been great so far, fans aren't too loud, power consumption
| isn't killer and there's ton of headroom still, assuming no
| modded minecraft server taking my ram.
| Gabrys1 wrote:
| https://androidtvbox.eu/ecs-liva-x-bay-trail-mini-pcs-suppor...
|
| I've been using this with Debian for years. My only complain is
| I needed one of the HDMI fake (or real) devices for the device
| to boot.
|
| I really like it's an amd64 and not an ARM. Allows to run
| software released as binary for Linux desktop.
|
| I have a USB-3 hard disk convected (Toshiba) and that's the
| slowest thing on the device.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| For me it's been great. When I finally found RAM and an SSD
| that was supported(!!), the experience got rock steady. On a
| headless Ubuntu server I'm hosting Home Assistant, Plex (the
| hardware transcoding and tone mapping is fantastic on a 12th
| gen Intel CPU), have tested out some "arrs" and I can tell
| there's plenty of headroom for more applications. The only
| thing is the fan noise when it really gets going. But I gather
| the 13th gen NUCs are much quieter. Considering a chassis swap
| in future.
|
| But the tradeoff for a small NUC is a big power brick.
| stefandesu wrote:
| I have an HP EliteDesk Mini PC as a mini home server. It's
| doing a great job, but the fans get quite loud when under load.
| It's an older model though.
|
| If I had to replace it, I'd probably opt for some kind of
| similar devices, but using a modern low-powered AMD chip
| instead of Intel.
| akira2501 wrote:
| I've got about a dozen fanless Celeron based NUCs out there for
| remote automation and other small scale server use. I'm a huge
| fan of the platform.
| rwmj wrote:
| I have ~ 10 NUCs in various roles, also some Gigabyte Brix.
| Some are servers, some are single-use developer machines (eg. I
| have separate ones for RHEL 7, 8 and 9), one is a desktop, one
| is a router.
|
| Having owned so many over years, I've found they are fairly
| prone to problems and have some missing features. My main
| gripes are:
|
| - Unreliable RAM. Obviously being Intel, ECC is not supported,
| and I have had several with bad RAM or random apparently RAM-
| related hanging issues. You could argue that this is nothing to
| do with Intel since the RAM is always from a third party (but a
| top quality one), but why do I only ever have this problem with
| NUCs and not the dozens of other machines I own?
|
| - CMOS batteries die after a few years and are not replaceable.
| Or they are replaceable if you completely dismantle the machine
| and desolder the battery leads, wrap a new CR2032 battery in
| tape with leads and solder it back to the board, but who has
| time for that. The battery should be socketed.
|
| - Only one 1Gbps network port.
|
| - Confusing model numbers and huge variety. ASUS should reduce
| and simplify the range.
|
| - No remote access / BMC. This would be the one feature that
| would make the systems 100x more useful.
|
| - Expensive! (Luckily Red Hat paid for most of them.) The
| Gigabyte machines are much cheaper.
|
| The good thing about them is they are small, quiet and use
| little power.
|
| For running VMs, note that the max possible RAM is 64GB. I do
| run VMs on some of mine, so it is possible.
| deadbunny wrote:
| > - No remote access / BMC. This would be the one feature
| that would make the systems 100x more useful.
|
| Ironically this is one of the options provided by some models
| in the dizzying line up. While it's not a dedicated IPMI port
| it uses Intel vPro for BMC like functionality. You'll pay a
| pretty premium for those models though.
| rwmj wrote:
| I tried to buy one, but once I worked out what the exact
| model number was that had VPro I couldn't find one in stock
| anywhere. It should really be a standard feature, but I
| guess Intel didn't want to cannibalize server sales?
| deadbunny wrote:
| And if you do find one they will be a lot pricer than the
| other models.
|
| The fragmentation in their lineup (and general lack of
| availability outside of B2B) really hamstrung them IMO.
| jdblair wrote:
| I have a NUC running Debian for 8 years as a fileserver for my
| home, with 2 x 2T USB HD. It was slow (USB2) but fine for the
| intended use of mostly cold storage.
|
| I recently replaced it with a Synology Diskstation, looking for
| a new job for the still running NUC.
| warp wrote:
| I have an i3-8109U NUC, probably purchased in 2019. I've had to
| replace the fan a year or two ago (found an unofficial
| replacement on ebay), but otherwise I haven't had any trouble
| with it (running Debian).
|
| It replaced a Raspberry Pi 3, and is obviously way more
| performant compared to that.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| I use mine as an ultra low-cost self-hosting machine. I have
| the cheapest dual-core NUC 11 (bnuc11atkc2) with 8GB RAM and a
| 256GB SSD (figured that would be enough) running Debian in a
| poorly ventilated IKEA cabinet. It runs Pi-hole, Home Assistant
| for my smart stuff (Zigbee stick via USB), Livebook (live
| coding notebooks) and Nextcloud, everything in Docker, and has
| two 4TB USB HDDs on BTRFS exposed via SMB as a cheap NAS with
| daily Restic backups to Backblaze.
|
| The machine sits at 49-53 degC and I have the fan curve set so
| the fan only starts spinning when it gets a little over that.
| Which I believe doesn't happen at all, because it's so
| underpowered.
|
| I don't know exactly how much power it consumes, but the whole
| IKEA cabinet sits at 16 W for my router, one Raspberry and this
| NUC together, so probably not much.
| diarrhea wrote:
| Yes, and it's excellent.
|
| Scored my model for EUR450, barely used. i7 8665, 32 GB RAM and
| 500GB SSD. It would have been around double that price new.
| This was about 4 years ago.
|
| It's quiet, rock solid and can run just about anything I throw
| at it. It's even overkill for my uses, but if I get another 5
| years out of it it's incredible value for the money.
| tiew9Vii wrote:
| I have the latest Gen 13 I5. It was an impulse buy as was on
| offer at a good price.
|
| I installed a 1TB Solodigm P44 NVME drive, 32GB memory.
|
| OS wise I installed Proxmox. Install was a pain but that's
| because I wanted LUKS encryption. I had to install Debian
| first, setup LUKS, then setup Dropbear ssh so I can ssh in to
| it at boot for the password. Once that was out the way I
| followed Proxmox's instructions on migrating Debian to Proxmox
| which is a case of adding the Proxmox apt repos and installing.
| A vanilla Proxmox install is minutes, but then it's unencrypted
| data which is a pain when selling drives.
|
| I have a small vm with WireGuard + rarr suite of apps, then a
| bunch of lxc containers, jellyfin etc. It's mostly idling away
| and silent but the fan kicks in pretty quickly if doing
| anything moderate cpu wise. The fan is loud when it starts.
|
| I am happy with the purchase as it uses little power and it's
| mostly silent for me. If it wasn't an impulse buy based on the
| price a better option might of been the Aliexpress fanless N300
| boxes at the low cpu end, or a one litre mini pc such as a eBay
| used HP Elite Mini G9 as they have better cooling so quieter.
|
| You can add 10gb to the hp, dual NVMe, and 2.5 sata drive. A
| mini powerhouse https://www.servethehome.com/perfect-project-
| tinyminimicro-p...
| lusid1 wrote:
| I have 4 older NUC8i5BEH with 64gb ram in a vpshere8 cluster.
| It makes a nice little lab, and it has been stable for years.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The power consumption of an idle "Wall Street Canyon" 12th-
| generation model is almost negligible. At the SoC, often less
| than half a watt. At the wall, less than 5 watts typical, most
| of which is being wasted in the AC/DC conversion.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I picked up a stack of nucs that a previous employer was about to
| recycle most of them i5s one i7. Turned them into a small kube
| cluster on my desk, they run my plex setup, email, mastodon
| server, other web applications, etc. Little things just keep
| humming along like no-ones business.
|
| Was pretty saddened to hear that intel was looking at getting out
| of the business but glad to see asus picking up a license.
| ed_blackburn wrote:
| Where is the ARM equivalent or put another way budget Linux Apple
| Mini competitor?
| ChrisLTD wrote:
| Raspberry Pi and their clones come close
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| It's wild to me there's no clear answer for this; it seems like
| such an obvious product! Raspberry Pi is neat but not quite
| powerful enough, particularly when it comes to disk IO.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Raspberry Pi and its various competitors... the problem is you
| can't just go and buy ARM CPUs or boards if you're not either
| willing to upfront _serious_ amounts of cash or have personal
| relations to Qualcomm and friends (which is how RPi got their
| in).
|
| You have a couple top tier vendors when it comes to actually
| performant SoCs:
|
| - Apple, which exclusively produces for their own lineup, and
| has inarguably the best-performing chips _by far_ in raw
| performance and power efficiency to a tune they 're
| outperforming Intel
|
| - Samsung, which use (almost) all their production for their
| own phones, tablets and TVs - I'm not aware of Samsung SoCs
| ending up in any third party product
|
| - Annapurna Labs, which belong to Amazon for a few years now,
| and whose SoCs end up being used in servers (both AWS
| themselves and third parties, QNAP uses a fair few of their
| models)
|
| - Qualcomm and Broadcom, who won't return your calls unless
| you're talking millions of dollars in volume, have all their
| documentation behind NDAs _and_ have serious deviations from
| any kind of standards which is what makes supporting them in
| Android forks a _huge_ pain in the ass, and even the RPi
| chipset lacks behind severely in something as basic as PCIe,
| see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150697
|
| - Mediatek and Rockchip which are even worse than the above two
| regarding documentation/standards/BSP quality, but you seem to
| stand a chance acquiring one of their chips even if you're
| small volume - almost all el-cheapo/gongkai devices and RPi
| competitors are based on their chips
|
| - NVIDIA with their Tegra lineup which seems to be used only on
| the Nintendo Switch, a few settop boxes and automotive
|
| That's more than in the x86/64 ecosystem on paper, where the
| only players left in town are Intel and AMD... but these are
| based on some common standardized core around BIOS/UEFI/PCI,
| there is no such thing in the entire ARM space. If you want to
| design a device using ARM, you're left either relying on a
| more-or-less open BSP from the vendor or doing everything
| including the bootloader yourself, and it's left to each
| SoC/board vendor on how to wire stuff like sensors (yes, I'm
| aware of device trees, but they don't come close to the
| easiness of x86/64). In total, it's a fuckton of work for very
| low gain as the market share for desktop ARM (Apple aside) just
| isn't there.
| RunSet wrote:
| > Apple, which exclusively produces for their own lineup, and
| has inarguably the best-performing chips by far in raw
| performance and power efficiency to a tune they're
| outperforming Intel
|
| Also limited in terms of running Linux on it, since the
| poster you replied to asked about that.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| At least the incentive for highly skilled reverse engineers
| is there and it's showing in pretty solid support [2] and
| contributions.
|
| For example Apple is known for re-using SoC blocks across
| _many_ generations - according to an (admittedly unsourced,
| but I 've seen it stated multiple times) HN comment [1],
| the UART has been the same _since the first iPhone_ through
| all the years past including M1 /M2 machines, whereas
| Samsung alone has four incompatible variations, and all the
| other vendors each have their own idea as well, while the
| entirety of x86 can be spoken to in bare-metal assembler.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28768942
|
| [2] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
| smolder wrote:
| > Apple [...] has inarguably the best-performing chips _by
| far_ in raw performance and power efficiency
|
| This is overstated. There are some benchmarks M2 does
| amazingly at, partly due to a super wide memory bus shared by
| the GPU. Power efficiency on performance desktop x86 is much
| worse than M2, but efficiency is comparable with lower TDP
| x86 SKUs and server chips.
|
| If you're comparing M1/M2 chips to apple x86, you are looking
| at obsolete x86. Otherwise, I think it's buying into the hype
| just a bit much to say x86 is _inarguably_ behind _by far_.
| Aromasin wrote:
| Try looking at ARM Embedded Single Boards. They're only ever
| marketed to industry for smart automation/IoT systems, but
| effectively fill the niche you're looking for:
| https://uk.farnell.com/c/embedded-computers-education-maker-...
|
| I've saved a few during my years of lab management as they ran
| our infrastructure, and they're cracking PCs. Sometimes I run
| into fringe issues with drivers, but never anything major.
| Pretty much all validated on Linux OS too, so better support
| than most client PCs.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I can only guess that ASUS was probably already acting as an OEM
| for the NUC line and is just taking on the responsibility for
| updates. ASUS has already produced several lines of mini sized
| computers, so not too surprising that they'll make them.
|
| I am slightly surprised that they're taking on the mantel of NUC
| though. Probably more about getting the Trademark than anything
| else. I wonder if this means "NUC" as a brand will stay
| exclusively Intel though.
| Triangle9349 wrote:
| Aren't ASUS mini PCs manufactured by the GEEKOM?
| rburhum wrote:
| I wanted to understand what NUC is and what it is used for... but
| after 13th mention of "NUC" (as if we all knew wth it was), I
| just gave up. Bad marketing always hurts more than help.
| Aromasin wrote:
| Next Unit of Computing; basically a computer system that's been
| pushed to the limit of size vs performance using client CPUs.
| It's only of those classic computer industry TLAs (three letter
| acronyms) where they assume everyone knows what it means, even
| though you'd never work it out on your own.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| How are people pronouncing NUC? Like "nuck" (rhymes with "Zuck")
| or "nuke" (rhymes with "puke")?
| folmar wrote:
| Like ``news''.
| whalesalad wrote:
| it's like gif as in gif
| tim-fan wrote:
| Or nook (rhymes with book)? At work I say nuck, but most others
| say nook, so I'd like to get to the bottom of this!
| vxNsr wrote:
| Wait, zuck and book rhyme, how are nook and nuck different?
| tomsmeding wrote:
| zUck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-
| open_central_vowel
|
| bOOk
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_central_rounded_vowel
| vxNsr wrote:
| Must be a midwestern accent thing, I don't pronounce
| book, "boooook" (as in what a ghost with a cough says)
| smolder wrote:
| Book/nook are not as in boo/goo, but they're also not the
| same as in buck/Zuck. This is not a Midwestern thing. I
| can't recall ever meeting a native US english speaker for
| whom these vowel sounds weren't distinct. Probably in
| some accents they blur together.
| saltcured wrote:
| Rather, I think some may be rhyming Zuck with buck which
| does not rhyme with book.
|
| Edit: oops, smolder said the same thing but I was reading
| a stale page without the reply...
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Here are some pairs of words to show they don't rhyme:
|
| Pluck / took
|
| Duck / rook
|
| Suck / shook
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Now I'm imagining your coworkers talking about getting
| nookie.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| I have a hard time shopping for NUCs (or really anything that
| comes in "product lines" instead of just having numbers). How am
| I to know if Bronze Puddle is faster than Medicated Jackrabbit,
| and where does Broad Jump fit into that ranking?
| pizza wrote:
| Have to say my experience with Intel and ASUS lately has just
| been one of shoddiness/instability- 12900ks + z690 desktop build
| has been pretty unstable just trying to enable the advertised
| features in the bios (xmp for instance). So I wish them better
| luck this time..
| smolder wrote:
| XMP comes with no guarantees. If you are unlucky in terms of
| CPU silicon, or your motherboard has suboptimal ram signal
| quality, you will need to turn down from the XMP speed to
| achieve stability. You can improve your odds of stability at
| high freq buying motherboards known for good ram speeds but for
| the CPU it's always a lottery.
|
| The 9700k I had was one of those unlucky chips that just
| couldn't do faster than 3200mhz RAM without occasional issues.
| pizza wrote:
| You're correct. That said it's kind of wild to me that the
| silicon lottery has stayed strong. They ought to be made to
| disclose when they are selling overclocker models that will
| not really overclock that well. Doesn't seem right to have to
| pay flagship prices when they know they're selling you
| something that won't reach that level. At least package it as
| a lesser SKU or something imo
| lakomen wrote:
| Lots of blah but no details
| emmelaich wrote:
| Meanwhile there's also the Gigabyte Brix.
|
| https://www.gigabyte.com/au/Mini-PcBarebone
| adrian_b wrote:
| While in the past I have used a pair of Gigabyte Brix with good
| results, I no longer consider them for any new purchase.
|
| The reason is that all the Gigabyte Brix are designed for a
| maximum working ambient temperature of 35 Celsius degrees.
| Where I live, in Europe, the ambient temperature is frequently
| higher than that.
|
| Now, a condition for buying any new computer is to have a
| maximum working ambient temperature of at least 40 Celsius
| degrees, like it was true for most Intel NUC models.
| bigyikes wrote:
| It's hard to take ASUS seriously with a quote like:
|
| > this collaboration will enhance and accelerate our vision for
| the mini PC - greatly expanding our footprint in areas such as AI
| and AIoT
|
| It's just dripping in buzzword doublespeak. The NUCs seem like
| cool devices, do we really have to shoehorn "AI" and -- I had to
| re-read this -- "AIoT" into everything?
| silisili wrote:
| Wait the I in IoT was internet....is that...artificial
| internet?
| TillE wrote:
| "Artificial Intelligence of Things" is also total gibberish.
| Vecr wrote:
| Are you sure? "Artificial Intelligence of Things" is a
| pretty good description of autonomous robots or a fully
| self-contained home assistant puck.
| RandomBK wrote:
| Alas, we have Wall Street to thank.
|
| Nobody _really_ believes this - not even Wall Street - but
| everyone knows how the game is played and begrudgingly plays
| along.
| dangus wrote:
| At the same time, it's not much to get surprised or worked up
| about. The marketing copy on any given PC OEM website for any
| particular product has always been complete jibberish.
|
| These are companies running on extremely thin margins that have
| minimal marketing budgets.
| inhumantsar wrote:
| Honestly there is demand for local inference in the enterprise
| space, especially computer vision systems, that demand more
| power than comparable arm platforms can provide.
|
| I could see there being a small but valuable niche they could
| fill.
| [deleted]
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Asus is one of the best in class, especially bang for your
| buck.
|
| I suggest paying less attention to PR and more attention to
| specs. There is one company that is best in class for their
| PR/marketing, but their specs can't hold a candle if you are
| willing to spend equivalent money.
|
| We should applaud companies that don't overspend on mind
| control/psychology tricks and spend that money instead on great
| products.
| dev_slash_null wrote:
| I use a Nuc clone to run Home Assistant, and AI event detection
| for my camera network (assisted by a Coral accelerator). So I
| think it legitimately qualifies for those buzzwords.
| o1y32 wrote:
| Except that almost nobody except random people on HN or
| certain reddit communities set up their own server for home
| assistant. Your personal interest and effort in this area
| really doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things --
| I'm sure Asus and Intel marketing people weren't thinking
| about users like you when they wrote those words.
| j45 wrote:
| People have many other home appliances, no reason a local
| machine to provide local Cloud and home automation can't
| happen.
|
| This form factor is especially neat for the amount of power
| per watt one gets.
| natecruft wrote:
| Yes. Failing to mention AI regarding any investment is
| basically MBA malpractice at this point.
|
| To err is human. To arr is pirate. To AI is lemming.
|
| At least it isn't yet AIoTaaS.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Now you've got me thinking of a hardware freemium model where
| you get some freebie IoT device on your home network, and its
| neural net convinces you to start paying its subscription fee
| (implemented with blockchain) once you're feeling done
| putting up with some limitation of the free version.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| This was all the rage back in 1999. ISPs we're giving away
| "free" eMachines with the purchase of a 3 year MSN _dialup_
| subscription.
| RunSet wrote:
| Also Juno and Netzero giving internet access for watching
| ads.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And FreeDSL.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/freedsl-goes-live/
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Been using an Asus PN51[1] with KDE Neon for about a year, and
| overall I'm very happy with it. Performance is good, never had a
| crash, stuff just worked out of the box without fuzz.
|
| Seems like a decent fit to me.
|
| [1]: https://www.asus.com/us/displays-desktops/mini-pcs/pn-
| series...
| Zanfa wrote:
| Did PN51 come with networking supported by default? When I got
| my PN50 some time ago, it couldn't connect to either wireless
| or wired networks and there was no indication which
| manufacturer's driver was required without some disassembly. I
| also loved how they shipped a CD with a computer that has no
| means of reading it with included drivers, so that was
| completely unhelpful.
|
| Why is installing drivers still a thing in 202x in non-Macs?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Yeah both worked without any manual intervention. Was
| positively surprised of how smooth it went.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Fedora 37 is working smoothly on mine.
| [deleted]
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Another happy PN51 user (R7 4700U) - I've found it to be quite
| the mighty mite working with big NetBeans projects.
|
| I'm honestly not surprised that Asus would pick up the NUC
| line.
| Havoc wrote:
| The pn51 didn't ship with a 4700. You're either using a pn50
| or 5700
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Oops, you're right, it's a PN50. Anyway, I'm still
| impressed with this little guy.
| Havoc wrote:
| Yeah got the same. Very solid
| RandomBK wrote:
| I find the development quite interesting, and it lends credence
| to the theory Intel's NUC line was _technically profitable_ (or
| at least not horrifically in the red), but just didn 't make
| strategic sense - especially from a 'competing with your own
| customers' view.
|
| While I never bought one of these NUCs myself, I've used quite a
| few deployed as thin clients and kiosk machines. Let's see what
| ASUS ends up doing with the product segment.
|
| More broadly, I hope the trend of selling off business units
| rather than closing them outright continues (Google Domains
| selling to Squarespace being another recent example).
| bfdm wrote:
| I _have_ been using a NUC as an HTPC for several years now and
| it 's great, though the comments in the previous conversation
| about them ending the line were right about the noise.
|
| I'm in the market for a similar device to replace my
| dangerously past EOL desktop, and funny enough I have been
| circling around Asus' SFF line.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Would a Mac mini work?
| j45 wrote:
| Non Apple Silicon is usually overpriced for the CPU
| benchmark point to run linux
|
| Nucs, or USFF's are quite performant.
| asciimov wrote:
| Biggest problem with the Mac mini is it has no user
| upgradable parts, nuc does.
| katbyte wrote:
| Nah the biggest problem (for intel macmini) is there is
| no easy t2 applesmc support in the Linux kernel so you
| have zero fan control without patching and building a new
| kernal and I never figured out how to do it
|
| I have my old Mac mini and a 10th gen nuc in a proxmox
| cluster and they are basically the same. except I had to
| upgrade the nuc to give it nvme and 10g where as the
| macmini already had that. And then because I lack fan
| control on the mini slap a giant heat sink on top and
| point some fans at it
| lostlogin wrote:
| That's less of an issue than the price.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It causes a price issue because Apple's upgrades are
| extremely overpriced
| [deleted]
| jojobas wrote:
| A lot of things would work at 2x-4x the NUC price, even
| without the Apple lock-in.
| ChumpGPT wrote:
| Costco occasionally has sales on Mac Mini for $299.00 (M1
| Mac Mini).
|
| Right now a Mac mini - Apple M2 Chip 8-core CPU, 10-core
| GPU - 8GB Memory - 256GB SSD - Silver is $499
|
| Hard pressed to buy a decent NUC for less.
| kcb wrote:
| Having to spend $200 per 8GB of RAM and $200 per 256GB of
| storage like it's still 2012 pretty much destroys any
| value proposition from Apple.
| adastra22 wrote:
| You can put a 4tb drive on a USB port.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| *That's much slower and higher latency than the internal
| storage.
|
| And where do you plug in the extra RAM?
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| This thread is talking about HTPC, and I'm wondering what
| the use case is where you need lots of RAM and the
| speed/latency of an internal NVMe drive.
|
| My HTPC is about 12 years old, and I'm pretty sure that
| the internal SATA SSDs are slower than a modern external
| USB3.1 drive. Yet it does everything I ask of it with no
| noticeable delay.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> This thread is talking about HTPC_
|
| No, the thread is not mentioning HTPCS but about NUCs,
| which can also be used to do productivity work/games, not
| just watching movies, so exqueeze me that I want/need a
| system with 16GB of RAM and some decent storage in
| mid-2023 to be productive and am not contempt with the
| bare minimums of 8GB/256 and being price gouged for any
| drop over that.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| You are exqueezed. While the overall topic is about NUCs,
| this particular thread of conversation appeared, to me,
| to be about HTPCs. Nevertheless, the existence in the
| marketplace of computers with underwhelming specification
| does not in any way diminish your techno-self-worth or
| invalidate your needs and desires.
| fadedsignal wrote:
| Not if you use Thunderbolt 4 SSD (enclosure)
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Yes, spend $600 on an base iMac Mini then spend $800 on
| an TB SSD with $200 worth of NVME inside it because ...
| logic ???
|
| Meanwhile a 12th-Gen NUC with 16GB RAM and 500GB SSD
| costs ~$240 on Amazon, and you can replace the internal
| RAM and SSD with whatever size and models you want.
| kcb wrote:
| A 1 TB NVME SSD is like $40 retail these days.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| He said external TB SSDs not USB SSDs. Check how much
| those cost. TB SSD of 4TB is like $1000.
| tjoff wrote:
| Such hacks just to get trapped in apples ecosystem? How
| can that be appealing?
| criddell wrote:
| How are you trapped in the ecosystem?
|
| A Mac Mini can run more software than any of their
| competitors (you can't install macOS on a VM on a Windows
| or Linux host but the reverse is possible).
|
| Even on the hardware side you are free to connect third
| party drives, monitors, keyboards, etc...
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| You can actually install Mac os in a VM on Linux or
| Windows. It's not a technical issue, it's that Apple
| tries to make it hard to do so.
| criddell wrote:
| Yeah, it's a legal issue.
|
| My point mostly was that if you buy a Mac Mini, you
| aren't really trapped.
| tjoff wrote:
| The kind of mental gymnastics people go through...
| criddell wrote:
| Maybe I misunderstood what you meant by ecosystem and
| trapped. Care to elaborate?
| questionable922 wrote:
| They would have to run Mac OS, and that's likely a no
| sale for many people.
|
| There is Asahi Linux, however it's not really ready for
| day to day use, by comparison it would make the amount of
| time an Arch Linuxer spends trickering seem trivial in a
| business setting.
|
| Also for many a large benefit of the NUC was the ability
| to swap out persistence and memory at will, supported,
| warrantied, and in most non-starter kits what you had to
| do. Mac minis is soldered everything.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Untrue, at least for the older intel ones. Have put linux
| and windows on a few of them over the years. The m* line
| one sure.. but linux support is coming and honestly macos
| isn't so bad if you are just using it to run homeserver
| stuff like file sharing/plex/etc.
|
| I do hope that apple reverses some of it's recent 'lets
| just solder everything to the board' tendencies
| (especially in regards to storage), maybe they can start
| with the minis/studios and move down until the thiness of
| the air line means they can't anymore. Maybe the EU can
| sue the shit out of them like they did around the
| lightning cable. It's less clear to me if the soldered in
| RAM is a requirement of the design of the m* platform or
| not, but the storage certainly should certainly move to a
| standard like m.2/m.3/u.2. I managed to wear out the
| storage on a touchbar intel powerbook and getting the
| storage replaced basically meant getting a refurbed
| laptop, it took several days.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Not a NUC, but there are loads of competitive mini PCs
| for $500 or even less. Amazon has the Beelink SER 6 Pro
| for $500 after coupon with 32GB RAM, 500 GB SSD, 2.5Gbe
| and an 8 core Ryzen 7 7735HS with Radeon 680M.
| jojobas wrote:
| Just checked on ebay, a 12500H NUC with 16GB ram and 1TB
| SSD is $518.
|
| You have to be in a completely distorted reality field to
| choose Apple in these circumstances.
| speedgoose wrote:
| The Intel creates a lot more heat though. If the
| noise/performances ratio is important or if energy
| consumption is something you care about, the Intel
| solution doesn't seem that interesting.
| Symbiote wrote:
| For noise, you could budget about $100 for a fanless case
| for the NUC.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Wouldn't it run slow? The Intel CPU data sheet says it
| emits 95W of heat in "turbo" mode. Is there fanless NUC
| cases capable to dissipate that amount of heat, without
| even thinking about the other sources of heat?
| tjoff wrote:
| You don't design your cooling system to maintain peak
| turbo consumption. Thermal Design Power is 45W.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Why not? With max 45W it would throttle a lot under heavy
| loads.
| tjoff wrote:
| This is not a bitcoin mining rig. And no, it wouldn't
| start to throttle, it would stop turbo. And the primary
| purpose of turbo is to get short bursts that the CPU
| might not even be able to maintain regardless of cooling
| system.
|
| Designing the cooling system to keep up with that is by
| definition overkill. Which might be fine! Overkill can be
| fun. But it kind of goes in the face with a small system
| like a NUC.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Alright, but if you stop the turbo mode doesn't that
| invalidate a lot of CPU benchmarks? Is the CPU much
| slower than what we could believe it is in real life?
|
| But fair enough, let's assume 45W and not 95W. It's still
| a lot more than the Mac Mini.
| tjoff wrote:
| You won't stop the turbo mode, it is still working as
| designed...
|
| Yes, for the first time in eternity apple has an edge in
| hardware. The solution is obviously to go all in in their
| walled garden ... profit?
|
| You pick software ecosystem first, then you pick the
| hardware to run it. As such NUC vs. Mac Mini is apples
| vs. oranges.
| speedgoose wrote:
| If you already run ARM Linux VMs, it's not much
| differences. The VMs host will run macOS instead of Linux
| but that's not the end of the world.
| tjoff wrote:
| As if the typical use case is to run ARM Linux VMs... But
| fine.
|
| The typical solution, if VMs are your use case, is to use
| a hypervisor, such as XCP-NG, proxmox, ESXi etc. But if
| you want to shoehorn in OS X just for the sake of it,
| sure, that will work. But I guess you'd have to be pretty
| deep into apples ecosystem to even consider that.
|
| And with VMs you typically want RAM and disk-space, and
| if you pick such a closed ecosystem that is going to be a
| real bummer.
| speedgoose wrote:
| If most of the devops people already use macs, it's not
| too crazy.
|
| But that's a good point. I would say that we are in the
| DIY infrastructure world as deploying VMs on a Mac mini
| or NUC isn't really following the industry best
| practices, but installing proxmox on a amd64 box is
| probably easier.
| jojobas wrote:
| The VMs that mac-wielding DevOps guys deploy don't go
| into their laptops.
| indymike wrote:
| >ave to be in a completely distorted reality field to
| choose Apple in these circumstances
|
| I'm not sure a NUC is a good replacement for a laptop.
| That said, there are some really nice Intel and AMD based
| machines out there.
| jojobas wrote:
| I'm responding to the guy who suggested a mac mini, not a
| laptop.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Or price is of little consequence and you just want a
| nice machine.
|
| I have several Nucs and would love a Max mini server. I
| think I'd prefer that option but the price is too high to
| justify it.
|
| The bits I like are the built in 10gbe and the huge
| transcoding power.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| 256GB seems pretty small for an HTPC, unless it's just
| pulling from a server in another room
| lockhouse wrote:
| The key is to use an external SSD via USB. Much better
| bang for your buck than Apple's storage pricing.
| Symbiote wrote:
| My fairly old NUC has a fanless case, 2TB NVMe, 64GiB
| RAM, and a VESA mount hiding it behind my screen.
|
| I see there are aftermarket VESA mounts for the mini, and
| I suppose you can tape or glue the disk to it somehow.
| jojobas wrote:
| Or, just as a wild thought, stay away from overpriced
| hardware.
| lockhouse wrote:
| What's overpriced about the base model Mac mini? I agree
| that Apple way overcharges for upgrades, but the base
| model looks reasonably priced to me.
| jojobas wrote:
| I dunno, the fact that you can get a much beefier machine
| for the same price?
| lockhouse wrote:
| I wouldn't say _much_ beefier.
|
| They're $599 at full price and easily found on sale for
| $500 or less.
| afavour wrote:
| While that's true it kind of ruins the point in getting a
| small factor computer like a Mac Mini. You want as small
| a footprint as possible.
|
| Personally I have a USB disk plugged into my router and
| my HTPC just grabs files over the network.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > as small a form factor as possible
|
| This is what I want. And the Mac Mini does it better than
| the nuc as the power bricks the Nucs use are big, ugly
| and annoying to deal with.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| It's hard for me to put my finger on it exactly but at
| this point NUCs just feel more _hackable_. For me, that
| 's why the mini is not a satisfactory replacement.
|
| If you want a little kube node, if you prefer the way
| ubuntu and debian upgrade over the way osx upgrades (and
| have the linux experience be decent), if you want to
| shuck it and slap the board in a robot and run ROS, if
| you want it to be a steam box with an eGPU, there's a
| bunch of things NUCs do well / places they fit that mac
| minis don't quite (yet, at least).
|
| Mac minis are great but they're not the same thing. The
| "tight hand" of Apple makes them great but also limits
| them. Like you probably _can_ do all the above, with
| sufficient effort but is not a first class experience, in
| the same way that an orange pi is not a raspberry pi.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| The last mac minis i worked with were the final gen intel
| ones. Very similar to a NUC, you could run whatever linux
| on them fine (and even windows with the bootcamp
| drivers). I think we'll get to m* series mac minis
| running linux eventually, it's just going to take some
| time to get it all ironed out.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'd love to go back to HTPC, but really want a full-screen
| friendly interface that includes the various streaming
| services. What have you been using for the UI/UX?
|
| Aside: been using NVidia Shield TV(s) and Kodi for local/nas
| media.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| I had an htpc for over a decade in various forms. I finally
| just settled on the Nvidia shield reading over NFS. It's so
| much better than the htpc I don't regret it for a minute.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| After owning and using the same shield since 2016 I was
| advising to get it if anyone asked for a streaming and
| local playback of media. But now days I think Apple TV
| beats it easily as a streaming device. If Apple moved to an
| M chip and added audio passthrough it would be no contest.
| I would not advise people to get Shield if they want to get
| a device for the next 5-6 years unless it has a hardware
| refresh.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| I've gone from the Shield (bought it within a month of
| release to replace my Boxee) to just using Android TV in
| my Bravia.
| lrem wrote:
| It does 4k HDR and ATMOS. What does it lack?
| vetinari wrote:
| It doesn't do AV1 in hardware. Not yet necessary today,
| but nice to have for future proofing.
| mkesper wrote:
| Who really needs ATMOS, wasn't that only marketing fluff?
| OJFord wrote:
| It does HDR10 & Dolby Vision, but not HDR10+ or HLG. Iirc
| there's some strange app-dependent (non-)support too.
|
| I have the older (not 4k) Shield, I'm just using TV apps
| since upgrading the TV, since I couldn't settle on
| anything else. Tried and didn't like the 4k Fire Stick.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| I use it with Kodi and Jellyfin as well use streaming
| apps such as Netflix as well as geforce now. But its
| processor is old and it shows its age when going through
| movie collections. It does not support VP9 and now the
| new coming AV1 codec. So for someone getting a new device
| today I would not recommend it as the price premium they
| are asking for a 7-8 year old processor based device I
| feel is not worth it. With a Jellyfin or plex server you
| can play most of your media on your smart tv directly or
| you can get a $50 google tv or amazon fire stick
| bamfly wrote:
| Jellyfin user here. Started on Roku, moved to a Shield
| because I needed more codecs (my server's too weak to
| live-transcode anything above ~720p) and wanted to get
| there cheap.
|
| Should have just gone straight to the AppleTV, which is
| where I ended up. Better UI, not shitted up with ads,
| less jank and crashing (friggin' Android), and none of
| the problems I'd see with playback of certain combos of
| audio and video codecs on the Shield. If not for the weak
| codec line-up, even sticking with Roku would have been
| better than the shield (yeah, it's shitted up with ads,
| too, but not as bad--hell, the Apple TV _kinda_ has
| _some_ , but again, less bad).
| vetinari wrote:
| Shield does support VP9 as such; what it doesn't support
| is VP9 Profile 2 (i.e. 10 and 12 bit decoding).
| j45 wrote:
| Lenovo has the thinkcentre line
|
| Dell has the optiplex
|
| Go has the elitedesk and pro desk
|
| All in mini/usff formfactor similar to the size of a Mac
| mini.
| baz00 wrote:
| Yes this. The tiny PCs tend to have mobile CPUs in them as
| well which can feel a little sluggish. You can get a decent
| small desktop for the same money. I have a Lenovo Neo 50s
| as my main computer with a 12400, 32Gb of RAM and 1TB
| SN850X SSD in it. Very nice, quiet and reliable machine.
| user_named wrote:
| Yeah but for the same money as your Lenovo, you can get
| something much smaller.
| j45 wrote:
| Physical size generally matters to a certain extent,
| compared to the small amount of electricity for the
| computing power.
|
| 2 values I like comparing:
|
| - Computing power (cpu benchmark) / per watt is a good
| comparison.
|
| - After that, comparing those to compute power per dollar
| ratio really lays a clear picture out.
|
| The NUCs are definitely smaller than the USSF boards
| (roughly mac mini size), but not enough that it has stood
| out.
| baz00 wrote:
| It lurks under my desk getting dusty. I don't care. If
| it's really small it's really hard to make it lurk
| somewhere. It's either dangling, in some horrible mount
| or on top of the desk.
|
| There's enough room in the Lenovo for a couple of PCI
| cards, a couple more disks and a hell of a lot more RAM
| if I need it too.
| wooptoo wrote:
| The Tiny/Mini/Micro series from Lenovo/HP/Dell don't use
| mobile CPUs at all, but the throttled (T) versions of
| their desktop counterparts. They're even socketed, so you
| could swap them out.
|
| I use a Dell OptiPlex 7000 Micro having an i5-12500T CPU
| as my main dev machine and it's very snappy. Add a
| monitor and mount it on a MFS18 stand and you have a nice
| all-in-one system.
| j45 wrote:
| This secret might get out now :)
|
| So many cores and threads for so few watts.
| youngtaff wrote:
| Yeh, I struggle to see the point of a NUC when I can buy
| one of those used and get much better value
|
| https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/
| rizky05 wrote:
| Did you meant Go = HP. I made the same typo anyway, they
| are one keystroke away.
| j45 wrote:
| Definite typo - meant HP, thanks!
| adrian_b wrote:
| I have used many kinds of NUCs from various generations and a
| pair of NUC8 (i.e. with Coffee Lake U CPUs) are much quieter
| than both the earlier and the later NUCs.
|
| Most of the time they are completely inaudible. I have one
| that works 24/7 as a server in the room where I sleep. You
| can hear them only at full load, which in these NUCs means 50
| W power for the first half minute, and then 30 W forever.
|
| Unfortunately later Intel reverted to the use of cheaper,
| noisier fans. I have not used the last two generations of
| NUCs, so I do not know how they compare in noise.
|
| So the various models of NUCs can differ a lot in noise.
| treprinum wrote:
| NUC8 was great, the first time their CPUs could match
| desktop CPUs in raw performance, yet they were quiet. I
| have another NUC11Pro and that is much louder.
| ourmandave wrote:
| _I have one that works 24 /7 as a server in the room where
| I sleep._
|
| Used to keep all the server and network stuff in my room,
| but couldn't sleep.
|
| All the leds were like a blinking Christmas display.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > about the noise
|
| I've been thinking of getting a fanless case[1] for my Asus
| PN51. Akasa also makes some for Intel NUCs too[2], amongst
| others.
|
| [1]: https://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+P
| OWER...
|
| [2]: https://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+P
| OWER...
| deadbunny wrote:
| I'm still using the i3 NUC I bought about 10 years ago for
| one of my home theatre boxes. It started kicking off a lot of
| fan noise after a few years the fix was to replace the (now
| dry and cracked) thermal paste and the fan went back to
| inaudible rpms.
|
| I have about 10 nucs in various roles around the house and
| the first thing I do when buying them used from ebay is
| replace the thermal paste and they've all been fine.
| gumby wrote:
| > especially from a 'competing with your own customers' view
|
| Intel was* a major mobo manufacturer, which is definitely
| competing with your channel.
|
| * maybe still are -- I don't pay attention to that stuff any
| more.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This was a good move on their part, I've got at least 6
| different generations of NUC machines around, but I also have
| the ASUS PN50 which is a pretty solid "tiny desktop" / "mac
| mini" type of setup. Completely agree with the whole "why are
| you competing with us" question really creating channel
| conflict at Intel.
| kodah wrote:
| I use a Skull Canyon as my daily driver for programming and
| honestly I wouldn't have selected another machine.
| georgeburdell wrote:
| Me too. Been waiting years for them to release a similarly
| performant model in the same form factor.
| j45 wrote:
| I waisted for the successor to skull canyon so long I just
| bought a Lenovo lol.
| Aromasin wrote:
| They brought out the Serpent/Raptor Canyon recently and
| they're awesome bits of kit.
| j45 wrote:
| Nice, I'll check it out. Know some folks who swore by it
| for their development desktop machine, even if they
| didn't develop much, they'd just remote into it from the
| macbook as needed.
| nextos wrote:
| With one of the third party cases, such as those from Akasa,
| they are nice inexpensive fanless machines with excellent Linux
| support and low power consumption.
| gsliepen wrote:
| I considered those, but I think something like the Shuttle DS
| line of fanless mini-computers are nicer (especially since
| they have two Ethernet ports). See for example:
|
| https://www.shuttle.eu/en/products/slim/ds20u7
|
| A drawback is that Shuttle has less frequent updates than the
| NUC, and it's harder to find them in local stores.
| o1y32 wrote:
| I would remove the word "inexpensive". Many alternatives cost
| less. I know people buy Intel for brand, quality and warranty
| but definitely not price.
| dacryn wrote:
| at those form factors, they were quite price competitive.
|
| Yes many alternatives cost less, but if you want to tape
| them to the back of a TV that generates heat and has to be
| turned on 24/7 to display advertisements, video,..., they
| were cheapest by far.
|
| Or in meeting rooms to display zoom/teams, ... A raspberry
| pi just doesn't handle those scenario's
| tracker1 wrote:
| An RPi actually can handle those scenarios in many
| usecases. A Chromecast devices with a server feed can as
| well.
| merlyn wrote:
| I've found in the long term, it can not. In the short
| term, yes it does work.
|
| Perhaps my failure rate is just high, but micro-mini
| systems for that use case were much more reliable for me
| over long time frames.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I've fount the weakest link is usually the microsd
| cards... I've tended towards usb drives, but ymmv of
| course. I also switched to intel mini pcs, that offer a
| lot more when the gouging was happening over covid.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I bought for price - a max mini would have been better but
| ludicrously expensive.
| senttoschool wrote:
| I think the poster above you meant other mini PCs by non-
| Apple manufacturers.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| I bought it for Price
|
| The Intel NUC Celeron systems could not be met for price if
| you also needed Windows. To beat the NUC Celeron on price
| you had to drop to ARM and use Linux but if the software
| you needed to run only supported Windows that was not an
| option.
|
| the Celeron NUC's where GREAT for Line of Business use
| cases where the computer was running a Screen, or Single
| windows Application
| mikecoles wrote:
| Needing that much horsepower for a screen or single
| application is a sign that anything requiring Windows
| should be automatically disqualified.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| I used to feel the same way about kiosks, POS terminals,
| etc. but... if you have an organization whose bread &
| butter is C# desktop apps and Windows development and
| they're looking for, say, qty 10 units, you'll have a
| really hard time justifying the training and NRE costs to
| do anything but Windows.
|
| I 100% agree that it's not the technically optimal
| solution. But don't discount the idea that, given an
| existing set of people and skills, it can definitely be
| the local optima organizationally.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Yup, exactly this. I tried deploying such system on low
| powered ARM systems that could technically do it. It was
| a nightmare from a support and compatibility standpoint.
| Also the vendor would support the hardware for
| significantly less time than Intel would support their
| NUCs.
|
| The maybe dozen NUC's I needed were not a very
| substantial hardware cost. You bought a Celeron NUC and
| they just worked even if you didn't have the most
| experienced staff supporting them or the best software
| running on them.
|
| If you're going to be deploying a thousand such systems,
| sure, of course you shouldn't use NUCs.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| > If you're going to be deploying a thousand such
| systems, sure, of course you shouldn't use NUCs.
|
| I'd probably argue that, barring specific requirements
| that these might not cover, the NXP i.MX6/7/8 would
| probably be my default for something like this in volume.
| ~Motorola~/~Freescale~/NXP have been incredibly great
| stewards of the platform and provide significant lifetime
| guarantees for their parts (like 10+ years often). Plus
| you can generally run mainline kernels on them unless
| you're doing something special that requires something
| from their vendor branch.
| sofixa wrote:
| For just running a screen not only is Windows a massive
| waste in terms of resources and costs, but so is a NUC. A
| Raspberry Pi (equivalent) is more than sufficient.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| thanks for not reading my comment as I clearly said many
| apps do not have ARM or Linux compatibility
| sofixa wrote:
| There is exactly zero reason for an app whose only
| purpose is to be shown on a screen to be Windows or x86
| specific. It can be due to obsolete development practices
| or obscure vendor requirements, but still..
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Depends on what the screen is doing. We deployed a system
| with multiple Raspberry Pi's running Chrome in kiosk
| mode, each driving a TV showing different data.
|
| For one of them we had to switch from a Raspberry Pi to a
| small NUC to display a page with 3-6 videos running. The
| pi could show 1 or 2 videos but with all 6 going, it was
| very stuttery playback.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I'm actually surprised it handles two videos without
| issue... It's a good option a lot of the time. When the
| scalping got bad, I started using the cheaper intel
| boxes, smaller than NUC but more powerful than rpi and
| included a case and enough storage.
| SSLy wrote:
| What would be some of the alternatives? I don't even need a
| gpu. It will be a home server.
| unlimitive wrote:
| Turing pi 2
| lhl wrote:
| I'd suggest checking out ServeTheHome, which has been
| reviewing tons of mini PCs or CNX Software or Liliputing
| which cover all the SBCs and minipcs that get
| announced/launched. There are way too many options to
| list and it largely depends on your exact needs.
|
| Personally, I bought a cheap fanless Chinese (Topton)
| router (N5105, 4xi225v3) system from AliExpress running
| OPNsense that's worked flawlessly for the past year or
| so, but I'd recommend ordering your minipcs through a
| vendor where you can easily return it (like Amazon) if
| it's DOA or otherwise doesn't meet your expectations. I'd
| also skip the small Chinese vendors if warranty support
| is something you need. Go with a manufacturer that has a
| local office/support.
|
| Also, depending on what you want your server for, if you
| want ECC, your minipc options will be _extremely_ limited
| (a couple Xeon options when I looked). Personally, I went
| with an desktop Ryzen + ASRock Rack mini-ITX board in a
| slim case that was still pretty small since I wanted ECC
| for ZFS.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Running one of those same routers myself, been great.
| Setting up a friend with a topton N305 box that will host
| proxmox, about half resources going to OPNSense for
| routing, while also running pihole and wireguard... it
| may also share a usb connected HD for file sharing
| if/until he gets a separate nas.
|
| I do wish there were one of them that included even two
| 3.5" drive bays so it can run as a forbidden home server
| doing all the things.
| fomine3 wrote:
| for who accept used PCs:
| https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/
|
| for who accept Chinese brands (and suspicious Windows
| license): Beelink, Minisforum, etc
|
| the rest: ECS Liva or ASRock DeskMini?
| minimaul wrote:
| I'm a big fan of the ASRock deskminis for low power
| servers - dual 2.5" SATA bays, some have dual NVMe too.
|
| Very nice little platforms with low power draw, and low
| noise!
|
| I've got one of the DeskMini X300 on my desk atm with a
| 5750GE in it - 8c16t of Zen3 in 35W. It's competitive
| with M1 Pro for performance and power draw.
| UnixSchizoid wrote:
| I've gotten used Lenovo ThinkCenters for $30 on eBay.
| Sure they're used and have a 3rd generation i3, but it's
| the best budget home server option out there! They can
| easily replace whatever done on a pi and even more.
| kingrazor wrote:
| Yep ThinkCentres, Optiplexes, and Elite Desks go for
| pennies on eBay.
| UnixSchizoid wrote:
| Got to love used office equipment! I'm a big Optiplex fan
| and I use one as my daily personal pc for everything. I
| use ThinkCenters for most of my Homelab due to the fact
| that I've found them the cheapest, but I use Optiplexs
| when I need something stronger. But I've never used an
| Elite Desk in a homelab, how do they compare to Optiplexs
| and ThinkCenters?
| kingrazor wrote:
| I've never been a big fan of HP, but they seem to be
| roughly equivalent to the Optiplexes. The lab I used to
| work in had dozens of them and they seemed to run just
| fine without complaints.
| viraptor wrote:
| Used NUC, optiplex or others from eBay. If you need just
| "a" server for home, look for one of those small PCs on
| the used market. They often appear at very low prices
| after some company refreshes their office desktops.
| Replace the storage with something decent and you've got
| a perfect server.
| alias_neo wrote:
| We've used both NUC and Gigabyte BRIX at work and the
| BRIX are far more capable per $ compared to the NUC.
|
| Intel NUC is the BMW of mini PCs, certainly not
| "inexpensive" compared to the alternatives, even if we
| ignore the off-brand stuff.
| Arnt wrote:
| I found NUC+monitor+mounting inexpensive compared to the
| alternatives about a decade ago. The NUC could be mounted
| on the back of the monitor, which made mounting cheap and
| simple. Two cables from the ceiling, one device fixed to
| the wall, done.
| alias_neo wrote:
| We use them as servers to be honest, so we've never had
| to worry about additional hardware. We deploy
| infrastructure on them as portable machines to take to
| conferences/demos etc which previously was done using in-
| house built ATX computers.
|
| NUC and their ilk were a game changer and I'm glad to see
| a way for them to continue.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Depends on your needs, I've been using a Minisforum HX90
| for a couple years now. AMD 5900HX, 32gb ram, 2tb nvme
| drive. Runs great, relatively low power in standby.
| vkazanov wrote:
| Decent Intel NUCs are ok price-wise, but definitely not
| cheap. A decent Linux-preinstalled box for my kid's Minecraft
| needs was about 800PS (non-basic Entroware Aura) here in UK.
|
| It's a good machine technically speaking: perfect for
| lightweight gaming, office stuff, browsing, etc. But I
| suspect that a comparable mini PC from asian vendors would be
| twice as cheap and just as good. A laptop would be even
| easier.
| tudorw wrote:
| I have tried a couple of pretenders and they were not up to
| the 24/7 load I have lined up, random reboots and lockups,
| maybe it was bad luck, maybe it was thermal management,
| either way the NUC keeps trucking.
| vkazanov wrote:
| Yeah, it does feel, look and work solidly.
|
| Just pointing out that "cheap" is not the best
| description of these things :-)
| hnick wrote:
| There are Intel NUC laptops, or as they call them kits, I'm
| not sure what the details are. They're sold and branded by
| third parties but the guts are the same, except maybe the
| RAM and SSD (very minor customisation anyway). When I was
| looking I ended up with one since it was a pretty good
| price compared to the competition, I wanted one with a
| serviceable GPU for occasional games.
| re-thc wrote:
| > and it lends credence to the theory Intel's NUC line was
| technically profitable (or at least not horrifically in the
| red), but just didn't make strategic sense - especially from a
| 'competing with your own customers' view.
|
| Maybe, maybe not. ASUS whose core business is in building PC
| components would likely have better margins and vertical
| integration vs Intel that has to work with partners and
| outsource.
| maccard wrote:
| I bought two NUCs, one personally and one through work. I had a
| desktop class i9 chipset that I could travel around the world
| with. I actually plugged it into something like [0] with an
| eGPU when it was at home for the extra oomph.
|
| I'd buy another for my next machine.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cooler-Master-MasterCase-
| enclosure-...
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| > didn't make strategic sense
|
| Good little practical personal hardware things like NUC are
| what makes people love a company.
|
| E.g. Intel CPUs always were just default CPUs and what made me
| love the brand were Intel Desktop Boards which were
| exceptionally reliable (although I've heard some people had
| different experience). IBM/Dell/HP/etc servers always were just
| servers but their high-quality "enterprise class" laptops made
| me sympathize them, despite they probably never meant to make a
| huge portion of their profit from selling these. RaspberryPi
| hugely changed how do I feel about Broadcom, towards the
| positive direction. This is about purely subjective perception
| but I would guess this can play a role in many cases. Haven't
| IBM benefit from the fact ThinkPads were used on the space
| stations?
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| It's just a dream, but with TB4 or another high bandwidth PCIe
| interconnect, I'd be interested in seeing dockable cases not
| unlike the e-ports of yesteryear.
|
| The case design would slot in the otherwise independent NUC
| formfactor, providing power and airflow, housing the (e)GPU and
| other cards, and re-enabling all the benefits of cramming
| things in the 5.25" drive bays on the front of your PC.
|
| I got really frustrated recently after running out of space on
| my desk for all the cabling and clutter that used to live
| inside my computer. I had to build a rack to house new
| equipment to replace what was in a PIII ATX tower, and I find
| myself slowly losing ground to the copious adapters and
| peripherals I need to replicate the utility of formerly self-
| contained systems.
| hengheng wrote:
| I've been wanting for monitors to get PCIe slots for GPUs.
| Lots of space to get creative with cooling as well.
|
| My guess why it hasn't caught on is Thunderbolt timing
| issues. I could never get USB audio to work parallel to an
| eGPU on the same cable, which buries that whole one-cable-to-
| rule-them-all narrative.
| tracker1 wrote:
| In addition to the relatively short Thunderbolt cables,
| there's also the limited number of PCIe lanes that
| Thunderbolt offers, which will bottleneck higher end
| graphics cards.
| _jal wrote:
| I've been waiting for "board inversion" - where the video
| card effectively becomes the thing you insert the
| motherboard/CPU/RAM assembly in to.
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| Furthermore, Intel had no real way to get them in front of new
| customers. Asus is absolutely happy to cut deals with Walmart
| and Best Buy and to play hardball.
| [deleted]
| squokko wrote:
| Why would the business be horrifically in the red? It's
| commodity hardware at a slightly premium price.
| lhoff wrote:
| Development cost and low sales. If they spend to much for the
| R&D and then sold not enough units to recoup the cost then
| the business would be in the red.
|
| Over the years they developed some pretty special units.
| Examples are the Extreme Compute Element (NUCs in PCIe form
| factor) or the Hades Canyon with RXVega GPU and in general
| the more gaming focused NUCs. I don't think those were sold
| in high volume numbers.
| bee_rider wrote:
| About a week ago we had an article about Intel leaving the NUC
| market.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36680674
|
| It seems a bit slapdash to announce that ASUS is taking the brand
| forward a week later. Like if they were planning on doing this
| for a while, it would be an orderly transfer, right? So, what,
| did somebody at ASUS see that ServeTheHome article and decide to
| just go for it?
|
| Anyway, I really like NUCs, and I've got an ASUS laptop that I'm
| fond of, so I hope it all works out! It just looks a little
| funny.
| justinclift wrote:
| > So, what, did somebody at ASUS see that ServeTheHome article
| and decide to just go for it?
|
| That kind of stuff does occasionally happen. No idea about this
| particular case though. ;)
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I don't really know how computers are made so I assumed that
| ASUS or someone like them was already the OEM for most of a NUC
| anyway. I didn't think Intel had any ability to make anything
| other than chips.
| dboreham wrote:
| > I didn't think Intel had any ability to make anything other
| than chips.
|
| Historically this was definitely not the case. Intel made
| board level products in house, and systems for code
| development, ICE units etc.
|
| These days, probably it is all outsourced.
| midoridensha wrote:
| Intel never made board-level stuff in-house; no one does
| this in fact. It's always outsourced to a contract
| manufacturer that specializes in PCBs. Intel probably did
| their own PCB design however.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Intel probably did their own PCB design however.
|
| They do. I've heard rumors that some motherboard
| manufacturers don't have the skills in-house to design
| and simulate high-speed portions of the PCB (like the
| memory bus) themselves; they use Intel (or AMD) reference
| designs for that portion of the board.
| midoridensha wrote:
| Yes, I've heard similar things, that a lot of PC
| motherboards were basically slightly modified reference
| PCBs from Intel. The high-speed portions of the boards
| were really difficult to design.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This sort of device is usually made by OEMs, so the NUC was
| quite unusual, so that's a reasonable thing to mix up.
|
| Actually, this has made me curious--I'm not sure if Intel,
| like, physically made the cases. But it could be a deal like
| with Apple, they don't actually physically make iPhones of
| course, they contract it out to Foxconn. Wasn't able to find
| any info about a contract manufacturer for NUCs, does anyone
| know if they used one?
| dangus wrote:
| The best theory I've got is that when ASUS found out that Intel
| wanted out they essentially bought the NUC brand. Now when
| people search for "Intel NUC" they'll end up on ASUS product
| pages.
|
| Plenty of OEMs make similar systems but don't have the NUC
| brand.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if the clumsy announcement is because
| ASUS legitimately found out at the same time we did.
| totetsu wrote:
| at the end of that article
|
| Update 70 minutes after this piece went live. Intel just sent
| us the official confirmation:
|
| We have decided to stop direct investment in the Next Unit of
| Compute (NUC) Business and pivot our strategy to enable our
| ecosystem partners to continue NUC innovation and growth. This
| decision will not impact the remainder of Intel's Client
| Computing Group (CCG) or Network and Edge Computing (NEX)
| businesses. Furthermore, _we are working with our partners and
| customers to ensure a smooth transition and fulfillment of all
| our current commitments - including ongoing support for NUC
| products currently in market. (Source: Intel)_
| j45 wrote:
| Maybe it was a point in negotiation.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Asus seems to be on the ball in looking for new markets to
| expand into with whoever is managing it at the moment. After
| Valve Steam Deck proving that there was an addressable market
| for handheld gaming pc they have come out with probably the
| best device so to match steam deck
| stevefan1999 wrote:
| I uses a NUC9 with hackintosh as my music production workstation.
| Although Apple is phasing out x86, it still have a lifespan of
| abput 2 to 3 years until Logic Pro no longer works.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Does Logic Pro phone home to startup? If not you could just
| have a much longer lifespan provided you don't care about
| updating Logic and the underlying OS, which is ok if that box
| is not connected to vulnerable machines and the internet.
| stevefan1999 wrote:
| I specifically chose the i7 version of the NUC 9 Extreme Kit
| aka Ghost Canyon, just because MBP Late 2019 has the i7-9750H
| (spoiler alert: they have the same CPU), so it is still
| pretty decent in terms of spec, but I don't get the chance to
| try out the new AI stuff on Apple Silicon.
|
| Another thing though, I attached my 6600 XT ITX card into the
| Ghost Canyon so it can also carry out huge heavylifting of
| video editing, which I planned on using Final Cut Pro for
| such so.
|
| Unfortunately, Apple removed the Broadcom drivers/kext in the
| latest public beta, the macOS Sonoma apparently raised the
| supported devices to 2017 and that's when Apple started to
| use custom built-in chip from Broadcom which can't be used as
| a M.2. Wifi module. Apple is fucking with most of the
| Hackintosh users this way and it is clear they waited for a
| long time.
|
| So, until we can find a way to inject the legacy Broadcom
| drivers into Sonoma, the Hackintosh network connectivity
| situation is uncertain and dire.
| smolder wrote:
| > 6600 XT ITX card
|
| What is an ITX card? I assume that should say pcie card?
| flower-giraffe wrote:
| I think the influx of very low cost Chinese mini PCs makes the
| NUC, Asus PN and Asrock devices a bit less attractive. Also
| thelow power AMD APU has been very good for the form factor.
| Maybe the margins are too tight for Intel. Another take maybe
| that the NUC came in when low power Arm desktops looked viable
| and Intel needed a low power small form factor to defend against
| that.
|
| The Minisforum, Beelink and the generic aliexpress units are
| incredibly cheap.
|
| There are celeron based fanless models with 4 2.5gbe NICs
| available for less than $200 on Amazon.
|
| Personally I have been using the AMD 15w Ryzen variants it's a
| nice balance for performance. I have several, my daily driver is
| an Asus PN50 with 2Tb nvme disk and 64GB ram driving 3 sceeens at
| 2560x1440 in a completely silent Akasa case.
|
| As long as you are prepared to fiddle and potentially destroy the
| original case rhe Akasa cases are fantastic.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| I wonder what impact they really have. I have always bought NUC
| though traditional IT market channels and we us them in the SMB
| market pretty heavily
|
| I can not see any of these VAR's carrying minisforum or other
| generic aliexpress systems. So from an SMB stand point my
| options are NUC, Lenovo Tiny/Micro, and the simliar offerings
| from Dell and HP.
|
| Maybe some Asus, Asrock, Gigabyte, etc.. Higher end consumer
| brands.
|
| So I guess it comes down to how many NUC's are being sold in
| business channels vs the budget consumer channels
| tomComb wrote:
| > The Minisforum, Beelink and the generic aliexpress units are
| incredibly cheap.
|
| Certainly are, hard to resist for personal use, but then I read
| that one will likely never receive a BIOS update.
|
| Also, those moments when you wonder whether something in your
| home is listening, resulting in ads for something you've just
| talked about... well that is usually some super cheap product
| listening for keywords and selling the info to a company that
| can't get away with doing the listening themselves...
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| So they're not worse than ASUS then.
|
| I've had several motherboards from them, and they stopped
| receiving BIOS updates a year or two after release. Never got
| anything since meltdown & spectre have become known, for
| example (I think BIOS updates are needed for microcode
| updates on Windows, so this would be a serious problem for
| most users).
|
| I've also used two ASUS smartphones, and... never again. The
| last one received one major update (from Android 5 to 6), and
| stopped receiving security updates a _year_ after the phone
| was announced. Fuck that company.
| luzer7 wrote:
| Can you share a link to the model that you're running?
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Are any of these ARM systems suitable for easily running Linux
| on them?
| chx wrote:
| I bought a Qotom Q190G4 in 2016 for $139.00. That was also a
| Celeron branded CPU -- but it was not Atom, I don't buy Atom
| PCs -- with four gigabit NICs. This is to say, I do not think
| there's a new influx, these machines were available for a long,
| long time now. And yet, NUCs have thrived alongside.
| treprinum wrote:
| I hope that doesn't affect AMD 8-core mini PCs from ASUS as a
| part of the deal...
| nickpeterson wrote:
| I feel like it's really hard to justify one of these in light of
| m2 Mac minis. High usage memory applications?
| skeletal88 wrote:
| What if you just don't want os x?
| jsight wrote:
| Base price is $599 for 8GB and 256GB of storage. A NUC with
| more storage isn't that expensive.
|
| There are advantages if the M2 is what you want, but CPU/GPU
| aren't always the thing to optimize for here.
| notatoad wrote:
| if you're using these in any sort of volume, then the $4-500 of
| savings is significant.
|
| also, if you're not using MacOS then having hardware that's
| actually compatible with your OS is nice. all respect to the
| asahi linux folks, but i'm not going to give that to my
| customers.
| generj wrote:
| Or if you want more than 256 gigs of storage built in. The
| Mini's pricing makes no sense at all if it's not Base or with
| the M2 Pro.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| My 8/256 NUC setup cost $230, the cheapest 8/256 Mini is $825
| here. Easiest choice to justify ever.
| stu2b50 wrote:
| They can be nice as small servers. OSX is not as suited to
| server usage as a BSD or Linux and doesn't have expandable
| storage - NUCs have additional m2 or sata drive ports. The NUCs
| also cost less.
| [deleted]
| bee_rider wrote:
| Operating systems other than MacOS? (Well, Asahi is pretty
| impressive but it is only a couple years old).
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Are the minis upgradeable? My nuc now has an nvme drive and a
| 2.5" ssd, and I've upped it to 32gb ram for some light vmware
| work.
|
| On the other side of spectrum I have a few cheap nucs with
| celeron for media tv and streaming purposes.
|
| If I read it correctly, Mac mini is 800cad for 8gb ram and 256
| sdd.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| I understand, but I feel like nucs always end up at this
| weird, "I'm going to drop 200 on ram, 200 on a ssd and have a
| 700-900 dollar thing that has no second hand value and really
| isn't that powerful". I remember throttling being an issue as
| well. Add a custom heat sink and some thermal paste? (50-100
| more..)
|
| It just feels like you're paper cutting your way into a more
| expensive system. Not sure on small form factor pcs otherwise
| though. Hp z2 minis always seemed neat and typically have a
| promo code that works with a bare config you can bring your
| own ram/disk + Linux.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I can understand that perception. Depends on situation I
| suppose. I find that a) ram and ssd prices are way more
| affordable than that b) I always seem to have some around
| anyway - The circle of upgrades! And c) I _wish_ second
| hand value was low, I 'd be buying them like candy, but it
| isn't :-/
| kcb wrote:
| Have you seen the prices of RAM and SSDs lately? You can
| get name brand 32gb of DDR5 and a 1 TB NVME drive for a
| little over $100. Apple is literally charging 1000% markup
| on these upgrades.
| jeffbee wrote:
| "No second hand value"?
|
| https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=NUC11TNKi7&_
| s...
| j45 wrote:
| How so?
|
| Depends on the application, but for base line Apple silicon mac
| minis, ram is like lungs, even if the cpu/legs are super fast.
|
| The max studio m1 max on the other hand is worth looking at.
| lunfard000 wrote:
| Much better as home-servers (450~ euros for a barebone 1340p is
| a pretty good deal). They have really good IO and linux
| support.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Huh? ASUS already makes PCs and mobos. Intel still makes chips.
|
| NUC is just a chip in a small mobo in a little case.
|
| This is just selling the name "NUC" for marketing?
|
| Is ASUS going to maintain the PCI backplane platform for
| expandable NUC?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| This is really a best case outcome. NUCs are great but Intel is
| sort of a lousy manufacturer to get PC support from, and ASUS is
| already on the premium end of consumer PC brands.
| entropicgravity wrote:
| I'm happy they are partnering with Asus. Not as happy if it means
| Asus products such as the PN5x series with AMD processors will
| get the axe.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Good. I love the NUCs and I hope the pricing becomes much more
| competitive. A bare bones Quad i5 on a little PCB in a plastic
| box with a wall wart should not cost $400. I can buy an new i5
| laptop for that.
| midnitewarrior wrote:
| ASUS FTW!
| davkan wrote:
| This makes me less inclined to buy NUCs in the future. I have
| more faith in Intel to deliver products without cutting corners
| than asus. I say this with my current and previous mobos both
| being asus. Intel NUCs were always the premium option in the
| micro pc market. I'm much more likely to at least look at other
| integrators now that it's an Asus NUC.
| pantulis wrote:
| What I find most interesting is not the use case of a standalone,
| small, cheap desktop computer: it's what this enables other
| industries to achieve.
|
| See for example, what Korg is doing in the electronic music
| industry with a Raspberry-based platform: the OpSix, Modwave and
| Wavestate are a whole new line of affordable desktop synthesizers
| with powerful capabilities. Couple that with something like
| Roland Cloud and you could end up with a cloud-aware synth that
| could automatically download new sounds and features on demand,
| all under a subscription model without the need of a tethered PC
| because the device _is_ a PC.
| transpute wrote:
| Would Asus or ASRock be interested in continuing the PC Engines
| APU2 line of low-power, fanless x86 embedded systems with
| coreboot?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35635900#35636960
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35635900#35636517
| gonzo wrote:
| If they were it probably would have already occurred.
| Daegalus wrote:
| There are many nice NUC like devices on Amazon. BeeLink makes
| some good ones with both Intel and AMD.
|
| I think this is a great end result for the NUC. Asus makes some
| good stuff and they can probably push the NUC some more for
| reasonable prices.
| yla92 wrote:
| +1 for BeeLink stuff. I was surprised how tiny they were and
| yet still powerful!
| slimsag wrote:
| Beelink devices are great. Super powerful for the price.
|
| I wish they sold ARM ones. I've been wondering if it'd be
| possible to put a full arm linux desktop distribution on one of
| their 'super console x king' devices, which seem to be a
| rebranded Beelink GT King which they used to offer the ability
| to install arbitrary linux distro's on.
| sandreas wrote:
| I personally used an old NUC6i5 with 16GB Ram and 1TB SSD as my
| private "HomeServer" / "Media-PC" / "RemoteMachine" for a long
| time, mainly bought because it was (and still is) 5.9W idle power
| consumption while reasonable performance (way more than a
| raspberry PI at the time). I also spent the money on an Akasa
| Passive case[1], which made the device very expensive in total,
| but it was worth it at the time. It's still running as a backup.
|
| BUT: I really think the times of the NUC are over. Media-PCs are
| getting less important (Netflix, etc.). With dedicated boxes like
| Apple-TV and TV Recording they hardly play a role any more and
| for home servers there are better alternatives.
|
| I recently invested some money into a used Fujitsu D3417 + Xeon
| homeserver and it runs Proxmox at 9.3W Idle. The performance is
| just on another level than any NUC with the same price tag and
| because it is upgradable and supports ECC RAM, the only drawback
| is it's size.
|
| I'm still questioning the industry, why they don't provide
| affordable ITX or smaller sized boards with enough space for ECC
| (!) RAM and two or more NVMe-Slots as low power low cost Micro-
| Server appliance. Newer AMD Ryzen does inofficially support ECC
| but the Idle Power consumption is pretty high. This could be a
| niche, I would definitely get one of these, if it was good
| quality (like the DELL, HP or Fujitsu Servers). These boards
| exist, but they are nearly impossible to get anywhere. An example
| would be the Gigabyte C246N-WU2, which does run at an
| unbelievable Idle consumption of less than 8W [2]
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-dVdm3OjME
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFurC_HDlKM (German)
| hot_gril wrote:
| Personally my M1 Mac mini replaced the idea of a home server
| NUC for me. My workstation is also my server now because I
| don't need to worry about power consumption on it.
| sandreas wrote:
| While the hardware itself may be astounding, the operating
| system is not my preferred choice for a server... even if
| asahi linux may already work well.
|
| I tried TrueNAS Scale, Proxmox, handcrafted debian,
| Terraform+Ansible scripts and with all the problems it may
| have, Proxmox is my choice for over a year now and I never
| regretted it.
|
| I already used the ZFS rollback feature [1] twice to get back
| where I was and IT JUST WORKS... never had issues so far.
|
| [1]: https://pilabor.com/series/proxmox/restore-virtual-
| machine-v...
| hot_gril wrote:
| Yeah, the Mac is definitely for lighter home server tasks.
| I tried in the past to run more complex stuff, and it
| wasn't worth the hassle of figuring out macOS's differences
| vs Linux. Had PowerEdges in the basement once for a
| startup, but nowadays the Mac is enough.
| hguant wrote:
| I would argue that media pcs and home servers are becoming
| _more_ not less important, precisely because Netflix, Disney+
| et al have become such bad stewards of movies and shows, both
| in terms of deleting content, and no longer being "worth it"
| for the price. Anecdotally, I know more and more friends and
| coworkers who are moving to having their own media servers
| because they don't want to have to hunt through different
| services for their favourite shows or movies, or they've been
| burned by Amazon changing the streaming license of their
| "purchase."
| hot_gril wrote:
| I don't think piracy is a broadly popular method of watching
| media, not because it's wrong but because it's technically
| challenging and inconvenient. And if it started becoming
| popular, the industry would respond by either cutting prices
| or beefing up enforcement. Either way, the STB remains
| mainstream.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| 1L desktops are the new hotness for home labs. Intel and AMD
| offerings are very impressive and some are super low power but
| can throttle way up if you give them the proper oversized power
| bricks. small, expandable, low power and most importantly
| cheap.
| jzb wrote:
| The time for media PCs may be over, they may not. I have a Plex
| server and the NUC is a great form factor for that.
|
| But, even leaving aside media PCs, the form factor is great.
| They're powerful enough for me to use happily as a desktop, and
| I love having a tiny PC that doesn't take up acres of desktop.
| sandreas wrote:
| I'm not sure if I can totally agree with that. The form
| factor may be nice but, in my case the NUC has always been
| very noisy and hot until I decided to buy the akasa case.
| This is no wonder, because the small packed hardware cannot
| be cooled as efficient as bigger cases, even slightly bigger
| onces.
|
| The NUC is also limited in extensability and even if the form
| factor as such is nice, they are slow compared to only
| slightly bigger sized Ryzen workstations (e.g. Minisforum
| X400 or ASRock DeskMini).
|
| I'm also running a Plex server (as Proxmox Guest) and in my
| opinion servers do not need to be small or fanless in
| general, if you can place them somewhere in a room where
| noise and space are not this problematic (my server is in the
| kitchen ON the fridge... I consider the living room and the
| bedroom as quiet places)
|
| The NUC is pretty good for very specific use cases
| (presentations, fairs, etc.) because they can easily be
| transported and are small and the hardware is ok, but for
| most other use cases, especially servers, there are
| definitely better systems.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Seems to me torrents are getting a big boost and people are
| fleeing from streaming. I see many buying alternatives to
| stream like "the old days" after they have cancelled Netflix
| etc. I'm one of them, canceling and adjusting for several
| families.
| manmal wrote:
| Old (but not too old) Fujitsu mainboards are a great hack to
| build a computer with low power draw, especially in idle mode.
| They support relatively recent Intel sockets and 4 SATA ports
| out of the box, so really ideal for small-ish and very
| affordable file- and media servers. I've seen in a German forum
| [1] specialized in this kind of thing that people reproducibly
| get 5-8W idle with such boards.
|
| At least in the EU, you can get used Fujitsu towers with those
| power saving boards for cheap. Just take care that you pick one
| with the higher efficiency power supply (IIRC, that's the
| E90+).
|
| Hidden in that forum thread [1] are posts from members who
| bought a specialized board (EUR250 last time I looked) that
| takes idle consumption down to 2W. Can't remember the name of
| the manufacturer so I can't link to it, but if someone were
| interested, it's mentioned throughout the thread.
|
| 1: https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-
| sparsamste... - someone claims they reached 4W idle with this
| Fujitsu board
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| I have an ASUS PN40 that idles at 1.8W (_at the wall_). This
| is with one SSD and LPDDR3 memory.
| manmal wrote:
| Yeah the small systems are often very efficient, but you
| can't really use them for file serving from HDDs. USB (and
| even eSATA) enclosures are not a suitable replacement for
| internal SATA ports. Their controllers & firmware are not
| stable enough for heavy concurrent use and often crash or
| become non-responsive.
|
| Idling an old Xeon or a 12100 at 4W is also a bit more
| challenging than a 1.1Ghz Celeron.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| For the record, the PN40 not only has 1 SATA internal
| port, it even has an NVME-capable M.2 slot. I make no
| claims of the power consumption of the latter since I
| never used it.
|
| If you want a shitton of SATA ports you obviously have to
| go somewhere else but then even the power consumption of
| the idling SSDs will start to be troublesome (and when in
| use will likely necessitate another PSU).
|
| I also disagree with the assessment of eSATA (since it is
| basically external SATA), and think the claims of
| problems with USB to SATA controllers are very
| exaggerated. They all have terrible power management
| though; if I had to use one, I'd just cut USB power
| entirely on idle, which would btw also help with any
| controller issues.
| manmal wrote:
| M.2 SSDs have almost zero idle power draw, if that's what
| you meant?
|
| HDDs can spin down and will not draw much in that state.
| I think it's a reasonable assumption for a file server at
| home that it will spend most of time in spindown.
|
| I have seen some problematic reports on external
| enclosures on Reddit, but maybe they do work fine in many
| cases.
| [deleted]
| bunnie wrote:
| I have used the NUCs to integrate controllers into small
| robotic platforms and custom lab equipment. They are a good 'it
| just works' platform that you can scale performance v cost over
| time as needs vary (need image processing? drop in a core i7.
| just motion control? save money and go with an i3 or atom).
| Also they are more reliable and performant than RPi, and
| relative to the cost of the motion control systems, the NUC is
| a rounding error.
|
| Notably the NUC has a standardized base plate mount that
| requires only two screws, and it has nice rubberized stand offs
| that isolate vibration. So, mechanical integration is super
| easy, and swapping out a NUC in the field is also very fast. In
| some cases it is easier to do a firmware upgrade by switching
| out the whole NUC than trying to walk a lab tech through
| punching a hole in the corporate firewall, or running an
| ethernet cord through the production floor, etc etc.
| mrspuratic wrote:
| I use the VESA plate to mount on the back of a monitor (with
| an extension plate since there's a stand too). Completely out
| of view, almost silent, I can just flip the DP/HDMI inputs
| and go from "work" to "home" desktop (though full-screen VNC
| is plenty zippy and saves faffing with keyb/mouse). It's just
| a home (linux/Slackware) server for
| storage/streaming/tinkering but glad I spent a few extra EUR
| as it's rock solid.
|
| My sheevaplug (!) sits unloved in a drawer since I got it :D
| Aromasin wrote:
| I'd recommend looking at Kontron and OnLogic, products. They
| very much are targeted to industrial applications, but they
| effectively make exactly what you're describing. Low power
| machines with lots of I/O and expansion capability in a small
| form factor. We use a couple of their full system solutions for
| our lab infrastructure, but they also sell boards if that's
| what you're looking for:
| https://www.kontron.com/en/products/systems/c136842
| https://www.onlogic.com/eu-en/computers/industrial/
| beebeepka wrote:
| It's funny and sad how the NUC started as a super small form
| factor device but eventually ended up as mini-ITX. Intel's own
| models have been mini-itx for years now.
|
| That said, I see zero reason to buy anything Intel as AMD is
| spanking them pretty much everywhere. That may change soon if
| rumours of hoarding all the latest EXE machines are true.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Most NUCs aren't anywhere near as large as a mini-ITX. The
| larger ones are the enthusiast models that nobody bought. The
| NUCs they actually sold millions of are the ones that are 4
| inches square and an inch tall.
| ggm wrote:
| Dear ASUS: please make a range of NUC with either on-board 4+
| SATA lanes or a PCIx instance which can take a daughtercard which
| does true parallel SATA, not serialised.
|
| TL;DR the market for home RAID/NAS is huge. We need you to stop
| needing us to max out with only 1 device, and sometimes M.2
| keying isn't where we are. People are well beyond "2 disks is
| enough" in a home NAS now.
|
| thanksbai.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Sincere question: How are you even going to fit more than one
| 2.5" drive in a NUC? These things are tiny.
| ggm wrote:
| Cable(s) out to an external drive holder with an ATX -> Sata
| uplift from a DC psu.
|
| I run the radxa USB3->SATA bridge pi-Hat which is a jmicron
| chipset and with the vagueries of USB- attached drives, but
| SATA like speed through a serialising controller I do pretty
| well. I'd like to do astonishingly well.
|
| So the use case is "yea I can't fit it inside the NUC case
| but I can bridge it to a small box" -or run the NUC with the
| lid off and re-tool the case.
| notatoad wrote:
| if you don't care about having it all fit inside a case,
| then the NUC isn't really doing anything for you. just grab
| any motherboard you want and build yourself a heap of parts
| like my NAS: https://ibb.co/6W7MkL4
| Dalewyn wrote:
| So, since the form factor isn't the goal here (separate box
| with umbilical cord, after all), what exactly is the
| purpose in using a NUC or similarly sized small computer?
|
| None of this is intended to be condescending or anything,
| I'm just sincerely curious about the train of logic here.
| What you're talking about so far seems like something that
| would be satisfied by a custom Mini-ITX build with
| appropriate case/tower or something similar, so I would
| like to know why that isn't.
| ggm wrote:
| Fanless. It's about low noise. Reusing a fullsize case
| with a fanless mini itx board might be the way to go if
| the passive cooling worked out. The NAS with fan in use
| now has a noise penalty I want to avoid.
|
| I've used NUC and they are remarkably well made but
| you're on the money: they just may not be a good "fit"
| quailfarmer wrote:
| What you're describing is not a product, it's a kludge.
| Even if you can stomach the poor reliability of an octopus
| of wires, a product designed to be used like that is likely
| to fail EMI testing.
|
| I've certainly done this with SAS Harnesses coming out the
| side of my tower case, but you can't expect a company to
| make a product with this use case in mind. There exists SFF
| NAS boxes with room for many drives for this purpose.
| ggm wrote:
| The NAS boxes I can see either assume USB-C or don't seem
| to provide much clue to how to use an eSATA to connect
| between things. If they were easy to work with I think
| there would be a lot more 'use this box to house the
| disks and this cable to connect over to the computer' and
| sure, I'd use the single SATA at some saturated speed.
|
| I live in ZFS. These box makers often assume you want to
| run their Raid card, and have optioned up 'to make it
| better' without understanding ZFS exists, uses its memory
| efficiently (ignore the 'not on less than 4GB' thing its
| highly specific to some time in history and de-dupe) and
| wants a dull-as-ditchwater HBA to talk to the drives. Or,
| worse yet, they embed the CPU and you buy their packaged
| solution with their suite of apps and their model of GUI.
| Like the NAS I moved off, which had a sparc CPU and
| ceased being able to run, aside from which it was locked
| to <2TB drives.
|
| You're not wrong btw. I am just saying "no, the home NAS
| space isn't as easy as you say, if you want to run ZFS
| yourself" unless I have missed a key term to search for,
| getting standalone drive enclosures.
|
| I can believe I am not the market. Mainly because very
| few SBCs have more than one SATA slot, even less more
| than 2 and many of the M.2 keyed sata cards are listed in
| a homebrew filestore page with "odd chip, drivers
| uncommon" -If I was the market I am sure by now, more of
| them would be mainstream and more web pages would say
| "sure: its easy!"
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Pretty much any HBA has a passthrough mode. It's what I'm
| using with my HP micro server gen8 to run Unraid.
| lmz wrote:
| Looking at the bandwidth numbers a PCIe 3 x4 slot (like those
| used for M.2 slots) should be good for 4x SATA 3 ports, no
| "serialization" required.
|
| There's this https://www.tomshardware.com/news/silverstone-
| turns-one-m2-s... but it's only x2 and theoretically a
| bottleneck.
| ggm wrote:
| Thats my hope. So I may be "meh, we've moved on, M.2 is the
| universal glue" about this now.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Yes, ASUS makes one-liter small PCs with two M.2 PCIe 4.0
| sockets, e.g. PN53 (AMD) or PN64-E1 (Intel Raptor Lake; the
| -E1 is essential, PN64 is a very different worse computer).
| Beelink, Minisforum and others also make similar small
| computers with two M.2 2280 sockets.
|
| If the bottom cover is removed, one can add two of these
| adapters from M.2 key M to five SATA ports:
|
| Delock Converter M.2 2280 Key B+M male to 5 x SATA with
| heat sink
|
| https://www.delock.com/produkt/64051/merkmale.html?g=1818
|
| In this way one can connect up to eleven SSDs/HDDs to such
| a small computer (it already has one SATA port). Making an
| improvised support for them is easy, e.g. one can reuse the
| removable cage from an old computer case. One can make a
| cut through the bottom cover for passing the SATA cables
| and the internal SSD/HDD cage can be removed if it gets in
| the way.
| j45 wrote:
| I long considered doing this and I the end decided storage
| should be an appliance not seen or heard from which is
| relatively self managed and hot swappable and doesn't require
| too much maintenance. Qnap/synology was dropped in and hasn't
| been heard from in years.
|
| There should be a dedicated ssd nas, that would be quite cool.
|
| Setting up local compute was worth looking at on its own.
| defrost wrote:
| The Helios64 was a serious contender with a promising future
| ... until the small team got hammered with pandemic and supply
| chain issues.
|
| https://wiki.kobol.io/helios64/intro/
|
| https://www.hackster.io/news/open-spec-nas-specialist-kobol-...
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/plrwos/looking...
| dbg31415 wrote:
| I have like an 8-10 year-old NUC and I love it.
|
| I got another one for my mom, it's her primary PC. It's tiny,
| reasonably speedy with 16 GB of RAM, well-built, hasn't needed
| any maintenance.
|
| ASUS makes sense, glad the NUC found a new home.
| teamonkey wrote:
| Here's hoping this leads to another line of affordable small
| computers like their much-loved Eee series.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee
| m3kw9 wrote:
| What is an example of a NUC product? Get I get one at newegg?
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Hoping they continue Intel's long tradition of good support for
| Linux/BSD.
| daviddever23box wrote:
| This. Total white-box support is the model that other
| manufacturers have struggled to match.
| Aromasin wrote:
| Agreed. I'm running a dual-boot Manjaro OS on the Serpent
| Canyon NUC (Intel 12th Gen CPU with their new A750 GPU). It was
| very finicky at first, but as soon as Linux 6.2 rolled around
| it worked almost flawlessly. For first gen hardware, that's
| some incredibly work by the kernel team.
| Jabihjo wrote:
| I'm looking forward to this! A couple of years ago, I had decided
| to upgrade my self hosted solutions after running two NUCs non-
| stop that are almost ten years old (and still running!).
| Unfortunately, I decided to go cheap with the upgrade and I
| bought two Minisforum computers, and one of them decided to crap
| out after just 6 months. No word from support yet. I want to
| believe that I would have gotten much better support from Intel,
| if anything would have happened. Also, in general, the NUCs have
| been more stable with seemingly mundane "features" like sleeping.
| I know these are just two data points, but I felt validated
| reading some of the other comments on the HN post from the other
| day where Intel announced discontinuing the NUC and where people
| were praising Intel for Linux support and whatnot.
|
| I'm slowly starting to accept that I shouldn't skimp on things
| that I want to be robust.
| cout wrote:
| Which model minisforum computer did you have? Mine also died
| suddenly. It was the fanless Kodlix GD41. I've read of other
| people with similar experience. What is it about these machines
| that causes them to fail so quickly? I would not buy from them
| again.
| KAMSPioneer wrote:
| My experience with a NUC that died about 18 months into a two-
| year warranty was pretty good. It took a while to do all the
| tests they wanted, but the responses were usually same-day from
| Intel's side. In the end I got a replacement, whole thing took
| maybe two weeks (partially me being slow doing all the tests
| for an issue I knew needed an RMA but c'est la vie).
|
| Shame to hear about Minisforum though.
| j45 wrote:
| The hard thing about the rabbit hole is when you have one, you
| need two to mirror, and then maybe a third to stage or develop
| with...
| INTPenis wrote:
| Very interesting move to do it with Asus seeing as I've been
| using both NUCs and Asus PN5x mini PCs these last 3 years.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I have the system76 branded nuc and it works pretty well. Glad to
| see the line won't just be discontinued
| mobilene wrote:
| I use a Nuc as my main desktop machine and LOVE not having the
| giant box under my desk anymore. I'm thrilled that the line will
| continue, because I'd have another when it's time to replace this
| one.
| Apofis wrote:
| I really liked having a Mac Mini. I might pick one up in the
| future considering how competent Apple's GPUs have a potential
| of getting. Big hopes for M3.
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