15 ms·

ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products

559 points by mepian 3y ago

trd716 3y ago
How is ASUS build quality these days?
- j45 3y ago
  Asus gear just seems to keep working
- throw_m239339 3y ago
  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.
- sexy_seedbox 3y ago
  The Zenfone 10 seems pretty high quality.
- Tade0 3y ago
  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.
- teamonkey 3y ago
  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.
bee_rider 3y ago
About a week ago we had an article about Intel leaving the NUC market. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36680674 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.
- dangus 3y ago
  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.
- justinclift 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > 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.
    - 3y ago
lakomen 3y ago
Lots of blah but no details
bigyikes 3y ago
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?
- RandomBK 3y ago
  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.
- inhumantsar 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dev_slash_null 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
magicalhippo 3y ago
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/mini-pc-pn51/ https://www.asus.com/us/displays-desktops/mini-pcs/pn-series...
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    The pn51 didn’t ship with a 4700. You’re either using a pn50 or 5700
    - flyinghamster 3y ago
      Oops, you're right, it's a PN50. Anyway, I'm still impressed with this little guy.
      - Havoc 3y ago
        Yeah got the same. Very solid
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Zanfa 3y ago
  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?
RandomBK 3y ago
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).
- agloe_dreams 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    [deleted]
- bfdm 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Would a Mac mini work?
    - j45 3y ago
      Non Apple Silicon is usually overpriced for the CPU benchmark point to run linux Nucs, or USFF's are quite performant.
    - jojobas 3y ago
nickpeterson 3y ago
I feel like it’s really hard to justify one of these in light of m2 Mac minis. High usage memory applications?
- generj 3y ago
  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.
- stu2b50 3y ago
  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.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Operating systems other than MacOS? (Well, Asahi is pretty impressive but it is only a couple years old).
- NikolaNovak 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
midnitewarrior 3y ago
ASUS FTW!
ggm 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Sincere question: How are you even going to fit more than one 2.5" drive in a NUC? These things are tiny.
  - ggm 3y ago
    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.
    - quailfarmer 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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!"
kiwijamo 3y ago
Hoping they continue Intel's long tradition of good support for Linux/BSD.
- daviddever23box 3y ago
  This. Total white-box support is the model that other manufacturers have struggled to match.
  - gautamcgoel 3y ago
    What does 'white-box support' mean?
- Aromasin 3y ago
  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.
VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
I have the system76 branded nuc and it works pretty well. Glad to see the line won't just be discontinued
ocdtrekkie 3y ago
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.
dbg31415 3y ago
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.
Jabihjo 3y ago
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.
- KAMSPioneer 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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…
- cout 3y ago
  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.
emmelaich 3y ago
Meanwhile there's also the Gigabyte Brix. https://www.gigabyte.com/au/Mini-PcBarebone https://www.gigabyte.com/au/Mini-PcBarebone
- adrian_b 3y ago
  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.
entropicgravity 3y ago
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.
Daegalus 3y ago
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 3y ago
  +1 for BeeLink stuff. I was surprised how tiny they were and yet still powerful!
- slimsag 3y ago
  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.
davkan 3y ago
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.
transpute 3y ago
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#35636960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35635900#35636517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35635900#35636517
- gonzo 3y ago
  If they were it probably would have already occurred.
beebeepka 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
keithnz 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Lenovo or HP mini PC with PCIe slot, https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/ https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/
- Gabrys1 3y ago
  https://androidtvbox.eu/ecs-liva-x-bay-trail-mini-pcs-support-4gb-ram-windows-linux-os/ 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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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.
dmvdoug 3y ago
How are people pronouncing NUC? Like “nuck” (rhymes with “Zuck”) or “nuke” (rhymes with “puke”)?
- tim-fan 3y ago
  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!
  - dmvdoug 3y ago
    Now I’m imagining your coworkers talking about getting nookie.
  - vxNsr 3y ago
    Wait, zuck and book rhyme, how are nook and nuck different?
    - tomsmeding 3y ago
      zUck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-open_central_vowel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-open_central_vowel bOOk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_central_rounded_vowel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_central_rounded_vowel
      - vxNsr 3y ago
        Must be a midwestern accent thing, I don’t pronounce book, “boooook” (as in what a ghost with a cough says)
        smolder 3y ago
        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.
pizza 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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
flower-giraffe 3y ago
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.
- chx 3y ago
  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.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  > 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...
sandreas 3y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-dVdm3OjME [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFurC_HDlKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFurC_HDlKM (German)
- manmal 3y ago
  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 (€250 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-sparsamsten-systeme-30w-idle.1007101/page-89#post-29890294 https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamste... - someone claims they reached 4W idle with this Fujitsu board
ngcc_hk 3y ago
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.
pantulis 3y ago
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.
daviddever23box 3y ago
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....
rburhum 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
  - rburhum 3y ago
    thank you!
treprinum 3y ago
I hope that doesn't affect AMD 8-core mini PCs from ASUS as a part of the deal...
stevefan1999 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      > 6600 XT ITX card What is an ITX card? I assume that should say pcie card?
      - stevefan1999 3y ago
        It's something like this https://www.asrock.com/Graphics-Card/AMD/Radeon%20RX%206600%20XT%20Challenger%20ITX%208GB/ https://www.asrock.com/Graphics-Card/AMD/Radeon%20RX%206600%... Single fan, low profile, high cost.
INTPenis 3y ago
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.
ed_blackburn 3y ago
Where is the ARM equivalent or put another way budget Linux Apple Mini competitor?
- ChrisLTD 3y ago
  Raspberry Pi and their clones come close
- mschuster91 3y ago
  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 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.
hgsgm 3y ago
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?
teamonkey 3y ago
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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee
m3kw9 3y ago
What is an example of a NUC product? Get I get one at newegg?
MisterTea 3y ago
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.
mobilene 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
at_a_remove 3y ago
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?
tracker1 3y ago
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.
sleepybrett 3y ago
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.
Triangle9349 3y ago
Aren't ASUS mini PCs manufactured by the GEEKOM?

559 points by mepian 3y ago

trd716 3y ago

How is ASUS build quality these days?

j45 3y ago
Asus gear just seems to keep working
throw_m239339 3y ago
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.
sexy_seedbox 3y ago
The Zenfone 10 seems pretty high quality.
Tade0 3y ago
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.
teamonkey 3y ago
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.

bee_rider 3y ago

About a week ago we had an article about Intel leaving the NUC market. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36680674 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.

dangus 3y ago
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.
justinclift 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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.
  - 3y ago

lakomen 3y ago

Lots of blah but no details

bigyikes 3y ago

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?

RandomBK 3y ago
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.
inhumantsar 3y ago
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 3y ago
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dev_slash_null 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago

magicalhippo 3y ago

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/mini-pc-pn51/ https://www.asus.com/us/displays-desktops/mini-pcs/pn-series...

flyinghamster 3y ago
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 3y ago
  The pn51 didn’t ship with a 4700. You’re either using a pn50 or 5700
  - flyinghamster 3y ago
    Oops, you're right, it's a PN50. Anyway, I'm still impressed with this little guy.
    - Havoc 3y ago
      Yeah got the same. Very solid
deleted 3y ago
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Zanfa 3y ago
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?

RandomBK 3y ago

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).

agloe_dreams 3y ago
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 3y ago
  [deleted]
bfdm 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Would a Mac mini work?
  - j45 3y ago
    Non Apple Silicon is usually overpriced for the CPU benchmark point to run linux Nucs, or USFF's are quite performant.
  - jojobas 3y ago

nickpeterson 3y ago

I feel like it’s really hard to justify one of these in light of m2 Mac minis. High usage memory applications?

generj 3y ago
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.
stu2b50 3y ago
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.
bee_rider 3y ago
Operating systems other than MacOS? (Well, Asahi is pretty impressive but it is only a couple years old).
NikolaNovak 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.

midnitewarrior 3y ago

ASUS FTW!

ggm 3y ago

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 3y ago
Sincere question: How are you even going to fit more than one 2.5" drive in a NUC? These things are tiny.
- ggm 3y ago
  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.
  - quailfarmer 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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!"

kiwijamo 3y ago

Hoping they continue Intel's long tradition of good support for Linux/BSD.

daviddever23box 3y ago
This. Total white-box support is the model that other manufacturers have struggled to match.
- gautamcgoel 3y ago
  What does 'white-box support' mean?
Aromasin 3y ago
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.

VWWHFSfQ 3y ago

I have the system76 branded nuc and it works pretty well. Glad to see the line won't just be discontinued

ocdtrekkie 3y ago

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.

dbg31415 3y ago

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.

Jabihjo 3y ago

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.

KAMSPioneer 3y ago
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 3y ago
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…
cout 3y ago
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.

emmelaich 3y ago

Meanwhile there's also the Gigabyte Brix. https://www.gigabyte.com/au/Mini-PcBarebone https://www.gigabyte.com/au/Mini-PcBarebone

adrian_b 3y ago
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.

entropicgravity 3y ago

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.

Daegalus 3y ago

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 3y ago
+1 for BeeLink stuff. I was surprised how tiny they were and yet still powerful!
slimsag 3y ago
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.

davkan 3y ago

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.

transpute 3y ago

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#35636960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35635900#35636517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35635900#35636517

gonzo 3y ago
If they were it probably would have already occurred.

beebeepka 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.

keithnz 3y ago

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 3y ago
Lenovo or HP mini PC with PCIe slot, https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/ https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/
Gabrys1 3y ago
https://androidtvbox.eu/ecs-liva-x-bay-trail-mini-pcs-support-4gb-ram-windows-linux-os/ 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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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.

dmvdoug 3y ago

How are people pronouncing NUC? Like “nuck” (rhymes with “Zuck”) or “nuke” (rhymes with “puke”)?

tim-fan 3y ago
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!
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  Now I’m imagining your coworkers talking about getting nookie.
- vxNsr 3y ago
  Wait, zuck and book rhyme, how are nook and nuck different?
  - tomsmeding 3y ago
    zUck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-open_central_vowel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-open_central_vowel bOOk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_central_rounded_vowel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_central_rounded_vowel
    - vxNsr 3y ago
      Must be a midwestern accent thing, I don’t pronounce book, “boooook” (as in what a ghost with a cough says)
      - smolder 3y ago
        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.

pizza 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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

flower-giraffe 3y ago

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.

chx 3y ago
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.
phpisthebest 3y ago
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 3y ago
> 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...

sandreas 3y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-dVdm3OjME [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFurC_HDlKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFurC_HDlKM (German)

manmal 3y ago
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 (€250 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-sparsamsten-systeme-30w-idle.1007101/page-89#post-29890294 https://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/threads/die-sparsamste... - someone claims they reached 4W idle with this Fujitsu board

ngcc_hk 3y ago

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.

pantulis 3y ago

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.

daviddever23box 3y ago

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....

rburhum 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.
- rburhum 3y ago
  thank you!

treprinum 3y ago

I hope that doesn't affect AMD 8-core mini PCs from ASUS as a part of the deal...

stevefan1999 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > 6600 XT ITX card What is an ITX card? I assume that should say pcie card?
    - stevefan1999 3y ago
      It's something like this https://www.asrock.com/Graphics-Card/AMD/Radeon%20RX%206600%20XT%20Challenger%20ITX%208GB/ https://www.asrock.com/Graphics-Card/AMD/Radeon%20RX%206600%... Single fan, low profile, high cost.

INTPenis 3y ago

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.

ed_blackburn 3y ago

Where is the ARM equivalent or put another way budget Linux Apple Mini competitor?

ChrisLTD 3y ago
Raspberry Pi and their clones come close
mschuster91 3y ago
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 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.

hgsgm 3y ago

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?

teamonkey 3y ago

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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee

m3kw9 3y ago

What is an example of a NUC product? Get I get one at newegg?

MisterTea 3y ago

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.

mobilene 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.

at_a_remove 3y ago

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?

tracker1 3y ago

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.

sleepybrett 3y ago

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.

Triangle9349 3y ago

Aren't ASUS mini PCs manufactured by the GEEKOM?