20 ms·

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 r

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
    A lot of things would work at 2x-4x the NUC price, even without the Apple lock-in.
    - ChumpGPT 3y ago
      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.
      - questionable922 3y ago
        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 3y ago
        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.
      - Rebelgecko 3y ago
  - asciimov 3y ago
    Biggest problem with the Mac mini is it has no user upgradable parts, nuc does.
    - lostlogin 3y ago
      That’s less of an issue than the price.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - wkat4242 3y ago
        It causes a price issue because Apple's upgrades are extremely overpriced
    - katbyte 3y ago
      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
- j45 3y ago
  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.
  - rizky05 3y ago
    Did you meant Go = HP. I made the same typo anyway, they are one keystroke away.
    - j45 3y ago
      Definite typo - meant HP, thanks!
  - youngtaff 3y ago
    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/ https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/
    - j45 3y ago
      These are a great size and one I like a lot Still the NUC size machines have their place, even the small chromeboxes, etc.
  - baz00 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      Yeah but for the same money as your Lenovo, you can get something much smaller.
- shaklee3 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
    - lrem 3y ago
      It does 4k HDR and ATMOS. What does it lack?
      - OJFord 3y ago
        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.
      - vetinari 3y ago
        It doesn't do AV1 in hardware. Not yet necessary today, but nice to have for future proofing.
      - mkesper 3y ago
        Who really needs ATMOS, wasn't that only marketing fluff?
      - xbmcuser 3y ago
        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
- adrian_b 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
  > 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+POWER.tpl&type=FANLESS+CASES&type_sub=AMD+Mini+PC https://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER... [2]: https://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER.tpl&type=FANLESS+CASES&type_sub=Intel+NUC&nuc=all&generation=all https://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER...
- deadbunny 3y ago
  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.
- tracker1 3y ago
  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.
kodah 3y ago
I use a Skull Canyon as my daily driver for programming and honestly I wouldn't have selected another machine.
- j45 3y ago
  I waisted for the successor to skull canyon so long I just bought a Lenovo lol.
  - Aromasin 3y ago
    They brought out the Serpent/Raptor Canyon recently and they're awesome bits of kit.
    - j45 3y ago
      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.
      - kodah 3y ago
        fwiw, I'm OP. I use it with 32GiB of RAM and a 1TB M.2 and it's been fantastic for day to day development on two HiDPI screens. The Vega-M graphics card mine came with is also on mainline Linux in terms of driver support.
- georgeburdell 3y ago
  Me too. Been waiting years for them to release a similarly performant model in the same form factor.
nextos 3y ago
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.
- o1y32 3y ago
  I would remove the word "inexpensive". Many alternatives cost less. I know people buy Intel for brand, quality and warranty but definitely not price.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    I bought for price - a max mini would have been better but ludicrously expensive.
    - senttoschool 3y ago
      I think the poster above you meant other mini PCs by non-Apple manufacturers.
  - SSLy 3y ago
    What would be some of the alternatives? I don't even need a gpu. It will be a home server.
    - unlimitive 3y ago
      Turing pi 2
    - fomine3 3y ago
      for who accept used PCs: https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/ 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 3y ago
re-thc 3y ago
> 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.
squokko 3y ago
Why would the business be horrifically in the red? It's commodity hardware at a slightly premium price.
- lhoff 3y ago
  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.
ChuckMcM 3y ago
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.
maccard 3y ago
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-graphics/dp/B08SBGK2ZM/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cooler-Master-MasterCase-enclosure-...
qwerty456127 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    I've been waiting for "board inversion" - where the video card effectively becomes the thing you insert the motherboard/CPU/RAM assembly in to.
gumby 3y ago
> 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.

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
  A lot of things would work at 2x-4x the NUC price, even without the Apple lock-in.
  - ChumpGPT 3y ago
    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.
    - questionable922 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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.
    - Rebelgecko 3y ago
- asciimov 3y ago
  Biggest problem with the Mac mini is it has no user upgradable parts, nuc does.
  - lostlogin 3y ago
    That’s less of an issue than the price.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      It causes a price issue because Apple's upgrades are extremely overpriced
  - katbyte 3y ago
    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
j45 3y ago
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.
- rizky05 3y ago
  Did you meant Go = HP. I made the same typo anyway, they are one keystroke away.
  - j45 3y ago
    Definite typo - meant HP, thanks!
- youngtaff 3y ago
  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/ https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/
  - j45 3y ago
    These are a great size and one I like a lot Still the NUC size machines have their place, even the small chromeboxes, etc.
- baz00 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Yeah but for the same money as your Lenovo, you can get something much smaller.
shaklee3 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
  - lrem 3y ago
    It does 4k HDR and ATMOS. What does it lack?
    - OJFord 3y ago
      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.
    - vetinari 3y ago
      It doesn't do AV1 in hardware. Not yet necessary today, but nice to have for future proofing.
    - mkesper 3y ago
      Who really needs ATMOS, wasn't that only marketing fluff?
    - xbmcuser 3y ago
      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
adrian_b 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
> 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+POWER.tpl&type=FANLESS+CASES&type_sub=AMD+Mini+PC https://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER... [2]: https://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER.tpl&type=FANLESS+CASES&type_sub=Intel+NUC&nuc=all&generation=all https://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER...
deadbunny 3y ago
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.
tracker1 3y ago
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.

kodah 3y ago

I use a Skull Canyon as my daily driver for programming and honestly I wouldn't have selected another machine.

j45 3y ago
I waisted for the successor to skull canyon so long I just bought a Lenovo lol.
- Aromasin 3y ago
  They brought out the Serpent/Raptor Canyon recently and they're awesome bits of kit.
  - j45 3y ago
    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.
    - kodah 3y ago
      fwiw, I'm OP. I use it with 32GiB of RAM and a 1TB M.2 and it's been fantastic for day to day development on two HiDPI screens. The Vega-M graphics card mine came with is also on mainline Linux in terms of driver support.
georgeburdell 3y ago
Me too. Been waiting years for them to release a similarly performant model in the same form factor.

nextos 3y ago

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.

o1y32 3y ago
I would remove the word "inexpensive". Many alternatives cost less. I know people buy Intel for brand, quality and warranty but definitely not price.
- lostlogin 3y ago
  I bought for price - a max mini would have been better but ludicrously expensive.
  - senttoschool 3y ago
    I think the poster above you meant other mini PCs by non-Apple manufacturers.
- SSLy 3y ago
  What would be some of the alternatives? I don't even need a gpu. It will be a home server.
  - unlimitive 3y ago
    Turing pi 2
  - fomine3 3y ago
    for who accept used PCs: https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/ 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 3y ago

re-thc 3y ago

> 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.

squokko 3y ago

Why would the business be horrifically in the red? It's commodity hardware at a slightly premium price.

lhoff 3y ago
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.

ChuckMcM 3y ago

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.

maccard 3y ago

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-graphics/dp/B08SBGK2ZM/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cooler-Master-MasterCase-enclosure-...

qwerty456127 3y ago

> 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 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  I've been waiting for "board inversion" - where the video card effectively becomes the thing you insert the motherboard/CPU/RAM assembly in to.

gumby 3y ago

> 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.