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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
by 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 agoWould a Mac mini work?
- j45 3y agoNon Apple Silicon is usually overpriced for the CPU benchmark point to run linux Nucs, or USFF's are quite performant.
- jojobas 3y agoA lot of things would work at 2x-4x the NUC price, even without the Apple lock-in.
- ChumpGPT 3y agoCostco 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 agoThey 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 agoUntrue, 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 ago256GB seems pretty small for an HTPC, unless it's just pulling from a server in another room
- lockhouse 3y agoThe key is to use an external SSD via USB. Much better bang for your buck than Apple’s storage pricing.
- jojobas 3y agoOr, just as a wild thought, stay away from overpriced hardware.
- lockhouse 3y agoWhat’s overpriced about the base model Mac mini? I agree that Apple way overcharges for upgrades, but the base model looks reasonably priced to me.
- afavour 3y agoWhile that’s true it kind of ruins the point in getting a small factor computer like a Mac Mini. You want as small a footprint as possible. Personally I have a USB disk plugged into my router and my HTPC just grabs files over the network.
- kcb 3y agoHaving to spend $200 per 8GB of RAM and $200 per 256GB of storage like it's still 2012 pretty much destroys any value proposition from Apple.
- adastra22 3y agoYou can put a 4tb drive on a USB port.
- tjoff 3y agoSuch hacks just to get trapped in apples ecosystem? How can that be appealing?
- criddell 3y agoHow are you trapped in the ecosystem? A Mac Mini can run more software than any of their competitors (you can’t install macOS on a VM on a Windows or Linux host but the reverse is possible). Even on the hardware side you are free to connect third party drives, monitors, keyboards, etc…
- BenjiWiebe 3y agoYou can actually install Mac os in a VM on Linux or Windows. It's not a technical issue, it's that Apple tries to make it hard to do so.
- jojobas 3y agoJust checked on ebay, a 12500H NUC with 16GB ram and 1TB SSD is $518. You have to be in a completely distorted reality field to choose Apple in these circumstances.
- lostlogin 3y agoOr price is of little consequence and you just want a nice machine. I have several Nucs and would love a Max mini server. I think I’d prefer that option but the price is too high to justify it. The bits I like are the built in 10gbe and the huge transcoding power.
- speedgoose 3y agoThe Intel creates a lot more heat though. If the noise/performances ratio is important or if energy consumption is something you care about, the Intel solution doesn’t seem that interesting.
- Symbiote 3y agoFor noise, you could budget about $100 for a fanless case for the NUC.
- speedgoose 3y agoWouldn’t it run slow? The Intel CPU data sheet says it emits 95W of heat in "turbo" mode. Is there fanless NUC cases capable to dissipate that amount of heat, without even thinking about the other sources of heat?
- tjoff 3y agoYou don't design your cooling system to maintain peak turbo consumption. Thermal Design Power is 45W.
- speedgoose 3y agoWhy not? With max 45W it would throttle a lot under heavy loads.
- goosedragons 3y agoNot a NUC, but there are loads of competitive mini PCs for $500 or even less. Amazon has the Beelink SER 6 Pro for $500 after coupon with 32GB RAM, 500 GB SSD, 2.5Gbe and an 8 core Ryzen 7 7735HS with Radeon 680M.
- asciimov 3y agoBiggest problem with the Mac mini is it has no user upgradable parts, nuc does.
- lostlogin 3y agoThat’s less of an issue than the price.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wkat4242 3y agoIt causes a price issue because Apple's upgrades are extremely overpriced
- katbyte 3y agoNah 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 agoLenovo 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 agoDid you meant Go = HP. I made the same typo anyway, they are one keystroke away.
- j45 3y agoDefinite typo - meant HP, thanks!
- youngtaff 3y agoYeh, 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 agoThese 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 agoYes 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 agoYeah but for the same money as your Lenovo, you can get something much smaller.
- shaklee3 3y agoI 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 agoAfter 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 agoIt does 4k HDR and ATMOS. What does it lack?
- OJFord 3y agoIt 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 agoIt doesn't do AV1 in hardware. Not yet necessary today, but nice to have for future proofing.
- mkesper 3y agoWho really needs ATMOS, wasn't that only marketing fluff?
- xbmcuser 3y agoI 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 agoI 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 agoNUC8 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 agoI 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 agoI'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 agoI'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.