4 ms·

They had some pretty wild ideas in the last two generations around motherboard design and compute elements.

jolmg 3y ago
Yeah. Aren't Intel NUCs the only Ultra-SFF offerings that separate the system between compute elements and board elements? It makes it simpler to have a board element specifically designed for a device while allowing upgradability of the compute element. For example, I imagine SimulaVR adopted NUCs in order to facilitate users being able to upgrade their system's CPU and RAM specs without having to replace the whole HMD or their device-specific board.
wkat4242 3y ago
The front (well, top) panels that could be 3d printed and could have connections were pretty cool too. Too bad they didn't see much use. But lately the nuc lineup was kinda meh anyway. A lot of models didn't come out in Europe but only Asia. They replaced the aluminium enclosure with plastic. Used realtek chips for network. Kept doing weird things with the ports (mini-HDMI, DisplayPort only over USB-C). I loved these little things though. I hate laptops due to ergonomics and everywhere I travel (which is super rare anyway) there's screens and keyboards anyway. So I just travel with my nuc. Cheaper, much less fragile, easy to upgrade and lighter and smaller than a laptop. Also no Lithium battery which gives some peace of mind because most of my NUCs run 24/7. I have 4 of them as really power efficient servers. Unfortunately the realtek thing hurts a bit with the latest ESXi. But you can still pass it through to a VM and use a USB one for management. And I have one 10th gen as workstation running FreeBSD. Asus already made pretty nice NUC equivalents by the way, I have one of them with a Ryzen.
- fomine3 3y ago
  Recent consumer 2.5G+ LAN chips by Intel suck so it's make sense to adopt Realtek despite it's Intel product
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Ah but they used the 1 gigabit realtek in the models I was thinking of. Perhaps now they use more modern ones though.

Yeah. Aren't Intel NUCs the only Ultra-SFF offerings that separate the system between compute elements and board elements? It makes it simpler to have a board element specifically designed for a device while allowing upgradability of the compute element. For example, I imagine SimulaVR adopted NUCs in order to facilitate users being able to upgrade their system's CPU and RAM specs without having to replace the whole HMD or their device-specific board.

wkat4242 3y ago

The front (well, top) panels that could be 3d printed and could have connections were pretty cool too. Too bad they didn't see much use. But lately the nuc lineup was kinda meh anyway. A lot of models didn't come out in Europe but only Asia. They replaced the aluminium enclosure with plastic. Used realtek chips for network. Kept doing weird things with the ports (mini-HDMI, DisplayPort only over USB-C). I loved these little things though. I hate laptops due to ergonomics and everywhere I travel (which is super rare anyway) there's screens and keyboards anyway. So I just travel with my nuc. Cheaper, much less fragile, easy to upgrade and lighter and smaller than a laptop. Also no Lithium battery which gives some peace of mind because most of my NUCs run 24/7. I have 4 of them as really power efficient servers. Unfortunately the realtek thing hurts a bit with the latest ESXi. But you can still pass it through to a VM and use a USB one for management. And I have one 10th gen as workstation running FreeBSD. Asus already made pretty nice NUC equivalents by the way, I have one of them with a Ryzen.

fomine3 3y ago
Recent consumer 2.5G+ LAN chips by Intel suck so it's make sense to adopt Realtek despite it's Intel product
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Ah but they used the 1 gigabit realtek in the models I was thinking of. Perhaps now they use more modern ones though.