Re:Completely Silent Computer
by uglycoyote on Thursday May 17, 2018 @10:29AM
(#17091504)
I'm using a NUC for a quiet home PC that I do mostly browsing but also some light web development on. Although it's mostly silent, I haven't been too impressed with the performance of it. It was one of the top of the line models in 2015, an i7-5557U. I was surprised to find it's quite a bit slower than my 2013 Macbook Pro 2.4 Ghz i5. On the Geekbench profile the MBP got almost 3x the single-core score of the NUC and 1.7x for multi-core. Real world performance of the older macbook is noticably faster.
It has made me think that instead of getting a NUC, for a quiet desktop system I should have just gotten a second used MBP and ran it permanently docked in clamshell mode with the monitors and keyboard attached. (with the added benefit of being able to go portable when I want to)
Neither the NUC nor my MBP is completely silent but for my purposes I find that I seldom tax either of them enough to where the fans become audible enough to be annoying. Still, I do find the difference in performance between them to be apparent just in things like iteration time on web development and IDE responsiveness.
It has made me think that instead of getting a NUC, for a quiet desktop system I should have just gotten a second used MBP and ran it permanently docked in clamshell mode with the monitors and keyboard attached. (with the added benefit of being able to go portable when I want to)
Neither the NUC nor my MBP is completely silent but for my purposes I find that I seldom tax either of them enough to where the fans become audible enough to be annoying. Still, I do find the difference in performance between them to be apparent just in things like iteration time on web development and IDE responsiveness.