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.

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.

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.

They’re $599 at full price and easily found on sale for $500 or less.

Personally I have a USB disk plugged into my router and my HTPC just grabs files over the network.

This is what I want. And the Mac Mini does it better than the nuc as the power bricks the Nucs use are big, ugly and annoying to deal with.

If you want a little kube node, if you prefer the way ubuntu and debian upgrade over the way osx upgrades (and have the linux experience be decent), if you want to shuck it and slap the board in a robot and run ROS, if you want it to be a steam box with an eGPU, there's a bunch of things NUCs do well / places they fit that mac minis don't quite (yet, at least).

Mac minis are great but they're not the same thing. The "tight hand" of Apple makes them great but also limits them. Like you probably can do all the above, with sufficient effort but is not a first class experience, in the same way that an orange pi is not a raspberry pi.

I see there are aftermarket VESA mounts for the mini, and I suppose you can tape or glue the disk to it somehow.

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…

My point mostly was that if you buy a Mac Mini, you aren’t really trapped.

And where do you plug in the extra RAM?

My HTPC is about 12 years old, and I'm pretty sure that the internal SATA SSDs are slower than a modern external USB3.1 drive. Yet it does everything I ask of it with no noticeable delay.

No, the thread is not mentioning HTPCS but about NUCs, which can also be used to do productivity work/games, not just watching movies, so exqueeze me that I want/need a system with 16GB of RAM and some decent storage in mid-2023 to be productive and am not contempt with the bare minimums of 8GB/256 and being price gouged for any drop over that.

Meanwhile a 12th-Gen NUC with 16GB RAM and 500GB SSD costs ~$240 on Amazon, and you can replace the internal RAM and SSD with whatever size and models you want.

You have to be in a completely distorted reality field to choose Apple in these circumstances.

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.

Designing the cooling system to keep up with that is by definition overkill. Which might be fine! Overkill can be fun. But it kind of goes in the face with a small system like a NUC.

But fair enough, let's assume 45W and not 95W. It's still a lot more than the Mac Mini.

Yes, for the first time in eternity apple has an edge in hardware. The solution is obviously to go all in in their walled garden ... profit?

You pick software ecosystem first, then you pick the hardware to run it. As such NUC vs. Mac Mini is apples vs. oranges.

The typical solution, if VMs are your use case, is to use a hypervisor, such as XCP-NG, proxmox, ESXi etc. But if you want to shoehorn in OS X just for the sake of it, sure, that will work. But I guess you'd have to be pretty deep into apples ecosystem to even consider that.

And with VMs you typically want RAM and disk-space, and if you pick such a closed ecosystem that is going to be a real bummer.

But that’s a good point. I would say that we are in the DIY infrastructure world as deploying VMs on a Mac mini or NUC isn’t really following the industry best practices, but installing proxmox on a amd64 box is probably easier.

I'm not sure a NUC is a good replacement for a laptop. That said, there are some really nice Intel and AMD based machines out there.

Nucs, or USFF's are quite performant.

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

Dell has the optiplex

Go has the elitedesk and pro desk

All in mini/usff formfactor similar to the size of a Mac mini.

https://www.servethehome.com/tag/tinyminimicro/

Still the NUC size machines have their place, even the small chromeboxes, etc.

2 values I like comparing:

- Computing power (cpu benchmark) / per watt is a good comparison.

- After that, comparing those to compute power per dollar ratio really lays a clear picture out.

There's enough room in the Lenovo for a couple of PCI cards, a couple more disks and a hell of a lot more RAM if I need it too.

I use a Dell OptiPlex 7000 Micro having an i5-12500T CPU as my main dev machine and it's very snappy. Add a monitor and mount it on a MFS18 stand and you have a nice all-in-one system.

So many cores and threads for so few watts.

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.

Should have just gone straight to the AppleTV, which is where I ended up. Better UI, not shitted up with ads, less jank and crashing (friggin' Android), and none of the problems I'd see with playback of certain combos of audio and video codecs on the Shield. If not for the weak codec line-up, even sticking with Roku would have been better than the shield (yeah, it's shitted up with ads, too, but not as bad—hell, the Apple TV kinda has some, but again, less bad).

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.

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.

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...

[2]: https://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=list%2FCHASSIS+POWER...

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.

Aside: been using NVidia Shield TV(s) and Kodi for local/nas media.

for who accept Chinese brands (and suspicious Windows license): Beelink, Minisforum, etc

the rest: ECS Liva or ASRock DeskMini?

Very nice little platforms with low power draw, and low noise!

I’ve got one of the DeskMini X300 on my desk atm with a 5750GE in it - 8c16t of Zen3 in 35W. It’s competitive with M1 Pro for performance and power draw.

Intel NUC is the BMW of mini PCs, certainly not "inexpensive" compared to the alternatives, even if we ignore the off-brand stuff.

NUC and their ilk were a game changer and I'm glad to see a way for them to continue.

Personally, I bought a cheap fanless Chinese (Topton) router (N5105, 4xi225v3) system from AliExpress running OPNsense that's worked flawlessly for the past year or so, but I'd recommend ordering your minipcs through a vendor where you can easily return it (like Amazon) if it's DOA or otherwise doesn't meet your expectations. I'd also skip the small Chinese vendors if warranty support is something you need. Go with a manufacturer that has a local office/support.

Also, depending on what you want your server for, if you want ECC, your minipc options will be extremely limited (a couple Xeon options when I looked). Personally, I went with an desktop Ryzen + ASRock Rack mini-ITX board in a slim case that was still pretty small since I wanted ECC for ZFS.

I do wish there were one of them that included even two 3.5" drive bays so it can run as a forbidden home server doing all the things.

Yes many alternatives cost less, but if you want to tape them to the back of a TV that generates heat and has to be turned on 24/7 to display advertisements, video,..., they were cheapest by far.

Or in meeting rooms to display zoom/teams, ... A raspberry pi just doesn't handle those scenario's

Perhaps my failure rate is just high, but micro-mini systems for that use case were much more reliable for me over long time frames.

Paying extra for reliability is absolutely worth it.

The Intel NUC Celeron systems could not be met for price if you also needed Windows. To beat the NUC Celeron on price you had to drop to ARM and use Linux but if the software you needed to run only supported Windows that was not an option.

the Celeron NUC's where GREAT for Line of Business use cases where the computer was running a Screen, or Single windows Application

I 100% agree that it’s not the technically optimal solution. But don’t discount the idea that, given an existing set of people and skills, it can definitely be the local optima organizationally.

The maybe dozen NUC's I needed were not a very substantial hardware cost. You bought a Celeron NUC and they just worked even if you didn't have the most experienced staff supporting them or the best software running on them.

If you're going to be deploying a thousand such systems, sure, of course you shouldn't use NUCs.

I'd probably argue that, barring specific requirements that these might not cover, the NXP i.MX6/7/8 would probably be my default for something like this in volume. ~Motorola~/~Freescale~/NXP have been incredibly great stewards of the platform and provide significant lifetime guarantees for their parts (like 10+ years often). Plus you can generally run mainline kernels on them unless you're doing something special that requires something from their vendor branch.

For one of them we had to switch from a Raspberry Pi to a small NUC to display a page with 3-6 videos running. The pi could show 1 or 2 videos but with all 6 going, it was very stuttery playback.

1. LoB apps need to be run not just on a computer that only shows a screen, but in other contexts, there is no reason to develop a whole new app just for that purpose.

2. Developers who are only used to working with Win API's like WPF, DotNet, etc. or other frameworks that are windows only Why would we want to employ whole new dev team just to maintain that app separate from the apps that run on our Laptops and normal computers

3. Management Tools. If my entire fleet of computers is managed by ConfigMgr and controlled by Group Policy and Compliance Setting why would I want to spin up a completely separate management system like Ansible or something just to control these machines when I could have them integrated into my existing tool set of which my helpdesk and everyone else is trained to use?

I can probably come up with 5 or 10 more reasons

It's a good machine technically speaking: perfect for lightweight gaming, office stuff, browsing, etc. But I suspect that a comparable mini PC from asian vendors would be twice as cheap and just as good. A laptop would be even easier.

Just pointing out that "cheap" is not the best description of these things :-)

https://www.shuttle.eu/en/products/slim/ds20u7

A drawback is that Shuttle has less frequent updates than the NUC, and it's harder to find them in local stores.

But the akasa line is pretty interesting if a bit more diy.

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.

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.

I'd buy another for my next machine.

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cooler-Master-MasterCase-enclosure-...

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.

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.

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.

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.