But the tradeoff for a small NUC is a big power brick.
I've been using this with Debian for years. My only complain is I needed one of the HDMI fake (or real) devices for the device to boot.
I really like it's an amd64 and not an ARM. Allows to run software released as binary for Linux desktop.
I have a USB-3 hard disk convected (Toshiba) and that's the slowest thing on the device.
If I had to replace it, I'd probably opt for some kind of similar devices, but using a modern low-powered AMD chip instead of Intel.
The machine sits at 49-53 °C and I have the fan curve set so the fan only starts spinning when it gets a little over that. Which I believe doesn't happen at all, because it's so underpowered.
I don't know exactly how much power it consumes, but the whole IKEA cabinet sits at 16 W for my router, one Raspberry and this NUC together, so probably not much.
Scored my model for €450, barely used. i7 8665, 32 GB RAM and 500GB SSD. It would have been around double that price new. This was about 4 years ago.
It’s quiet, rock solid and can run just about anything I throw at it. It’s even overkill for my uses, but if I get another 5 years out of it it’s incredible value for the money.
It's been great so far, fans aren't too loud, power consumption isn't killer and there's ton of headroom still, assuming no modded minecraft server taking my ram.
Having owned so many over years, I've found they are fairly prone to problems and have some missing features. My main gripes are:
- Unreliable RAM. Obviously being Intel, ECC is not supported, and I have had several with bad RAM or random apparently RAM-related hanging issues. You could argue that this is nothing to do with Intel since the RAM is always from a third party (but a top quality one), but why do I only ever have this problem with NUCs and not the dozens of other machines I own?
- CMOS batteries die after a few years and are not replaceable. Or they are replaceable if you completely dismantle the machine and desolder the battery leads, wrap a new CR2032 battery in tape with leads and solder it back to the board, but who has time for that. The battery should be socketed.
- Only one 1Gbps network port.
- Confusing model numbers and huge variety. ASUS should reduce and simplify the range.
- No remote access / BMC. This would be the one feature that would make the systems 100x more useful.
- Expensive! (Luckily Red Hat paid for most of them.) The Gigabyte machines are much cheaper.
The good thing about them is they are small, quiet and use little power.
For running VMs, note that the max possible RAM is 64GB. I do run VMs on some of mine, so it is possible.
Ironically this is one of the options provided by some models in the dizzying line up. While it's not a dedicated IPMI port it uses Intel vPro for BMC like functionality. You'll pay a pretty premium for those models though.
The fragmentation in their lineup (and general lack of availability outside of B2B) really hamstrung them IMO.
I recently replaced it with a Synology Diskstation, looking for a new job for the still running NUC.
I installed a 1TB Solodigm P44 NVME drive, 32GB memory.
OS wise I installed Proxmox. Install was a pain but that’s because I wanted LUKS encryption. I had to install Debian first, setup LUKS, then setup Dropbear ssh so I can ssh in to it at boot for the password. Once that was out the way I followed Proxmox’s instructions on migrating Debian to Proxmox which is a case of adding the Proxmox apt repos and installing. A vanilla Proxmox install is minutes, but then it’s unencrypted data which is a pain when selling drives.
I have a small vm with WireGuard + rarr suite of apps, then a bunch of lxc containers, jellyfin etc. It’s mostly idling away and silent but the fan kicks in pretty quickly if doing anything moderate cpu wise. The fan is loud when it starts.
I am happy with the purchase as it uses little power and it’s mostly silent for me. If it wasn’t an impulse buy based on the price a better option might of been the Aliexpress fanless N300 boxes at the low cpu end, or a one litre mini pc such as a eBay used HP Elite Mini G9 as they have better cooling so quieter.
You can add 10gb to the hp, dual NVMe, and 2.5 sata drive. A mini powerhouse https://www.servethehome.com/perfect-project-tinyminimicro-p...
It replaced a Raspberry Pi 3, and is obviously way more performant compared to that.
I keep thinking of getting something which I can run multiple vms as needed for things like game servers, hosting docker containers, etc. load it up with a bunch of memory. I don't want anything too big/power hungry given most of the time it would likely sit idle.