Damn, this is a sad day for the homelab.
The article says Intel is working with partners to “continue NUC innovation and growth”, so we will see what that manifests as.
I own a bunch of them, generations five through ten, and have always had a love/hate relationship with them. None has ever died on me. My main workstation at home, as well as two “homelab” servers are NUCs. They Just Work<tm> under both Ubuntu and Proxmox.
The love is for them just working. The hate is for Intel :-)
What they got wrong:
- cooling. CPU cooling is finely tuned and controllable through the BIOS, no qualms there. The disk and the NVME SSD have no cooling whatsoever. Sticking an small 40mm fan to the side and running it at the minimum RPM drops the case temperature from 60°C to 40°C and avoids the NVME SSD burning out. Needless to say, a glued on fan looks fugly.
- opening. By refusing to let their firmware be accessible to the fwupdmgr mechanism, Intel forces its Linux users to physically go to the machine, stick in a USB thumbdrive, keyboard and a monitor, and click their way through the BIOS update. In contrast, my Dell gear gets updated online through fwupdmgr, and I just have to suffer a reboot with a few minutes of downtime. I don’t even have to be at the keyboard.
- remote monitoring. I bought two NUC’s with vPRO support, to allow for remote management. But the remote console sucks eggs even from a Windows management station, so I wound up disabling it on all of them. Both Dell’s iDRAC and HP’s ILO run circles around vPRO based remote management.
That’s not a lot to go wrong for such a big endeavour, which is why I will keep hating Intel and sorely missing the upgrade opportunity. Just hoping Dell will step into the void.
I got one for my mother when she needed a new PC and it died within a month. Not intel’s fault though, chip on the SSD died, first time I’ve seen an m.2 SSD die like that. Replacement going strong.
What do you recommend for desktops that aren’t the big ass tower?
Look at minisforum and beelink.
I can second Beelink here. I bought a Beelink SER5 for US$380 as a gaming computer for my kids. It’s an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H with a Vega GPU, 16G RAM and a 500GB SSD. It probably won’t work well with the latest graphics-intensive games, but it’s been great so far with a bunch of games my kids like.
That one worked so well that when I needed a new desktop computer for their schoolwork and similar, I got another Beelink, this time a Mini S12 for US$200. It’s an Intel N95 with 8G RAM and a 256G SSD. Works absolutely fantastically for its purpose.
Both are tiny and silent.
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Well I’d like better cooling than a laptop, which should make it last longer. But a full size tower just doesn’t seem necessary anymore.
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Say for modest/patient gaming.
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Well personally for me not a handheld because I still want a computer for office and things like that (and not cheap one because the more RAM the better). I’ve seen people fiddle with their steam deck but I don’t want to bother with that.
I think user asked for a small factor PC, just like intel nuc. IMO intel nuc is a perfect PC for a work desktop. They can even mount on the back of the monitor - excellent feature. Not sure if any other brand has such feature.
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I get your point and I agree with you, but let me clarify what I was talking about.
The idea is a very small office where people don’t focus on working with computer, but rather use computer to help certain tasks, process payments, save something to MS Excel and so on. Those people don’t really need laptops, so stationary devices are perfect.
Just focus on what I wrote. I am the “admin” of such “small office”.
Intel nuc is perfect solution for me, the performance is more than enough and small size factor really takes the cake. I am really sad that NUC goes away and hope that soon there would be alternative. ✌️
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Between Minisforum and Beelink putting out NUC-likes with AMD, Intel just can’t compete. I’m biased in favor of team red to begin with, but you just cannot tell me an Intel NUC provides better per dollar value than the above’s offerings. I’ve used NUCs, I like NUCs, but why pay more for less when there exist alternatives?
I mean, they’re the OEM, they could easily have lowered their own prices. It’s not like they were taking a loss on each unit.
For me it’s the hardware transcoding capabilities of the Nuc is what makes it stand out.
Quick sync is so good and well supported that Intel is a no brainier for me.
Exactly, for a home lab I would pick an Amd over Intel just to have the extra cores on top of costing less.
The reason for wanting intel is the iGPU to get quicksync.
💯
I’m not too knowledgeable on the topic but I thought the amd iGPU had vce, which is a their version of quicksync?
Exactly. The only reason why I’m waiting for NUC12 right now. As far as my limited knowledge goes, AMD is behind here. Correct me, if I’m wrong.
Sad really, but the issue, as someone as mentioned already is they were too expensive.
Yeah. Not sure why people would be proud of paying more for less.
It’s not like the size difference is prohibitive compared to a normal workstation.
I’m fine with it. Their competitors passed them by a few years ago anyway. The only thing the Intel branded stuff was better at now- was being more expensive.
Agree, love my NUC but it seems the last few years they haven’t been the best option. It seems like they lost touch with what people wanted from them around the time they started releasing models that supported a full size GPU.
started releasing models that supported a full size GPU.
Exactly what nobody on earth wants from a mini pc.
Sad to see these go. I use one for my Nextcloud home server and am happy with it.
That’s a bummer. Maybe framework will fill the void lol
There are plenty of alternatives to the NUC. MinisForum, StarLabs and System76 out of the top of my head
The M1/M2 Mac Mini is really nice.
A bit too expensive for a book weight.
Ah this sucks. They’re such a great size and very capable. I’m currently using one as my all in one home server - it’s been flawless.
Damn. I may need to buy a couple
That sucks, I hope this isn’t a statement about the “Mini-Pc” market in general. I’ve been thinking about getting one as a “Steam machine/ emulation station” for a long time but the stars never really lined up.
I’ve got a full sized PC in the front room getting long in the tooth and looking ridiculous that could easily be replaced. But while the 970 still plays Dave the Diver, well there’s other shit money can be spent on.
Wasn’t meant as a reply, pressed the wrong thing, my bad
I still appreciate the love ✌️💛
Right there with you. Full size ATX machine circa 2010ish, can still play GTA V fine enough. The only reason it isn’t my media server is because my Mac mini does that for less power.
The big guy keeps chugging along when I need him, so the funds go elsewhere.
I was just looking at buying one second hand yesterday… Better buy one before everyone ramps up their prices!
I’ve bought a few dozen of these things, shame to see them go.
Minisforum is taking the torch from them. I just bought one from them which is essentially a NUC, it has a Core i7 and RTX 3070 mobile in it. It’s pretty much a laptop without a screen. They make tons of smaller ones if you forgo the integrated high-end GPU.
Every time I’ve had a use for these either a business PC (or ex-business referb for home) has always been a better, cheaper answer.
where do you find refurbs? I’d love to get my hands on an ex-business refurb!
You could use eBay but that’s usually the option of last resort.
Your local city probably has referb shops that sell them or if you’re keen you can pick them up directly from auction for peanuts.
Thanks! Gotta keep a lookout for them deals!
My city has a couple mom-and-pop type businesses doing it, I’d hazard a guess it’s similar elsewhere - never heard of any ‘big name’ outfits doing it on any real scale.
What’s your mom-and-pop businesses called? They have similar names or similar ways of finding them… Would make it easier to find those around me.
I haven’t used them in a while, but I used to go to Calgary Computer Wholesale
“Computer wholesale”. Got it. 😊
+1 I’m curious too
If you’re in a major city theres likely a recycling centre just for old office machines. You can snag them dirt cheap, but with no Harddrive. Theyre a bit dated, but will work great as a server.
In a similar vein is to look for government auctions in town. I’ve got a major public university in my city, and it maintains a permanent auction warehouse. Like once a month they sell all kinds of stuff, from mini fridges to laptops by the pallet.
Lame. I was just thinking about possibly picking up a NUC to run a Jellyfin home media server and such. Seemed like a perfect use case. Oh well, guess we’ll see where intel goes with it…
Plenty of alternatives to a NUC still out there. I like the MSI Cubi personally.
AMD seems to be eating their lunch in small computers for consumers with their APUs in the Steamdeck and the more than a half dozen like handhelds, mini-pcs, etc. I’m sure intel will hang onto small embedded devices for industrial applications for some time but it’s puzzling that they would just drop RISCV which seems poised to proliferate in this sector as well. It could just be that intel seeing that manufacture in China is and will continue to be very tricky has to narrow focus while they move their manufacture closer to home.
