Hoping they continue Intel's long tradition of good support for Linux/BSD.
This. Total white-box support is the model that other manufacturers have struggled to match.
ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
171–180 of 341 posts
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having to spend $200 per 8GB of RAM and $200 per 256GB of storage like it's still 2012 pretty much destroys any value proposition from Apple.
You can put a 4tb drive on a USB port.
*That's much slower and higher latency than the internal storage.
And where do you plug in the extra RAM?
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#173Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#174I feel like it’s really hard to justify one of these in light of m2 Mac minis. High usage memory applications?
My 8/256 NUC setup cost $230, the cheapest 8/256 Mini is $825 here. Easiest choice to justify ever.
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#175Anyone using a NUC as a mini home server? How is it? or if you use something else as mini server what? and why? 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.
I have ~ 10 NUCs in various roles, also some Gigabyte Brix. Some are servers, some are single-use developer machines (eg. I have separate ones for RHEL 7, 8 and 9), one is a desktop, one is a router.
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.
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#176I find the development quite interesting, and it lends credence to the theory Intel's NUC line was technically profitable (or at least not horrifically in the red), but just didn't make strategic sense - especially from a 'competing with your own customers' view. While I never bought one of these NUCs myself, I've used quite a few deployed as thin clients and kiosk machines. Let's see what ASUS ends up doing with the…
Furthermore, Intel had no real way to get them in front of new customers. Asus is absolutely happy to cut deals with Walmart and Best Buy and to play hardball.
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Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of things would work at 2x-4x the NUC price, even without the Apple lock-in.
Costco occasionally has sales on Mac Mini for $299.00 (M1 Mac Mini). 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.
Not a NUC, but there are loads of competitive mini PCs for $500 or even less. Amazon has the Beelink SER 6 Pro for $500 after coupon with 32GB RAM, 500 GB SSD, 2.5Gbe and an 8 core Ryzen 7 7735HS with Radeon 680M.
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use a Skull Canyon as my daily driver for programming and honestly I wouldn't have selected another machine.
I waisted for the successor to skull canyon so long I just bought a Lenovo lol.
They brought out the Serpent/Raptor Canyon recently and they're awesome bits of kit.
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#179I personally used an old NUC6i5 with 16GB Ram and 1TB SSD as my private "HomeServer" / "Media-PC" / "RemoteMachine" for a long time, mainly bought because it was (and still is) 5.9W idle power consumption while reasonable performance (way more than a raspberry PI at the time). I also spent the money on an Akasa Passive case[1], which made the device very expensive in total, but it was worth it at the time. It's still…
I'd recommend looking at Kontron and OnLogic, products. They very much are targeted to industrial applications, but they effectively make exactly what you're describing. Low power machines with lots of I/O and expansion capability in a small form factor. We use a couple of their full system solutions for our lab infrastructure, but they also sell boards if that's what you're looking for:
https://www.kontron.com/en/products/systems/c136842
https://www.onlogic.com/eu-en/computers/industrial/
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you’re describing is not a product, it’s a kludge. Even if you can stomach the poor reliability of an octopus of wires, a product designed to be used like that is likely to fail EMI testing. I’ve certainly done this with SAS Harnesses coming out the side of my tower case, but you can’t expect a company to make a product with this use case in mind. There exists SFF NAS boxes with room for many drives for this pur…
The NAS boxes I can see either assume USB-C or don't seem to provide much clue to how to use an eSATA to connect between things. If they were easy to work with I think there would be a lot more 'use this box to house the disks and this cable to connect over to the computer' and sure, I'd use the single SATA at some saturated speed. I live in ZFS. These box makers often assume you want to run their Raid card, and have…
Pretty much any HBA has a passthrough mode. It’s what I’m using with my HP micro server gen8 to run Unraid.