Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was all the rage back in 1999. ISPs we’re giving away “free” eMachines with the purchase of a 3 year MSN dialup subscription.
Also Juno and Netzero giving internet access for watching ads.
ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
231–240 of 341 posts
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#232I 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…
Old (but not too old) Fujitsu mainboards are a great hack to build a computer with low power draw, especially in idle mode. They support relatively recent Intel sockets and 4 SATA ports out of the box, so really ideal for small-ish and very affordable file- and media servers. I‘ve seen in a German forum [1] specialized in this kind of thing that people reproducibly get 5-8W idle with such boards. At least in the EU,…
I have an ASUS PN40 that idles at 1.8W (_at the wall_). This is with one SSD and LPDDR3 memory.
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#233I 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…
It's just a dream, but with TB4 or another high bandwidth PCIe interconnect, I'd be interested in seeing dockable cases not unlike the e-ports of yesteryear.
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.
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Just checked on ebay, a 12500H NUC with 16GB ram and 1TB SSD is $518. You have to be in a completely distorted reality field to choose Apple in these circumstances.
>ave to be in a completely distorted reality field to choose Apple in these circumstances
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.
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#235Anyone 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 the latest Gen 13 I5. It was an impulse buy as was on offer at a good price.
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...
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would remove the word "inexpensive". Many alternatives cost less. I know people buy Intel for brand, quality and warranty but definitely not price.
I bought it for Price 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
For just running a screen not only is Windows a massive waste in terms of resources and costs, but so is a NUC. A Raspberry Pi (equivalent) is more than sufficient.
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#237I think the influx of very low cost Chinese mini PCs makes the NUC, Asus PN and Asrock devices a bit less attractive. Also thelow power AMD APU has been very good for the form factor. Maybe the margins are too tight for Intel. Another take maybe that the NUC came in when low power Arm desktops looked viable and Intel needed a low power small form factor to defend against that. The Minisforum, Beelink and the generic…
> The Minisforum, Beelink and the generic aliexpress units are incredibly cheap. Certainly are, hard to resist for personal use, but then I read that one will likely never receive a BIOS update. Also, those moments when you wonder whether something in your home is listening, resulting in ads for something you've just talked about... well that is usually some super cheap product listening for keywords and selling the…
So they're not worse than ASUS then.
I've had several motherboards from them, and they stopped receiving BIOS updates a year or two after release. Never got anything since meltdown & spectre have become known, for example (I think BIOS updates are needed for microcode updates on Windows, so this would be a serious problem for most users).
I've also used two ASUS smartphones, and… never again. The last one received one major update (from Android 5 to 6), and stopped receiving security updates a year after the phone was announced. Fuck that company.
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
This thread is talking about HTPC, and I'm wondering what the use case is where you need lots of RAM and the speed/latency of an internal NVMe drive.
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.
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key is to use an external SSD via USB. Much better bang for your buck than Apple’s storage pricing.
Or, just as a wild thought, stay away from overpriced hardware.
What’s overpriced about the base model Mac mini? I agree that Apple way overcharges for upgrades, but the base model looks reasonably priced to me.
Re: ASUS to manufacture and sell Intel’s NUC products
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such hacks just to get trapped in apples ecosystem? How can that be appealing?
How are you trapped in the ecosystem? 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…
You can actually install Mac os in a VM on Linux or Windows. It's not a technical issue, it's that Apple tries to make it hard to do so.