Dell Optiplex 5050. Cheaper, bundled, and free year warranty. Power draw is about 6w.
I have one as a k8s node and thinking about another.
Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC
91–100 of 526 posts
Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC
#92"If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will" Steve Jobs
Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC
#93That’s a shame. After building a few of my own computers/servers with used parts over the years, I switched to buying used NUCs for my last two projects (computer in my shed/workshop for basic CAD, and a quicksync plex transcoding box). I’ve found them more meaningfully powerful than a raspberry pi but much smaller than a large computer. I was hoping with ARM advancements that we’d see some super low power NUCs in th…
Same here, I'm really going to miss that. I've been using the discontinued lower-end NUCs from eBay as home servers and they're amazing for that purpose.
Does anyone know of a similar deal to be had from another brand? (Apart from optiplex - I see the recommendations already and they do look nice)
Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC
#94Gutted. I run an i3 bought in 2014 as a mini Tailscale router and Plex music server, along as other servies like PiHole. That thing has never been shut off and is still performing well at its third or fourth os upgrade!
Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC
#95Gutted. I run an i3 bought in 2014 as a mini Tailscale router and Plex music server, along as other servies like PiHole. That thing has never been shut off and is still performing well at its third or fourth os upgrade!
I just bought a Raptor Lake NUC. The box is physically sitting on my desk, unopened.
And it seemed like they finally hit a good price-to-performance balance with the Alder Lake + Raptor Lake P-chip NUCs.
Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC
#96In theory I liked these things. ...but in practice I never got one, because they were always so expensive. The same hardware can be found in a laptop for much less.
Same here, I wanted to have a mini desktop to transplant the hard drive of a dying laptop, so I was looking into them, and exactly because of that I gave up.
Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC
#97I call BS on them being not good market fit, Apple does totally fine with mac mini. also these are just laptops w/o screen and battery. IMO the real reason may be worries around minipcs finally getting good enough that they may cannibalize higher margin PC market. BTW there are other vendors like Beelink that make semi decent tiny computers and I have one of those as my teenage kids pc,works just fine.
> Apple does totally fine with mac mini. Is there data on how well they actually sell? I always vaguely assumed it was a pretty low-volume product that they couldn't actually get rid of due to niche customer applications. They've historically often been very slow to _update_ it; they definitely don't treat it as one of their more important products.
> Is there data on how well they actually sell? I always vaguely assumed it was a pretty low-volume product that they couldn't actually get rid of due to niche customer applications. They've historically often been very slow to _update_ it; they definitely don't treat it as one of their more important products.
The Mac mini has always been Apple's low-cost trojan horse product for existing PC users who already have a keyboard, mouse and display. The issues with keeping it updated in the past had more to do with the Intel processors available to Apple.
In the short Apple Silicon era, the Mac mini has been upgraded multiple times. It's remains an important product.
Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC
#98I call BS on them being not good market fit, Apple does totally fine with mac mini. also these are just laptops w/o screen and battery. IMO the real reason may be worries around minipcs finally getting good enough that they may cannibalize higher margin PC market. BTW there are other vendors like Beelink that make semi decent tiny computers and I have one of those as my teenage kids pc,works just fine.
They're overpriced for what you are buying. I'm not interested in paying $400 for a bare bones i5 with no ram or disk which adds another $150-200.
I bought a quad i5 nuc on sale off Newegg for $300. I also ordered parts to build a little AMD 6 core APU itx setup for 50 bucks more. If the Nuc wasn't on sale I would not have bothered to even look at it. And for 50 bucks more got waaaaay more compute power. The only reason I even bought the Nuc and not another itx was simply the very small size.
The hardkernel odroid h3 with a quad Celeron, dual 2.5 GbE and m.2 M key costs $130 without the case/PSU. Intel can do better on pricing.
Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have space, sure. But if I'm not mistaken, NUCs are 4"x4". For some folks (like me) that's unfortunately a bummer.
The stock framework case is 36 in³ vs. a NUC's 31.4 in³, so it is about 15% larger.
Right, but it's blade-shaped instead of cube-shaped (with ports on both sides IIRC), which in some cases means it's harder to find room for it.
Re: Intel exiting the PC business as it stops investment in the Intel NUC
#100I call BS on them being not good market fit, Apple does totally fine with mac mini. also these are just laptops w/o screen and battery. IMO the real reason may be worries around minipcs finally getting good enough that they may cannibalize higher margin PC market. BTW there are other vendors like Beelink that make semi decent tiny computers and I have one of those as my teenage kids pc,works just fine.
How is the beelink? I'm really tempted by the price and what you get. But I've never bought anything that wasn't a well known brand like Dell.
I bought one with an AMD 4800U in early 2022 to be used as a cheap, dedicated Linux device for work (mostly Remote Desktop plus some local docker development environments) and it’s been rock solid for me.
Your mileage may vary, but I’ve been happy enough with mine for the price that I had already decided I would be choosing Beelink for my next mini PC over a NUC.
That said, I have seen some mixed reports of some issues around thermal throttling and eGPU support for some of the newer gaming focused ones, but I think if you have realistic expectations given the form factor (and especially if you’re not going for gaming) then they are fairly reliable and sturdy little devices.
* Also note, I bought mine barebones and added my own ram and SSD. I can’t speak to the quality of what they ship with, but I also haven’t heard any complaints from others with that regard.