Goodbye Intel NUC

Phishfry

Phishfry

Intel axed the NUC at v12
arstechnica.com

No more NUC: Intel’s weirdly named mini PCs seem to be going away

Intel has exited several side businesses as it tries to stop losing money.
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com

What are you thoughts? In 2012 I bought a Gen1 NUC IvyBridge Mobile board and put it in a Akasa case for the drive bay.
After that a hardened NUC5 from digital signage. Then at last NUC7. All running FreeBSD.

I liked no Wall Wart. Raw power cord. Good storage options like M.2 and NVMe for edge storage devices..

Crappy BIOS.

Seems like they mimicked / hijacked Aopen DE box popular for media players of the day.
It is a tough market. Android boxes are now very cheap.

I did like the Gaming NUC with glow skull. That was a cool design.

What do you think of NUC's. Does everybody have one?
 
I knew the NUC series would go down the drain when I read they are debating with ASUS to build them, but I had no idea it would be over THAT fast...

Those things are perfect as small office clients and for the typical "a bit of surfing and writing letters" PCs many people needed and whom I recommended a NUC.
We currently have ~35 NUCs (some 8th and 9th, but mostly 10th gen by now) running as client PCs, great value for the money, very low power consumption (I always hoped there would be PoE powered ones available some day) and completely uneventful and reliable when deployed (hardware-wise, not the windows crap...).
We only ever had (LOTS OF) failures with those cheap variants from AS(S)Rock, which had a PSU failure rate of ~300% in the first 3 years and 100% for the system itself (~8-10 systems) in the same time frame, but the original intel ones were and are rock solid workhorses...

So it seems we'll have to look for a new platform soon - just when we had everything replaced with NUCs and future upgrades would have been drop-in...
 
we have about 10 at $work. one of the earliest gens, i3 gen 4 so probably 10 years old. None broke, not even a power brick. Cleaning the fan or changing the battery sucks, also the battery has a non standard connector. i also have 3 same age or a bit newer that i bought second hand but i did not test them to hard.
 
ASRock and several other vendors are my goto for NUC-like boxes. Bonus: many of them sell boxes with AMD CPU's too.
 
NUC or NUC-like. Is "NUC" an Intel trademark or simply an acronym?
My experience has been an early gen works pretty good. Coming from a traditional desktop with big power supplies lots of space inside a "NUC" form factor is interesting. Limited expandibility but big heat sink, no fans, it's actually pretty cool for home use.
Home network, put a NAS somewhere, use a NUC to hold programs but not the data. Less noise, save the data if the "computer" goes down.

So if others are providing a "NUC-like form factor" I'm good.
 
I worked at a startup where we had literally thousands of these stripped of their cases and mounted in custom racks at a colo. It's one of my favourite jobs ever, so I'm definitely gonna miss these.
 
mer said:
NUC or NUC-like. Is "NUC" an Intel trademark or simply an acronym?
Click to expand...
NUC stands for "Next Unit of Computing" and is an Intel trademark.

I've had to deal with 2 or 3 "NUC-likes" and none of them had even remotely the build quality and reliability as the Intel NUCs. As said:
ASRock (which the boss ordered "because they are cheaper") were a catastrophe - the supplier sent us a whole box of PSUs after the third or fourth warranty claim with the words "if those don't get you through the warranty time, just call and we'll send out another box". They failed within months... but wasn't that bad because the boxes themselves *all* failed within ~3 years and as they (THANKFULLY) weren't available any more from the supplier, we just got partly refunds. Their UEFI was also particulary bad - it generated a new, additional boot entry at *every* reboot, until it had accumulated so much that POST would take several minutes.
The others were built by some white-box ODM company (yes, another find by $boss) and weren't as bad as ASRock, but they had slightly different mounting points than the NUCs, which was massively annoying, because the VESA mounts looked almost identical. Plus they weren't that much cheaper and rarely available.
Also the sometimes "exotic" variants of chipsets/controllers in those clones is annoying when it comes to drivers.

I've settled for the 10th gen i5 entry model for ~3 years now. Makes it really easy to deploy even with Windows (install/update once, generalize, clone disk...) and with 1-2 spares I can very quickly replace them if windows decides to crap itself.
We even have 3 or 4 of them running in dirty/dusty workshop environment. For the first one I 3D-printed a small bracket to mount a filter mat, but the others have been running for years (IIRC those are the oldest ones, so maybe even some gen 5 or 6 amongst them) without failures despite the constant influx of dust.
 
I found this interesting footnote on a link vermaden provided.

On July 18, 2023, Intel and ASUS announced that they had agreed on a term sheet for a non-exclusive license for ASUS to manufacture, sell, and support 10th to 13th Gen NUC systems. ASUS will be responsible for NUC sales distribution for 10th to 13th Gen NUC systems. For 13th Gen NUC and future generations, ASUS will select and create new ASUS NUC SKUs.
Click to expand...

nuc-overview | ASUS Global

Explore NUC solutions for limitless innovation: from business efficiency to immersive gaming. Build your ideal system with our diverse range of devices and kits.
www.asus.com www.asus.com
 
Phishfry said:
What did they do for power? 19VDC over barrel jack? Custom rack PDU?
Click to expand...
Yes and yes. We even tried to have a custom remote switch built for the PDU that would allow us to power cycle individual units. That turned into a disaster and we wound up using the rack PDU that would power cycle an entire shelf. Not optimal, but it did the job.
 
The NUC got released when there weren't a lot of Ultra Small Form Factor computers on the market.

Was okay for what it was but I'm not surprised they would discontinue it when you've got stuff like this now: Raspberry Pi 400

Personally, I'm waiting for the Raspberry Pi Mouse Edition 😁
 
i doubt it has anything to do with rpi400 or any arm based computer
non apple arm desktops are probably a fraction of a percent
any arm desktop that is not apple and has some visible market share probably runs chrome os
if you want a cheap and low power general purpose PC you are a lot better buying an older gen nuc like x86 than anything arm
 
there is some support for usb gadgets so if your run the box in "gadget mode" it can
people were building ip kvms out of rpi zeros

but it's really complicated and expensive to use it as just a keyboard
 
Raspberries (and similar) are toys or "gadgets" at best IMHO - definitely not comparable to a "real computer" platform like the NUCs.

I've used some orange pi zero for smaller networking appliances (e.g. monitoring UPSs via Network that only have serial/usb), but especially with Raspberries I don't have the best of memories when it comes to reliability, so I wouldn't trust them for anything critical, let alone as client PCs that just have to work without hiccups every few weeks (because at scale this means I'm constantly busy putting out dumpster fires...)

I just ordered another 5 10th gen i5 NUCs as they already went up ~25EUR over the weekend...
 
Depends. Raspi if you don't really need performance - the 2012 NUC was painfully slow. Other than that, there is a ton of SFF PCs nowadays that have great performance. Check out the Lenovo M75 Gen2 (Ryzen 6/8 core with up to 128 GB of RAM), Or the Minisforum / other Chinese brands, e.g. on Amazon. These often come with low power AMD Ryzen CPUs that still offer great performance. Important if you are in a high-cost country for electricity. If you want something professional, look for builds with the Supermicro Mini-ITX AMD EPYC server board, found here : https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/M11SDV-8C-LN4F

All in all, there are so many equivalent or better solutions today that I will not miss the NUCs.

BTW: I have a few of the Lenovo M75 Gen2 in use with FreeBSD (AMD Ryzen 7 Octacore, 64 GB RAM). With bhyve they act as mobile, self contained virtualization platforms for penetration tests in our data centres and server rooms (>80 locations). They do great with FreeBSD, I am running Kali Linux VMs as well as Windows (HCL AppScan) on there and all kinds of other VMs as needed. Important for me is that the larger of their two variants accepts up to two low profile PCIe cards, so we can add NICs as needed for the environment we are testing.
 
Protectli's beefiest option now is i7-10810U, up to 64GB RAM. I like that they are fanless. My only concern would be that 6 NICs is wasteful (aka more $$) when using it as a compute device. I have two smaller ones, one I use as a firewall, and another for testing.

I am interested in a small, quiet, fast compute box. Those Lenovos look cool.
 
I also like the small fanless mini pcs. I never had a Intel NUC but for my day to day work I use a fanless mini pc with a Intel 8296u cpu, 4 cores 8 threads,
32 GB Ram and Intel Iris plus graphics and a pci ssd. This little things is more than enough for my days work. And it runs FreeBSD without any
problems.
But best of all it is silent! No noisy fan(s) at all
 
I have a thinkcentre m80s on the way from Lenovo outlet (thanks recluce, I hadn’t heard of Thinkcentre before).

One thing I really like about Lenovo is they make it easy to find detailed tech specs of their products. They have the sales page which lists basic information, but if you search “<model> specs” there’s always a PDF that shows number of RAM slots and max RAM, NIC model, chipset, etc. I have a hard time finding that info with other vendors.
 
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