There's quite a few discounts floating around for the 11th gen at the moment, so probably a better bet for many users.
As ever Intel send the i7 - i've been looking at the i3-1220p version - effectively the i5-1235u - 2x P plus 8x E cores should be better thermals, still great peak performance and should live nicely in an Akasa Turing case fanless. Only frustration is there onlyseems to be about £40 between the i3 and i5.
I think if you're using these as a desktop the Dell/HP/Lenovo micro desktops are a better bet - bigger for better cooling so should be quieter.
I've been using a Beelink SEI12 for a couple of weeks, the 1235U version, and it's pretty impressive, all things considered. I did notice that out of the box it will tend to be power limited to keep the fan noise reasonable: Prime95 settles in very quickly to a speed of around 2500MHz for the P cores and 100MHz slower for the E cores. But if you're doing anything that isn't that computationally intensive, it feels plenty snappy, especially compared to, say, a 5yo Dell Latitude (even when that was new). Surprisingly, it'll even play Minecraft (unmodded) pretty well.
Nice. I've got an i7-1260p thinkpad from work and it's a furnace that thermally throttles constantly. I don't need 4 fat cores for a box that will be running pretty gentle server services (basic file-sharing, MySQL for Kodi, Roon, Home Assistant etc) two can handle the peaks with the E cores humming away in the background. I may just go for an 8 E core i3-300N box if they appear soon.
It might be worth it to go to 1215U or 1235U instead depending on the use case. Alder Lake-N drops a memory channel, supports only 16 GB memory, and drops many of the PCIe lanes. If the specs on ARK are accurate. Even the weird Intel Processor U300 might be better.
Given the recent introduction of the M2 Mac Mini, it would be very interesting to see how Intel's small form factor integrated system compares to Apple's. We haven't seen much head-to-head between Intel and Apple Silicon in a while, and a lot has changed (more for Intel than Apple). I imagine performance and power consumption would be closer these days.
What do you need to compare? The NUC runs a real OS and can actually be used for serious work, while the apple offering can only scroll Facebook and Instagram but at 120Hz
While "a real OS" and "serious work" makes your comment harder to take seriously you have a point in that the Nuc can run any OS (except perhaps macOS) whereas the Macmini is closely associated with MacOS (I hope Asahi gets to where it wants to go and enables Linux on Apple's arm implementation). I have little doubt the Macmini is the more power efficient machine, especially the M2. (Am currently writing this on a NUC12WSHi5. It works pretty well but don't force it to do 120Hz and play youtube videos. I kind of wish more reviewers would mention the NUC fan. Even at "quiet" it behaves like the small fan that it is, sudden jumps to 100% fan noise as the CPU or GPU load suddenly increases)
I agree with you 100% - both on comment about Apple and NUC. The problem with those NUC fans is IMHO their coolers arent big enough (not enough mass - same problem with most laptops) so the fan starts every time even for relatively small temperature increase. And the fan curve isnt to my liking aswell - i would prefer if fan would spin constantly with lower RPMs than to start/stop all the time.
Because it'll be interesting. That's why. Mabye not for the wintel-fanboys like You, which need couple of years to grow up. MacOS i very powerful OS, and Apple hardware is the best in its class. I agree, maybye not for kids like you, so don't bother. Nobody cares what is your opinion.
It's great to see the puck nuc come back, I was worried they discontinue it. Shame they gimped it with DDR4 SODIMMS when DDR5 is widely available, especially at this price.
Guess I'll wait for 14th gen when they actually jump on new memory types.
Yeah, why would intel choose DDR4 on a platform like this? It makes zero sense. They had the option of DDR5SODIMM, DDR5CAMM, or LPDDR5, and they decide to go with DDR4SODIMM
I just checked, 64GB of SO-DIMMs is still twice the price at DDR5 than DDR4. And the performance difference might be very minor for CPU workloads, especially in this form factor.
Now I would like to have seen if it makes a difference for the iGPU, but then the Xe isn't meant for gaming either way.
LP variants require soldered RAM and that's one of the major advantages of this form factor: upgradable RAM. I run my NUCs as VM servers and 64GB is just a good fit for that. Try getting anything with 64GB of LPDDRx RAM!
The performance lag on the passive cooled version is a great example of how bad Intel's thermals have gotten. I used to put NUCs into passive cases half the size of the one used here, and they lost zero performance. It's really sad how far they've fallen.
The problem with NUCs is that, after buying a screen, keyboard, and mouse, to get to a working system, you could have just purchased a laptop. NUCs don't offer mobility and aren't compelling from a performance perspective since they're using laptop-like TDP limits so you end up buying a desktop PC with laptop performance that you cannot use as flexibly as a laptop despite spending roughly the same amount. NUCs have niche uses, but the reason why they aren't popular is because that niche is rather narrow.
I have been using them for years as HTPC's in various locations in my house. In general they have been fine up until recently when I began streaming high bit-rate 4K video and they really don't like it. Granted they are all i3's of several generations old now, but other than that they do fine. I have a home media server that delivers video to these units, but rather than upgrade for 4K use I am currently trying plex via a fire stick and/or smart TV. The video stream is better but the interface is so slow. Not sure where I will end up, but having a NUC velcroed to the back of a TV has been very nice up till now.
Does Quick Sync work for you? Maybe a newer NUC with hardware accelerated transcoding would be what you're looking for? The new ones have 2 multi-format codec engines and quick sync
In the PC market, even "small" niches seem to be big enough to merit a product, otherwise Intel wouldn't keep on doing them.
My main NUC use case is µ-servers in a 10Gbit cluster using cheap cascaded KVMs in the rare case I need the console. Near silent and low average power 24x7 operation is the goal, with enough peak power to get things done in a hurry.
Yes, you could build that from laptops, but unfortunately the ones that offer 64GB RAM and 2-8TB of NVMe as well as a TB port for 10GBit Ethernet are designed for gamers and carry quite a hefty premium and extras I don't need.
In corporate workplaces laptops have pretty much replaced small form factor PCs, even more so with the pandemic. But there are still quite a lot of profesisonal installations in public services, medical care and production, where NUCs mounted to a firmly attached display are quite the ticket.
Personally, I'd prefer to have Mini-ITX board variants for every NUC Intel builds, but that really seems too niche these days.
A NUC can be a tremedously useful device to power up a basic digital audio workstation (DAW), alongside external audio and midi devices. It has enough processing power to run even the most modern DAW (e.g. studio one) alongside a bunch of virtual instruments and effects. Once everything is installed and up and running, it may be useful to deactivate Wifi, Bluetooth and LAN and to purge the autostart menu from all but the most essential scripts and programs, in order to reduce DPC latency. It is so compact that it a dream come true for musicians wanting to save precious space in the homerecording studios or who are on the run and on tour and need to travel as light as possible. So, if you know how to set this device up, it is an invaluable tool for musicians. It's benefit over laptops: it has more I/O. I struggled to connect all my external devices with an otherwise great laptop, but the NUC can handle them all (4x USB-A + 2x USB-C)
The GPU-Z data is obviously bollocks: I was first thrown off by the low memory bandwidth of 25GB/s, which is really what DDR3 based GT3 solutions or single channel DDR4 might do (64-bit width may be another hint, because it's 128-bit on dual channel).
I am seeing more like 40GB/s on my various Xe's, 38.4GB/s on an i7-1165G7 and 42GB/s on an i5-12500H with an 80EU Xe, both using DDR4-3200 SO-DIMMs.
But it's the pixel and texture fill rates and the GPU boost clocks where things must have been read wrong, nothing clocks 11GHz on CMOS just yet and the fill rates are matching the RTX2060 on my NUC11PHBi7 using GDDR6, 10GPixels and 21 GTexels are more realistic with 1.3GHz boost.
It's too bad how Intel often just manages to get withini >90% of what I want, only to bungle it on the final stretch...
The "blue day meta" variants (what on Earth did they smoke?) are rather intriguing because they seem to allow screwing say a Noctua fan on top (is there a matching fan connector on the board?): that could fix the major isse with the NUCs, too little volume/mass for cooling 20-30 Watts at acceptable noise levels.
What's critically missing for me, is the Thunderbolt ports, which I need for 10GBit networking, be it via Ethernet or TCP over TB. I believe those parts may still be in short supply, but I'd always pay €20-30 extra to have those ports.
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dontlistentome - Thursday, January 26, 2023 - link
There's quite a few discounts floating around for the 11th gen at the moment, so probably a better bet for many users.As ever Intel send the i7 - i've been looking at the i3-1220p version - effectively the i5-1235u - 2x P plus 8x E cores should be better thermals, still great peak performance and should live nicely in an Akasa Turing case fanless. Only frustration is there onlyseems to be about £40 between the i3 and i5.
I think if you're using these as a desktop the Dell/HP/Lenovo micro desktops are a better bet - bigger for better cooling so should be quieter.
1_rick - Thursday, January 26, 2023 - link
I've been using a Beelink SEI12 for a couple of weeks, the 1235U version, and it's pretty impressive, all things considered. I did notice that out of the box it will tend to be power limited to keep the fan noise reasonable: Prime95 settles in very quickly to a speed of around 2500MHz for the P cores and 100MHz slower for the E cores. But if you're doing anything that isn't that computationally intensive, it feels plenty snappy, especially compared to, say, a 5yo Dell Latitude (even when that was new). Surprisingly, it'll even play Minecraft (unmodded) pretty well.dontlistentome - Friday, January 27, 2023 - link
Nice. I've got an i7-1260p thinkpad from work and it's a furnace that thermally throttles constantly. I don't need 4 fat cores for a box that will be running pretty gentle server services (basic file-sharing, MySQL for Kodi, Roon, Home Assistant etc) two can handle the peaks with the E cores humming away in the background. I may just go for an 8 E core i3-300N box if they appear soon.nandnandnand - Friday, January 27, 2023 - link
It might be worth it to go to 1215U or 1235U instead depending on the use case. Alder Lake-N drops a memory channel, supports only 16 GB memory, and drops many of the PCIe lanes. If the specs on ARK are accurate. Even the weird Intel Processor U300 might be better.diamondsw - Thursday, January 26, 2023 - link
Given the recent introduction of the M2 Mac Mini, it would be very interesting to see how Intel's small form factor integrated system compares to Apple's. We haven't seen much head-to-head between Intel and Apple Silicon in a while, and a lot has changed (more for Intel than Apple). I imagine performance and power consumption would be closer these days.timecop1818 - Thursday, January 26, 2023 - link
What do you need to compare? The NUC runs a real OS and can actually be used for serious work, while the apple offering can only scroll Facebook and Instagram but at 120HzGrabo - Thursday, January 26, 2023 - link
While "a real OS" and "serious work" makes your comment harder to take seriously you have a point in that the Nuc can run any OS (except perhaps macOS) whereas the Macmini is closely associated with MacOS (I hope Asahi gets to where it wants to go and enables Linux on Apple's arm implementation). I have little doubt the Macmini is the more power efficient machine, especially the M2. (Am currently writing this on a NUC12WSHi5. It works pretty well but don't force it to do 120Hz and play youtube videos. I kind of wish more reviewers would mention the NUC fan. Even at "quiet" it behaves like the small fan that it is, sudden jumps to 100% fan noise as the CPU or GPU load suddenly increases)Kuhar - Friday, January 27, 2023 - link
I agree with you 100% - both on comment about Apple and NUC. The problem with those NUC fans is IMHO their coolers arent big enough (not enough mass - same problem with most laptops) so the fan starts every time even for relatively small temperature increase. And the fan curve isnt to my liking aswell - i would prefer if fan would spin constantly with lower RPMs than to start/stop all the time.max - Friday, February 3, 2023 - link
Because it'll be interesting. That's why. Mabye not for the wintel-fanboys like You, which need couple of years to grow up. MacOS i very powerful OS, and Apple hardware is the best in its class. I agree, maybye not for kids like you, so don't bother. Nobody cares what is your opinion.erotomania - Thursday, January 26, 2023 - link
Thanks Ganesh!$167 for a 100 MHz clock bump (1260P -> 1270P). Anything else included with that? I looked and could not find.
timecop1818 - Thursday, January 26, 2023 - link
vPro is usually a price premium, as it allows fully remote management in corp environment.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, January 26, 2023 - link
It's great to see the puck nuc come back, I was worried they discontinue it. Shame they gimped it with DDR4 SODIMMS when DDR5 is widely available, especially at this price.Guess I'll wait for 14th gen when they actually jump on new memory types.
meacupla - Thursday, January 26, 2023 - link
Yeah, why would intel choose DDR4 on a platform like this? It makes zero sense.They had the option of DDR5SODIMM, DDR5CAMM, or LPDDR5, and they decide to go with DDR4SODIMM
abufrejoval - Sunday, January 29, 2023 - link
I just checked, 64GB of SO-DIMMs is still twice the price at DDR5 than DDR4. And the performance difference might be very minor for CPU workloads, especially in this form factor.Now I would like to have seen if it makes a difference for the iGPU, but then the Xe isn't meant for gaming either way.
LP variants require soldered RAM and that's one of the major advantages of this form factor: upgradable RAM. I run my NUCs as VM servers and 64GB is just a good fit for that. Try getting anything with 64GB of LPDDRx RAM!
And then again at a reasonable price.
James5mith - Friday, January 27, 2023 - link
I have an i7-1165G7 based NUC used for my pfsense firewall. It's overkill, but it has the 2x 2.5GbE NICs I wanted for my firewall upgrade.Idles extremely low power, and never really gets stressed. For 10-15w I have a 2.5GbE capable firewall that is never stressed even when using IDS/IPS.
I wish they would release an i3 with 2x 2.5GbE at some point. It would be much more suited to the role.
Einy0 - Friday, January 27, 2023 - link
The performance lag on the passive cooled version is a great example of how bad Intel's thermals have gotten. I used to put NUCs into passive cases half the size of the one used here, and they lost zero performance. It's really sad how far they've fallen.Affectionate-Bed-980 - Friday, January 27, 2023 - link
Are your specs for HDMI correct? I see HDMI 2.0 listed on some sites like Newegg but Intel's spec page says HDMI 2.1https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/s...
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/s...
PeachNCream - Friday, January 27, 2023 - link
The problem with NUCs is that, after buying a screen, keyboard, and mouse, to get to a working system, you could have just purchased a laptop. NUCs don't offer mobility and aren't compelling from a performance perspective since they're using laptop-like TDP limits so you end up buying a desktop PC with laptop performance that you cannot use as flexibly as a laptop despite spending roughly the same amount. NUCs have niche uses, but the reason why they aren't popular is because that niche is rather narrow.white-hot - Friday, January 27, 2023 - link
I have been using them for years as HTPC's in various locations in my house. In general they have been fine up until recently when I began streaming high bit-rate 4K video and they really don't like it. Granted they are all i3's of several generations old now, but other than that they do fine. I have a home media server that delivers video to these units, but rather than upgrade for 4K use I am currently trying plex via a fire stick and/or smart TV. The video stream is better but the interface is so slow. Not sure where I will end up, but having a NUC velcroed to the back of a TV has been very nice up till now.Hakaslak - Saturday, January 28, 2023 - link
Does Quick Sync work for you? Maybe a newer NUC with hardware accelerated transcoding would be what you're looking for? The new ones have 2 multi-format codec engines and quick synchttps://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/s...
abufrejoval - Sunday, January 29, 2023 - link
In the PC market, even "small" niches seem to be big enough to merit a product, otherwise Intel wouldn't keep on doing them.My main NUC use case is µ-servers in a 10Gbit cluster using cheap cascaded KVMs in the rare case I need the console. Near silent and low average power 24x7 operation is the goal, with enough peak power to get things done in a hurry.
Yes, you could build that from laptops, but unfortunately the ones that offer 64GB RAM and 2-8TB of NVMe as well as a TB port for 10GBit Ethernet are designed for gamers and carry quite a hefty premium and extras I don't need.
In corporate workplaces laptops have pretty much replaced small form factor PCs, even more so with the pandemic. But there are still quite a lot of profesisonal installations in public services, medical care and production, where NUCs mounted to a firmly attached display are quite the ticket.
Personally, I'd prefer to have Mini-ITX board variants for every NUC Intel builds, but that really seems too niche these days.
ottonis - Friday, March 17, 2023 - link
A NUC can be a tremedously useful device to power up a basic digital audio workstation (DAW), alongside external audio and midi devices. It has enough processing power to run even the most modern DAW (e.g. studio one) alongside a bunch of virtual instruments and effects. Once everything is installed and up and running, it may be useful to deactivate Wifi, Bluetooth and LAN and to purge the autostart menu from all but the most essential scripts and programs, in order to reduce DPC latency.It is so compact that it a dream come true for musicians wanting to save precious space in the homerecording studios or who are on the run and on tour and need to travel as light as possible.
So, if you know how to set this device up, it is an invaluable tool for musicians.
It's benefit over laptops: it has more I/O. I struggled to connect all my external devices with an otherwise great laptop, but the NUC can handle them all (4x USB-A + 2x USB-C)
CyrIng - Saturday, January 28, 2023 - link
The blue carton box has a better look than the NUC case.About Hybrid processors, CoreFreq is now monitoring Pcore and Ecore, including their own Turbo tunable tweaks
ISO available at www.cyring.fr
abufrejoval - Sunday, January 29, 2023 - link
The GPU-Z data is obviously bollocks: I was first thrown off by the low memory bandwidth of 25GB/s, which is really what DDR3 based GT3 solutions or single channel DDR4 might do (64-bit width may be another hint, because it's 128-bit on dual channel).I am seeing more like 40GB/s on my various Xe's, 38.4GB/s on an i7-1165G7 and 42GB/s on an i5-12500H with an 80EU Xe, both using DDR4-3200 SO-DIMMs.
But it's the pixel and texture fill rates and the GPU boost clocks where things must have been read wrong, nothing clocks 11GHz on CMOS just yet and the fill rates are matching the RTX2060 on my NUC11PHBi7 using GDDR6, 10GPixels and 21 GTexels are more realistic with 1.3GHz boost.
So please recheck the setup and data.
abufrejoval - Sunday, January 29, 2023 - link
It's too bad how Intel often just manages to get withini >90% of what I want, only to bungle it on the final stretch...The "blue day meta" variants (what on Earth did they smoke?) are rather intriguing because they seem to allow screwing say a Noctua fan on top (is there a matching fan connector on the board?): that could fix the major isse with the NUCs, too little volume/mass for cooling 20-30 Watts at acceptable noise levels.
What's critically missing for me, is the Thunderbolt ports, which I need for 10GBit networking, be it via Ethernet or TCP over TB. I believe those parts may still be in short supply, but I'd always pay €20-30 extra to have those ports.