Next Unit of Computing

I like to mess with computers. This hobby could get pretty expensive. So I often scour places like craigslist, offerup, eBay and the facebook marketplace for deals. I recently picked up 2 Intel NUCs. I was looking for something small to use as a home server. I have used Raspberry Pis for this but I kind of wanted something a bit more powerful. The Intel NUC is a small form factor x86 PC. You get full sized PC power in the palm of your hand. NUC stands for Next Unit of Computing.

The NUC is basically a laptop without the keyboard and display. It is available with ATOM, Celeron, Pentium and all three variants of core ultra-low power (U) processors. Unlike CPUs intended for a more traditional ATX-based build, NUC processors are hard-soldered to the mainboard, and are't intended to be installed, uninstalled, or swapped out by the end-user. The NUC is sold as a full operational system with different specs, or as a kit. The kit does not come with ram, storage or an operating system.

I picked an Intel NUC Skull Canyon (NUC6i7KYK) which is supposed to be the performance edition, geared towards gaming and a base Intel NUC (NUC7i5BNK). The Skull Canyon came with a 6th generation i7, 480gb ssd and 16gb of ram. The base NUC came with a 7th generation Intel i5, 512gb ssd and 8gb of ram. Both of the NUCs I purchased were complete and operational, but I decided to upgrade and max out the ram at 32gb.

Both NUCs came pre-installed with Windows. I opted to install Arch Linux on them instead. Once I installed the OS everything ran smooth on the base NUC, the Skull Canyon on the other hand had display issues. After some troubleshooting and some help from forums and twitter I figured out there was an issue with the HDMI firmware on Linux. The fix was only available on Windows, but there was a workaround, a displayport to HDMI adapter. This seemed to fix the issue.

Overall I'm pretty happy with both NUCs. I'll probably end up getting rid of the Skull Canyon as I prefer the base NUC form factor but both would make great tv computers or media players. Now the search begins for a real production grade server.