Experience with Intel NUC's?

[Drezha]

I’m looking at getting a new rig for purely Linux use – it would replace my Pi-Hole and would be a day to day desktop. I was considering an Intel NUC – this i3 powered one though I have recently seen this Ryzen box advertised on eBuyer which might be better as it comes with Ubuntu installed anyhow.

Any thoughts on the NUC or the NUC and Linux? Quick googling suggests that it could be OK.

I’m tempted by the NUC as it’s smaller and draws less power than the Ryzen. However, I used to have a Gigabyte Brix and tried using that as a day to day box and was disappointed with it’s performance. I’m hoping an i3 would be more up to the task!

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[PlaneMan]

The i3 that you link to is some 25% more powerful than the Core m3 in my Chromebook, I’ve had no issues playing any Android game on my Chromebook so as long as you’re not trying anything unrealistic with it it should be fine.

That’s exactly the kind of thing that I’ll be looking at in a while to replace my little Dell media box.

[Drezha]

It would be mainly browsing and office based tasks. Maybe some encoding overnight (I currently have the Pi download me some Youtube videos with youtube-dl overnight and then encode them to MP3 to listen to) but as the Pi does that, I don’t see why this shouldn’t be able to do the same.

I found the Celeron based machines just a bit to slow for day to day browsing. I think I had issues as well streaming music to the device from my NAS. well, not even streaming, it was being played over an NFS share. There isn’t much in terms of price separating that and the Ryzen, so I guess the smaller machine could well do the job.

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[blacklion1725]

I’ve had an older Celeron NUC and still have a 3rd Gen i5 unit which is a (seldom used now) media PC. Both have run Linux Mint at various stages of theor life with no issues. I think you will be fine. I can’t remember if the I/R receiver works in Linux but doesn’t sound like you need it.

[Ed P]

I have had three NUC format devices (One an original Atom NUC), one a Brix (used by my wife) and one an Intel i5 NUC. Both the Intel NUCs have a very good graphics chip but obviously the Atom powered one is showing its four years and was struggling running four security full HDTV cameras The i5 eats the CPU intensive job and is probably overkill and an i3 would probably have done the duty with headroom to spare.

My wife uses an i3 Brix, and When I get on it to do the regular  maintenance work I’m very pleased with its responsiveness. Not that my wife does not hammer it as she will often have six or seven Firefox windows open within a Linux VM. (I ask her to run within a vm as then I have less worries/work about her hitting any web nasties/PUPs).

The only aspect that is less pleasing is that Intel’s support for the oldest NUC is a bit flakey and normally causes me to do a lot of Google foo. That machine has now been repurposed as a games box for the grandchildren running some of the vintage Gog Lego games etc. It runs these early noughties games with no problems.

I cannot remember which Brix my wife uses (and cannot kick her off right now!), but Dave uses them very regularly and is much more up to date than I..

[Dave Rice]

Not bought a new Brix for ages, but yes the Celerons were a bit underpowered but an SSD went a long way to negate that. I’ve used laptops with the same i3 CPU / chipsets and they’ve been fine, as have the AMD quad core equivalents.

Funnily enough I was only looking at them on the weekend, thinking they may be a solution for Les. The £150 Intel Nuc June Canyon NUC7PJYH Pentium J5005 caught my eye. It may say Pentium but Intel have been bumping names around again, however it does have the performance of the once legendary Q6600!

Is the I3 worth £120 more? I doubt it. If I was spending north of £250 I’d go straight for the £299 Asus VivoMini UN65U Intel i5-7200U and an M2.

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