Reviews - Intel NUC D54250WYK (22nm Haswell)

[walibe]

I entirely disagree. Small on board GPU for travelling (laptops as well as these little boxes) and an enclosure for home, or if you really have to lug it for a one off presentation/LAN session etc. The tech is there, but word on the street is Intel "discourage" people from making products that do it. That's not to say don't improve onboard GPU, but as with discreet cards, the power penalty comes with increasing the capability, and for battery life on the go that is not a good thing to have always running. There comes a point at which it is best to have a moderately capable onboard for 90% of the time, and flex to hook up for more grunt the other 100% of the time. It's like optimus but moving the better GPU offboard. Benefit = upgradability, no hampering of "mobile" GPU limitations, and in theory better portability + power life of the device when used without the external enclosure.

Whilst I know what you are saying the market says otherwise. People do not want multiple boxes. They want one simple box, and when its not fast enough they don't upgrade, they throw it away and buy new. The rise of the laptop and tablet is a good demonstration of this (and perhaps even the console market). Also in these markets which are likely to converge in the next few years there is a huge push towards pushing the GPU (in particular) and CPU powers up.

I do not know where intel have discouraged products such as you have described as they have demonstrated and talked about such uses with both Thunderbolt 1 and 2. The facts are that the technology is still expensive and no one has really shown any real desire to use these expansions for anything other than drive expansions and displays. If anything could change this it will be the mac pro but Thunderbolt hasn't really gone that much further than Macs and USB will not provide the require bandwidth or direct connectivity to the buses.

What you are wanting is unlikely to ever happen, the closest you get is the integrated to CPU and on board graphics many laptops use now for battery saving on the go. I wanted the exact same as you do four or five years ago where people were trying this with the new PCI express slots, however my expectations changed quite drastically over those years.

[walibe]

I'm surprised there's no Thunderbolt connection. It would greatly benefit the system by giving much more expansion possible to it. Yes I know Thunderbolt prices are silly at the moment, but, if Intel want their Thunderbolt to take off, it need pushing. Otherwise it's currently going the way of Firewire.

For example I've often wondered how would the NUC be if I could just plug in a GPU box via Thunderbolt. As it stand, for a typical home user - it'll just be an "Internet box", or a media server/player. Although it might well be a possible streaming Steambox although I think a much cheaper system would just as well since it only need to show the video output.

Spot on, this is what ik9000 is getting at and has been tried on a few MacBooks with such ports. The odd thing was that this intel technology that is thunderbolt was being pushed heavily by intel just a year or two ago. I don't think its adding anything that USB 3.0 isn't right now which is a fraction of the cost. The external GPUs just haven't become realistic and people are only using Thunderbolt for external drives for the most part.

[kingpotnoodle]

This is where we need small graphics cards that we can put in, would make this an awesome mini gaming machine

or if people sorted out whatever politics is stopping them from releasing thunderbolt enabled external GPU enclosures (it has been shown to be possible) it would be problem solved. Mini PC with optional gaming enclosure. Suddenly travelling to a LAN would be sooo much easier.

IIRC Thunderbolt is still too low on bandwidth for high end cards, if you're only going mid range then its not so amazing an idea.

It sounds like supply chain etc would be simpler if the industry consolidated the mass PC industry onto a smaller form factors that use laptop parts minus a screen, if laptops can cram GPUs on small cards then so can SFF PCs.

I reckon it's quite likely big box PCs and large laptops will decline sharply in favour of SFF, dockable tablets/2in1s (that function badly needs a standard connector mechanism so it can be built into monitors) and all-in-ones like iMac. Larger more customised boxes like a lot of us will have are going to get increasingly niche.

[mikerr]

The Intel NUC i3 version is now available in various places for very reasonable £139 (no ram or hdd)

http://www.ebuyer.com/409027-mb-boxd...ox-boxdc3217by

and it does have full size HDMI and thunderbolt port too (hm.. no ethernet though)

[b0redom]

Umm I don't think that's the Haswell version. Looks like this is the Haswell version:

http://www.dabs.com/products/intel-w...hdmi-9067.html

More expensive and does have GigE.

[Splash]

Correct, that's the previous gen (there was also the DC-3217YE which skimped the TB connector in favour of a Gb NIC - I have 3 of them in my homelab running ESXi)

[hesham1516]

It probably wouldn't have made a huge difference in the benchmarks, but why are there differences in the memory, storage and operating systems for the barebones systems?

[Thorburn]

It probably wouldn't have made a huge difference in the benchmarks, but why are there differences in the memory, storage and operating systems for the barebones systems?

Presumably because the results are from previous reviews and not re-tested for the later review.

[b0redom]

Right, so I have one of these now, and am currently in the process of migrating from a MacMini. Some observations:

1) No drivers ship with the product which is a bit of a PITA when you don't have wired Internet to hand
2) The fan is pretty whiney - certainly much more noticeable than my MacMini which is silent
3) Mini HDMI. Really? Another cable to buy!

Performance wise, it's pretty good. I've installed Plex and it happily streams and transcodes uncompressed 1080p content to unmodified AppleTVs (using PlexConnect).

It also seems OK at playing basic games, but the 3d performance is obviously nothing to write home about.

The only major problem preventing it replacing the MacMini immediately though is the fan which makes it a bit living room unfriendly.

[Thorburn]

Got one of these and did some playing around with it today - had a go at bumping up the TDP to try and get a bit more GPU performance from it.



20% improvement, but not sure its worth it for the noise increase personally.

[philipmathews]

Wonder if people use this for esxi or is it just to underpowered