As you’ve probably guessed from the pictures so far, the Intel NUC is more or less a barebones system. You have to add your own mSATA storage drive, your own SODIMM RAM and your own OS. At this point we would like to say a huge thank you to ADATA for providing us with an mSATA SSD and some SODIMM RAM for testing.
For running our benchmarks we used ADATA’s XPG 256GB SSD which operates at SATA III speeds. This SSD certainly isn’t cheap, at $269.99, and for this particularly NUC model (which is a budget orientated Celeron system) you’d probably be better off running a cheaper 64GB mSATA SSD which you can pick up for around $80 and then using network or cloud storage. If you were to pick a higher end NUC then something like this would be a better investment.
ADATA also provided us with 16GB of SODIMM 1333MHz DDR3 RAM, this costs about $120, and again I’ll say the same thing as above. With this particular NUC you’d be better off opting for a cheaper 4GB SODIMM kit which you can pick up for around $35 however if you were getting one of the higher end Core i5/i7 NUC based systems then you’d definitely want to consider something similar to this to get the most out of your NUC.
Installing the SSD was as simple as plugging it in and then screwing it down.
Installing the SODIMM was also easy. Its literally a firm plug and play job and is no different to putting some SODIMMs into a laptop/notebook.
It’s not for me personally atm. It’ll be a long time before I warm to something like this. If it goes from strength to strength and drops in price it could be viable.
Yeh that is basically what it needs. About a 30% price reduction to make it more attractive. I’d take a normal desktop system or laptop anyday.
These are turning out to be quite popular in the corporate space. More then enough power to do most tasks and support depts. love these as it is easy to just swap out when one goes wrong, resulting in little user downtime.