If you're looking for the smallest of teeny-tiny PCs for your home
theater or small business, Intel's latest Next Unit of Computing shines.
But it remains a niche product with some limitations. Look...
Price : $360
Component
manufacturers typically don’t build retail products—they don’t want to
compete with their customers. But when it comes to constructing
itty-bitty desktop PCs, Intel apparently still sees the need to show the
way forward.
The next Next Unit of Computing, the NUC Kit D54250WYK, represents a major leap forward from Intel’s first effort. Whereas the first-gen kit featured a third-generation Core i3 processor and formed the foundation for a stupendous home theater PC,
with this new kit Intel stuffed a beefier fourth-gen Core i5 chip into
an even smaller enclosure. Add the right components, and you have a
capable contender for both play and work.
Peering inside the box
If
you’re wondering why Intel markets the NUC as a kit, that’s because it
isn’t a complete computer. You need to supply a number of additional
components—and an operating system—before you can fire this machine up
and start using it. We reviewed it with Windows 8, but this thing is
just begging to have a copy of XBMC installed on it.
Such
a product is what’s commonly referred to as a “bare-bones” system. In
this case, your $360 buys a 4-by-4-inch motherboard with a Core i5-4250U
processor (soldered to the board and therefore not upgradable), an
enclosure (with an integrated Wi-Fi antenna), a heat sink and fan, and
an external power brick (an item Intel didn’t ship with the first NUC
because the company didn’t want to stock a bunch of versions based on
the requirements of various markets).
The enclosure that comes in the NUC kit includes an infrared receiver, so you can control the PC from your couch.
The
Core i5-4250U is a dual-core processor with one of Intel’s better—but
not best—integrated graphics technologies: the Intel HD Graphics 5000.
Intel also includes a VESA mounting bracket, so you can attach the NUC
to the back of your display should you want to create a custom
all-in-one PC. The motherboard has a pair of SO-DIMM slots and can
address up to 16GB of DDR3L/1333 or DDR3L/1600 memory (the L is
for low-power, or 1.35-volt, RAM). It has one full-length PCIe mini
slot (which you’ll probably use to plug in an internal Wi-Fi adapter)
and one half-length PCIe mini slot (which you’ll most likely use to
connect an mSATA solid-state drive).
You’ll
need to open the case to install storage, memory, and a Wi-Fi adapter,
but that’s easy. Perhaps other case manufacturers will leave room to
make use of the SATA connectors.
Intel
aided our review by shipping an evaluation unit with 8GB of DDR3L/1600
memory (two 4GB SO-DIMMs), an internal dual-band Intel Wireless-AC 7260
Wi-Fi/Bluetooth adapter, and a 180GB, Intel 530-series mSATA SSD. The
unit also has a gigabit ethernet port if you want the performance only a
cable can deliver.
It’s not the size of the dog…
Despite
its pint-size dimensions, the NUC D54250WYK packs a serious bite
(performance will vary, of course, depending on the components you
outfit it with). Our evaluation kit posted a Desktop WorldBench 8.1
score of 241. That’s much higher than the original NUC (which earned a
mark of 156), and it’s better all-around performance than what we’ve
gotten from most of the all-in-one PCs we’ve reviewed lately (with the
notable exception of the Dell XPS 27 Touch).
On the other hand, most of the tested all-in-ones have had
less-powerful integrated graphics and have relied solely on mechanical
hard drives for storage. The presence of discrete graphics processors
and SSDs—even SSD cache drives—has a big impact on WorldBench scores.
The
home remains the best environment for the NUC—not just in the
entertainment center, but in the kitchen, bedroom, or even the garage.
It’s a fantastic system for light productivity. And with support for
technologies such as Intel’s Quick Sync Video,
the revamped rig also delivers media-encoding and file-compression
scores that are nearly twice as high as those of its predecessor. And
it’s four times faster on image-editing tasks.
Four
USB 3.0 ports (two in the front), Mini HDMI, Mini DisplayPort, and
gigabit ethernet. What more could you ask for? (Maybe eSATA?)
Small
businesses might balk at the prospect of buying a kit and then fleshing
it out. And larger businesses won’t like that the NUC’s Core i5-4250U
processor doesn’t include Intel’s vPro technology. But if you can do
without those features, you could stick a NUC on the back of a display,
add a mouse and keyboard, and have a superefficient, light workstation.
Big things from a small package
The
NUC D54250WYK kit definitely raises the standard for barely-there PCs,
but you’ll pay for that engineering prowess, both literally and
figuratively. Building out a configuration like the one reviewed here
will cost around $700 ($800 if you buy a Windows license). Intel’s
decision to solder the CPU to the motherboard blocks your most important
upgrade path, and the mSATA hard drive limits you to streaming media
(unless you drop more cash on an external hard drive). Meanwhile, you
could build a basic home-theater PC for about $300 less.
That
said, the NUC packs a unique combination of performance and
power-efficiency, and no other PC on the market can match its minuscule
4.6-by-4.4-by-1.4-inch dimensions. If you think that a pint-size PC
potent at everything except games sounds appealing, you can’t go wrong
with the NUC D54250WYK.
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