We have a tiny, Haswell-powered PC from Intel—what should we do with it?

There’s a lot of potential inside this dinky box.

Intel's "Next Unit of Computing" is a high-end Ultrabook without the screen or the battery. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

I walk around with a reasonably powerful computer in my pocket at all times, but for some reason I’m still drawn to tiny desktops. Maybe it’s because a “desktop” in my mind still looks like an old dusty Dell Dimension mid tower wedged under a desk. Maybe it’s because PCs are more configurable and customizable, where phones and tablets are more appliance-like by nature. Whatever the reason, being able to hold an entire PC in the palm of my hand still pokes my brain’s “that’s cool” receptors in a way that the smartphone du jour no longer does.

If you like tiny PCs as much as I do, you’ve probably heard of Intel’s “Next Unit of Computing,” or NUC for short. The NUC is a tiny little box with one of Intel’s Ultrabook-class CPUs, a fan, and a motherboard inside. There are also slots for an mSATA solid-state drive, a half-height mini PCI Express Wi-Fi adapter (the antennas are already integrated into the case), and two DDR3 SO-DIMMs like those you’d find in many laptops (the NUC supports up to 16GB of RAM, 8GB in each slot). It resembles a pre-built PC in many ways, but it’s just configurable enough to scratch an itch for those who like to build their own PCs (or lapsed system builders like yours truly who enjoy building PCs but no longer enjoy the support headaches a homemade PC comes with).

Intel has sent us a Haswell-based version of the NUC outfitted with a 1.3GHz Core i5-4250U and the HD 5000 integrated GPU, the same combination that powers the 2013 MacBook Airs and several other Ultrabooks. We’ll be packing it with components, putting Windows 8.1 on it, and giving it the standard review treatment in the coming weeks. We’ll focus on performance and power usage improvements over last year’s Ivy Bridge NUC, but what we really want to know is what do you want to know?

Part of the fun of tiny PCs is that they can go just about anywhere—the NUC can be strapped to the back of a monitor to create a makeshift all-in-one, but it also doesn’t look out of place in a TV stand. Many people will probably put some form of Windows on it, but it should (in theory) have no trouble running your favorite Linux distribution. Tell us where in your home a tiny PC would fit and what you’d like to do with it, and we’ll incorporate some of your questions and suggestions into the review itself.

A few things to bear in mind about the NUC before we get started:

It has a good selection of ports, but what you see is what you get: there are four USB 3.0 ports (two on the front and two on the back), one gigabit Ethernet jack, a mini DisplayPort (some of last year’s NUCs included Thunderbolt but this year’s do not), and a mini HDMI port.
We’ve already picked our components. We’ll be testing a NUC that includes Intel’s 7260 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 adapter, a 128GB Crucial M500 SSD, and 8GB of DDR3 RAM (two 4GB sticks running in dual-channel mode). This is a reasonably well-specced configuration that should take just about anything we can throw at it, but we won’t be able to buy other external components (aside from some USB accessories and hard drives we already have lying around).
Let’s observe the terms of all EULAs and other such documents. Any Hackintosh requests will fall upon deaf ears.

The NUC shouldn’t be confused with smaller, ARM-based boards like the Raspberry Pi—it’s several times more expensive and several times more powerful. The finished cost of our box comes to somewhere between $600 and $700, so it’s perhaps not the most cost-effective way to get a basic computer. Still, it’s a fun little box with a lot of potential for tinkerers, and we’re excited to try out some of the things you guys come up with.