Smallness über alles: Intel’s tiny, Haswell-based NUC desktop reviewed

A couple of months back, Intel sent us the latest version of its “Next Unit of Computing,” or NUC for short.

The NUC is sort of a side-project for Intel. It’s a some-assembly-required desktop computer aimed at hobbyists who like playing with new tech and building their own PCs, but who also want something that’s as small as possible. It gives up much of the expandability that we’ve come to associate with desktops, but in exchange you get more processing power than anyone else is offering in a computer this size.

When we originally got the NUC, we asked you what kinds of things you were interested in using it for. We can’t get to all of your questions, but here’s a list of the ones we’ll try to answer, along with some of our standard performance analyses and comparisons to an Ivy Bridge model.

• What is the NUC for (and more importantly, what is it not for)?
• Why would you buy one instead of building your own mini PC?
• What is power consumption like?
• Could you use it as a mini gaming box?
• How does the NUC perform as an HTPC?

Some of the other questions asked may be revisited in future articles, but these are the use cases we felt the NUC would be best-suited to.

Why buy a NUC?

More than a few of you had questions about just why one would choose to buy a NUC rather than building a mini-ITX or microATX desktop. There are a few tradeoffs to consider, but the largest one (pun intended) is size. Even among pre-built mini PCs from the OEMs, it’s difficult to find a desktop as tiny as the NUC that doesn’t use weaker, Atom-class CPUs.

Comparing the NUC to a mini-ITX PC you’d build yourself makes for an even more lopsided comparison—the cheaper ITX cases are generally shoebox-ish in size. The better, more expandable ones like the BitFenix Prodigy we used to build our Steam Machine are closer to microATX-sized. Cases like the M350 exist on the smaller end of the spectrum, but they lack the readily accessible front USB or audio jacks that you might want if you’ve got the computer under your TV.

In return for its small size, the NUC requires you to give up expandability and flexibility. Current models have one connector for mSATA solid-state drives, one slot for a half-height PCI Express Wi-Fi card, two slots for laptop DDR3 DIMMs, and that’s it. The Ultrabook-class CPUs used in the NUCs are all of the soldered-in, ball grid array (BGA) variety, so there are no upgrades possible there. SATA data and power ports on the motherboard point to a possible future variant with room for a 2.5-inch hard drive or SSD (or for those of you who want to pop the NUC’s board in some other case, since it has the necessary headers), but there isn’t room for one in the current models.

Going with a larger system (either self-built or from an OEM) opens up other possibilities, including faster quad-core desktop processors, large pools of storage, and proper PCI Express expansion slots that can be used for high-end GPUs and other peripherals. A system with even a single 2.5-inch drive bay will give you a much wider range of SSDs to choose from—mSATA drives are rarer and a little more expensive than their 2.5-inch counterparts, and certain big names like Samsung sell most of their mSATA drives to OEMs, not direct to consumers. That said, Crucial, Mushkin, Intel, and a handful of smaller players do sell mSATA drives on sites like Newegg, and their prices aren’t too far off from their 2.5-inch counterparts. Capacities generally top out at 480GB as of this writing, though 1TB mSATA SSDs are on the horizon.

What it’s not good for

The NUC’s size and the amount of performance it crams into its tiny case gave readers a lot of interesting ideas, some less plausible than others. Before going further, let’s talk about some tasks the NUC just isn’t suited for, based on some of your questions.

First, the NUC is emphatically not built to be a good Bitcoin miner. The best machine for this sort of work is a dedicated box like the Butterfly Labs miner we tested last year. If you insist on mining with your PC, a strong dedicated GPU is much better suited to hashing than a CPU, and Intel’s integrated GPUs pale in comparison to even low-end and midrange dedicated parts. While this mining hardware comparison chart only lists Intel’s last-generation HD 4000 part rather than the new HD 5000, the two are architecturally similar enough that AMD’s GPUs in particular are still going to beat the NUC easily. At this late date, mining Bitcoins has become difficult enough that even a high-end GPU likely won’t make you back the money you’re spending on electricity—a dedicated ASIC miner is the best way to go, and something like the NUC is basically the worst way.

By the same token, the NUC won’t be very good for graphics-heavy work like CAD software or high-end gaming. As we’ll see soon, the NUC isn’t a bad gaming box if you manage your expectations properly, but a dedicated card is still the only way to go for fluid gaming at 1080p. The NUC will do you just fine if light gaming or drafting work is one of the many things you’ll use it for, but as a primary 3D workstation or gaming machine it will probably disappoint.

Next, some of you were wondering about using the NUC as a server, perhaps with some virtual machines configured to save even more space. Depending on what you wanted to use the system for, this sort of usage isn’t entirely out of the question. However, two things make the NUC a less-than-perfect server: the first is storage space. Since the NUC only includes the one mSATA SSD slot, storage is expensive, and there’s no way to set any kind of RAID up for redundancy’s sake. Second, it has only two physical CPU cores, and if you install very many virtual machines on it they’re all going to become CPU starved pretty quickly. If you install 16GB of RAM and you know your VMs just won’t need a lot of CPU power, there’s nothing stopping you from using it as a server box (the i5-4250U it uses supports all of Intel’s virtualization extensions), but we’d hesitate to recommend it for a mission-critical production environment.

Finally, a lot of you suggested mounting the NUC to wheels or something that flies or floats, taking advantage of its small size to make something ultra-portable. What these suggestions fail to account for is the fact that the NUC uses Ultrabook-class hardware, and as we’ll see, this means it features Ultrabook-esque power consumption. At this point, flying computers and makeshift robots are best left to cheaper, more power-sipping hardware like the Arduino, the Raspberry Pi, and their ilk. The NUC just isn’t very well-suited for trips away from an outlet.

Bang-for-buck (or lack thereof)

The NUC dwarfed by a Mac Mini. The Mini has an integrated power supply while the NUC’s is external, but the total volume of the NUC is still smaller.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The NUC is a barebones PC kit, meaning that you’ll need to bring your own storage, Wi-Fi, and RAM to fill it up and make it actually work. The maximum cost of the NUC depends on which components you decide to fill it with, but the base model’s MSRP is $389.99 no matter what you fill it with. A Haswell NUC with the slower HD 4400 GPU retails for $299.99, and you can spend as little as $159.99 if you step down to one of the Celeron-equipped Ivy Bridge models.

To that $390 base model we’ve added a 128GB Crucial M500 SSD ($110), 8GB of DDR3 laptop RAM (about $70, depending on the brand), and an Intel 7260 Wi-Fi module ($33 on eBay), chosen in part because it includes Bluetooth 4.0 in addition to a two-stream, 867Mbps 802.11ac implementation. That’s all you need if you plan to build a Linux-based NUC or if you already have a Windows license you can use, but we’ll add another $100 to cover an OEM license for Windows 8.1. The final price tag of $702.99 is reasonably competitive compared to other OEM systems, especially once you take Intel’s three-year warranty into account.

The OEM systems give you more CPU power but less GPU power, somewhat slower Wi-Fi, less RAM, and a slower-but-larger HDD instead of an SSD. Whether a fast SSD or a large HDD is more important to your build will depend on what you’re using the system for, but we tend to prefer speed to size for most use cases. Finally, it’s important to remember that Intel’s Turbo Boost will make the NUC’s 1.3 GHz CPU run at speeds of up to 2.6 GHz if there’s enough thermal headroom, making the clock speed gap feel smaller than it looks on paper for many tasks.

Pricing gets trickier if you’re comparing the NUC to a home-built computer. Let’s throw together a quick Haswell-based mini ITX PC just to get an idea of the tradeoffs you’ll make. We’ll use:

• A Cooler Master Elite 130 case is reviewed reasonably well, has a good selection of front-facing ports, and is reasonably attractive. It’s $50.
• A mini ITX motherboard based on Intel’s H81 chipset: pricing is all over the place for these, but you can expect to spend at least $70 on one from an OEM with a decent reputation like MSI’s H81I. For $96, you could step up to Zotac’s H87ITX-A-E, which has built-in Wi-Fi antennas and an integrated slot for a Wi-Fi mini card.
• A Haswell CPU will run you at least $70 as of this writing, which will get you a 3.0GHz dual-core Pentium. This is a pretty good chip for basic work, but the nice thing about using desktop CPUs is that you could step up to something like the quad-core i5-4430 for $190 if you needed the extra power. The bad thing is that none of Intel’s desktop CPUs include the HD 5000 GPU, limiting your integrated GPU’s performance to barely better than Ivy Bridge levels.
• A decent power supply: you can spend as much or as little here as you’re comfortable with, though cheaping out on your PSU can have disastrous consequences. We grabbed this Antec VP-450 for our Steam Machine, which should cover you for anything up to a mid-range gaming box. It has an MSRP of $50, though right now it’s going for a mere $35.

Using these components, you can build a decent Haswell-based barebones PC starting for just $225, and you can add a hefty quad-core desktop CPU and Wi-Fi-ready motherboard for $371, both less than the price of our NUC. That system’s performance will usually run circles around the NUC, though graphics performance and power consumption won’t be as good. A custom build will also fit an integrated DVD or Blu-ray drive, and it will be able to fit at least a couple of 2.5-inch HDDs or SSDs. What you give up are the NUC’s small size and its low idle noise level—this home-built system would have the PSU and CPU fans going at the very least, plus whatever case fans you decide to hook up.

We won’t price out components for a mini gaming PC here, since those of you looking for more GPU power than the HD 5000 can provide won’t really be considering the NUC in the first place. If you’re looking for a solid recommendation in the same ballpark as the finished NUC, our $600-ish homemade Steam Machine is a pretty well-balanced box.

Some assembly required

The NUC, opened and waiting for parts. Note the SATA data and power ports.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Since the NUC isn’t ready to use out of the box, you’ll need to be comfortable popping in some parts yourself before you can do anything with it. Luckily, this is an easy project.

Four large, captive Phillips-head screws hold the bottom of the NUC in place. Pop the cover off, and you’ve got ready access to the RAM slots, the SSD slot, and the Wi-Fi card slot. Install the RAM first, placing it in at an angle and then pushing down on it until the retention mechanism snaps into place. One thing we noticed with both the Haswell NUC and the previous-generation Ivy Bridge model we tested is that they’re both finicky about the RAM being seated correctly. If you power the NUC up and get a blinking power light and a machine that won’t boot, reseat the RAM and it should fix the problem.

You’ll need to bring your own Wi-Fi card, mSATA SSD, and DDR3 DIMMs to make the NUC into an actual computer.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Next, remove the two smaller Phillips-head screws that will hold the Wi-Fi card and SSD in place. Put down the Wi-Fi card first, attaching the small antennas to the card before popping it into place. Screw it down and repeat the process for the SSD, making sure that the antennas don’t prevent the card from laying down all the way. Put the bottom cover back on—it only fits one way, and the thermal pad should go where the SSD is—but make sure the box powers on properly before tightening the screws. You’ll thank yourself for it.

Power consumption and installing Windows 8.1

The Ivy Bridge NUC (top) has the same footprint as its successor but is slightly thicker.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

By now you should know if the NUC is for you, how much you can expect to spend on one, and how to put it together. To test the other things you asked about, we’ll need to install an operating system. Assuming you’re installing Windows, the Windows USB/DVD Download Tool can assist you in creating a bootable USB install drive from your DVD or ISO, and UNetbootin should cover you for most Linux distributions. An external DVD drive is also an option if you’ve got one.

A freshly constructed NUC won’t have anything on the boot drive, so it will automatically begin to boot from our USB drive and begin the normal Windows installation process. Putting Windows on a fresh PC is straightforward enough at this point that we won’t go over the process in detail here—suffice it to say that if you’re reading this, you’re probably technically inclined enough to make it to the Windows desktop without issue.

Once you’ve pulled up the desktop, Job One is getting the drivers you need. This can be done manually by searching the Intel Download Center site for your specific NUC board (the search page for ours is here), since Intel’s automatic Driver Update Utility won’t detect updates to drivers that aren’t already installed (and thus won’t get rid of those hated Device Manager exclamation points). Intel offers driver bundles for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 that include everything you need. It would be really great if this process was more automated and user-friendly, but it’s nothing that PC builders won’t be used to.

Yellow exclamation points, I CAST THEE OUT!

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Once you’ve got Windows installed, the NUC is basically indistinguishable in operation from any other PC—the combination of Haswell and the SSD make it plenty fast for most productivity tasks, though a lack of Intel’s vPro management features might hurt its viability in some businesses (for that, there’s always the M93P). And, of course, the fact that it’s pretty much an Ultrabook without a screen leads to some impressive power usage numbers.

Unless you’re using the NUC as some kind of server, you’ll need to factor in your TV or monitor’s power consumption into these numbers too. Still, for a full PC (with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse connected, even) they’re impressively low. The NUC shouldn’t max out your power bill.

CPU performance and the NUC as a workstation

The NUC has all the ports you’d need from a basic workstation, and it sports robust multi-monitor support.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

If all you want to use the NUC for is a small, unobtrusive desktop workstation, the computer is surprisingly full-featured. It’s got a mini DisplayPort (version 1.2) and mini HDMI port (version 1.4a). These ports, combined with the HD 5000 GPU, can drive a display of up to 3840×2160 at 60Hz and up to 1920×1200 at 60Hz, respectively. Intel’s documentation (PDF) says both external displays can be used at these resolutions simultaneously.

The DisplayPort 1.2 spec also allows for daisy-chaining displays through its “multi-stream transport” (MST) spec, which allows a single port to drive multiple displays. With a DisplayPort 1.2 hub, Intel’s documentation says the NUC can drive three displays at 1080p at 60Hz or two displays at 2560×1600 at 60Hz. Any way you cut it, the NUC’s multi-monitor support is surprisingly robust for a system this size.

The NUC’s port selection isn’t especially exotic, but it’s pretty good for the size. There are two USB 3.0 ports on the front, another two on the back, a gigabit Ethernet connection, and a Kensington lock slot on the right side for good measure. The only 1/8-inch audio jack is on the front of the device, which is good for headphones but less so for speakers. Both the mini DisplayPort and the HDMI port can output audio too, but that’s better for HTPC use than it is for standard desktop speakers, and the NUC includes no basic integrated speaker for your operating system’s notification sounds. The only port this year’s NUC is missing that certain Ivy Bridge NUCs included was a Thunderbolt port, though given the relative dearth of Thunderbolt accessories, it’s hardly a death-blow.

Finally, we get to general CPU performance. Here’s what we’ll compare (all tests were run in a 64-bit version of Windows 8.1).

• The Haswell NUC and its 1.3GHz (2.6GHz Turbo Boost) Core i5-4250U
• The Ivy Bridge NUC and its 1.8GHz Core i3-3217U
• The 2013 MacBook Air, which has been upgraded to a 1.7GHz (up to 3.3GHz) Core i7-4650U

The Haswell NUC’s CPU performance outdoes the Ivy Bridge version’s, despite having a significantly lower listed clock speed. This is thanks in part to Haswell’s architectural improvements, but mostly it’s because of the i5-4250U’s inclusion of Turbo Boost. Intel provided us a Core i3 Ivy Bridge NUC to test with, but if you bought the model with the Turbo Boost-enabled i5-3427U, the gap would narrow considerably.

While the i7-4650U in the new MacBook Air is faster than the CPU in the NUC, we did see a few small signs that the CPU would be forced to throttle down more quickly in a laptop than in the NUC while we were torture-testing the devices to get power consumption measurements. The desktop isn’t large, but there’s a little more room inside the case to dissipate heat. The NUC should be able to sustain its maximum Turbo Boost speeds for a little longer than many Ultrabooks.

The NUC as a mini game console

The NUC is much smaller than, and much more capable than, a Nintendo Wii.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

There’s no way to get around the NUC’s integrated graphics. If you want something that can play modern titles smoothly at 1080p, this isn’t the box for you. But if you’re looking for a nice little HTPC that will also play casual games or high-end games at lowered, console-like resolutions and graphics quality settings, the NUC actually doesn’t do too badly. We’ll compare raw GPU performance first.

Note: Onscreen tests max out at 60 FPS.

Note: Onscreen tests max out at 60 FPS.

Note: Offscreen tests run at 1080p and have no framerate cap.

Note: Offscreen tests run at 1080p and have no framerate cap.

Note: Onscreen tests max out at 60 FPS.

Note: Offscreen tests run at 1080p and have no framerate cap.

Test run at Ultra quality setting.

Test run at Ultra quality setting.

The Haswell NUC can never double the speed of the Ivy Bridge model and its HD 4000 GPU, but it provides a significant boost that you’ll appreciate while playing games. Playing older or lighter games like Portal or the original Bioshock at 1080p with all the settings cranked actually looked pretty great (I’m impressed that it can run Bioshock at 1080p because I distinctly remember having to spend $200 to replace the dedicated graphics card in my circa-2007 gaming PC to get playable performance at 1680×1050). For newer games like Bioshock Infinite, you can get playable performance if you resort to some of the game tricks as Xbox 360 or PS3 developers, reducing resolution and quality settings until you get playable performance (the Infinite benchmarking tool hits a 30fps average at 720p and low settings, which will give you roughly last-gen-console-esque image quality).

If smaller or indie games are more your speed, the NUC will serve you even better. We hooked an Xbox 360 gamepad up to the NUC and took it for a spin in Steam’s Big Picture Mode, which ran well at 1080p and played less-intense gamepad-focused titles like Super Meat Boy, Cave Story, Braid, and Bastion without breaking a sweat. We’ll revisit gaming on the NUC again later on when the SteamOS beta gains Intel graphics support (there are ways to get Intel GPUs working with the current beta, but we’d rather not evaluate performance and stability without official support).

As with the CPU, there’s some indication here that the HD 5000 in the NUC will be able to perform better than the same chip in Ultrabooks because of better heat dissipation. The NUC’s GPU outperforms the MacBook Air’s by a decent margin even though the maximum clock speed in the i7-4650U is 1.1GHz, instead of the 1.0GHz of the i5-4250U.

The problem with gaming on the NUC has less to do with performance and more to do with noise. The system’s single fan is audible all the time, but while idle and performing light tasks you probably won’t notice it over typing, quiet music, or ambient noise. While gaming, the NUC’s fan takes only a minute or two to ramp up into overdrive, a high-pitched, insistent whining not unlike a small vacuum cleaner. Whether it bothers you is something you’ll have to decide for yourself, but you’ll usually be able to hear it over the sounds of the game you’re playing. The fan is much faster to spin up during heavy GPU activity than heavy CPU activity.

The NUC as an HTPC

The NUC has a cutout on front for an IR receiver, ideal for Windows Media Center remotes.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

One of the most common reader requests involved hooking the NUC up to a TV and using as an HTPC, a task to which it is well- (but not perfectly) suited. The thing you’ll probably miss most is a Blu-ray drive, which can be added to the NUC via USB at the expense of aesthetics if you’d like. Same deal for TV tuners: you’ll need to go with an external USB accessory because there’s no room in the case. Finally, if you have an extensive library of ripped DVD content or other locally stored video, you’ll either want to store it on external drives or on a file server or some other kind of network-attached storage. The high cost and relatively low capacity of the SSDs you can fit into the NUC make it poorly suited to host a huge amount of rarely accessed data, a use case where bigger slower HDDs are still far preferable to SSDs.

If what you mostly want is a box that will stream from online sources (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu) and local sources (a file server or DLNA-equipped NAS), the NUC is a nice option that needs no extra hardware. It’s much more expensive and a bit more power hungry than a set-top box like a Roku or an Apple TV (AnandTech’s power consumption figures for the latest Apple TV revision says the box needs less than 0.9W of power to watch 1080p content from iTunes or Netflix, where the NUC needs around 10 times that much), but its power consumption is still good for a full PC and you get much more versatility in exchange.

One useful feature that Intel has added to the Haswell NUC is a consumer infrared (CIR) sensor that’s compatible with most Windows Media Center remotes—it’s hidden away under the black plastic cutout on the front of the machine, so you won’t have to use one of your precious USB ports for a receiver. We don’t have one of these remotes on-hand to test, but since they work with both Windows Media Center and front-ends like XBMC they’re pretty easy to find. Getting a standard universal remote working with the PC is a bit more difficult, but tools like LIRC or its Windows equivalent can help you with that in a pinch.

Streaming video isn’t a particularly intensive task for most modern systems. The HD 5000 GPU will help with video decoding for today’s most important formats, including 4K H.264 support (while H.265 decode support isn’t integrated yet, that standard is still in its infancy). While playing a 1080p YouTube video in Chrome, CPU usage hovered between 30 and 40 percent and GPU usage (as measured by GPU-Z) hovered in the low 20s.

The good news about this relatively low resource usage is that fan noise isn’t the problem it is while gaming. In all of our testing, streaming video to the NUC didn’t prompt its fan to spin any faster than it does at idle, so even if you’re watching mostly quiet, atmospheric TV shows and movies the fan shouldn’t annoy you.

If you happen to be using the NUC as a media server, encoding and transcoding don’t give it much trouble either. This is particularly true for programs that can take advantage of Intel’s Quick Sync video encoding—adoption has been a bit slow, but popular media apps like the VLC Player and Handbrake have been working to implement support since the Quick Sync SDK was released about a year ago. Haswell introduced Quick Sync improvements meant to push encoding quality over Ivy Bridge (this MissingRemote report has a lot of great data on the subject), so if your video apps of choice happen to use the feature the new NUC should make you happy.

One last thing to consider: if you’ll be buying a NUC as an HTPC box and don’t expect to do much high-end 3D gaming, you could go with the lower-end D34010WYK NUC, which knocks $90 off of the MSRP of the model we’re reviewing. You step down to a Core i3-4010U, which exchanges the HD 5000 GPU for an HD 4400 and removes Turbo Boost support. You shouldn’t really lose any of the features that make the NUC a good HTPC—you give up some 3D performance, but Quick Sync and the other video features all remain intact.

Not for everyone, but surprisingly versatile

The NUC’s power button.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The NUC is good at a lot of things. It’s a reasonably capable workstation and an excellent little HTPC as long as you don’t need to store a lot of video or play discs. It’s also a reasonably capable gaming box, though it won’t play modern titles at 1080p and we think the fan noise is loud enough to be distracting.