Leak: Intel readies next round of NUC Slides of what's widely reported to be the next iteration of Intel's NUC have hit the Web courtesy of fan site Fanless Tech. The slides, here, indicate that as well as giving the fanless boxes more grunt across the board, the NUC 2.0 line will also get gamer versions. The details are straightforward enough: Core i3, i5 …
I want nice shiny and smooth visuals so I'll stick to requiring a discrete GPU. However a little machine like this is perfect for office and home office use and general entertainment and makes me wonder why so many set top boxes still are so large and oddly shaped.
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Almost none of the gaming market needs a discrete GPU. "Hard core" gamers are a tiny tiny fraction.
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Really? If you consider farmville most of the gaming community and playing something like TombRaider hardcore you would be correct.
But most people playing a normal AAA game on a PC would like it to look a little bit like the console at a playable frame rate. That is never going to happen on an imbedded intel graphics solition.
Yes there are hardcore that want 4K at 200FPS, but most are happy with default graphics at 720 or 1080.
"Almost none of the gaming market needs a discrete GPU. "Hard core" gamers are a tiny tiny fraction."
Presumably hard core gamers are a profitable market of a reasonable size, otherwise there wouldn't be so many expensive (overpriced?) products targeted at them?
"A dual NIC option please. Offer that and I'd be in it for my SOphos/Astaro box."
Just stick a mini AP Router in a USB port like this one: http://www.pqigroup.com/prod_in.aspx?mnuid=1286&modid=138&prodid=536 or this one: http://www.pqigroup.com/prod_in.aspx?mnuid=1286&modid=138&prodid=565 and there you go. :) I have the "express" version because I don't need the SD storage on it and I can tell you that this little gizmo rocks!
With you on the audio. I've got one of the i5 current gen models and the interference noise via the audio outputs is very noticeable. Problem is it even comes across if you use the HDMI audio functionality on the damned thing.
The only work-around I've found is to use some sort of USB audio which kinda defeats the purpose of an all-in-one unit. It's small and quiet but yeah, Intel haven't impressed with these. Interested to see they're implementing digital audio with these new ones on at least some of the models. Guessing they haven't been able to figure out a way around the interference issue (if that's what the problem is) on the analogue audio.
So the NUC - great concept poorly carried out. Shame on you, Intel.
The noisy audio is probably a consequence of the switch mode power supply and an earth loop. The trick is to isolate earths - preferably with an audio ground isolation device (sometimes called a hum eliminator). This isolates the ground plane of the amplifier/TV from the computer ground plane.
This is fairly essential in computer audio applications - it would be nice if manufacturers designed computer kit with audio isolation (either balanced transformers or opto-isolation), but you can get a stereo device for about 20 pounds. Add some suitable cables and you are away. Not sure how you can do this with HDMI audio, though.
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