back to article Intel NUCs find fresh life in Asus, but rights are 'non-exclusive'

Those mourning the discontinuation of Intel's quirky little Next Unit of Compute (NUC) mini-PCs can rest easy – Asus has officially taken over development of the product line. It's not exclusive, though, and already there's competition. "Starting September 1st, NUC becomes a proud member of the Asus product lineup, setting off …

  1. m4r35n357 Silver badge

    Noisy fans

    These things are great in principle, but are massively let down by the need for fans. I have an i5 NUC that is about 10 years old now, but if I play YT videos it turns into a hairdryer. Same with browsing many sites (BBC), javascript easily sets the fans off. It gets up to 80 degrees C easily.

    I do all that stuff on a Raspberry Pi 4 nowadays, it handles it all, and never goes above 60 degrees C (heatsink case). Smaller than an NUC, power consumption < (5V x 3.1A), easily swappable storage. And it is still made in the UK for the time being.

    No real point in the NUC any more from my perspective, but I might consider a fanless one at the right price (unlikely!).

    1. fb2k

      Re: Noisy fans

      you can get a fanless Akasa case for most NUCs, or really just pick a fanless mini PC like the ASUS PN42 with a N100 (6W TDP) which will blow your Pi out of the water...

      1. m4r35n357 Silver badge

        Re: Noisy fans

        Unnecessary and unpleasant militaristic analogy, particularly since I keep my Pis well away from water.

        1. SonofRojBlake

          Re: Noisy fans

          I can understand keeping your Pi away from water, but... does nobody cool their PC with liquid? Is it really that hard?

          I'm picturing a Pi (or NUC) that's a 4" x 4" square box... but poking out of the top of it is an aluminium rod of a standardised diameter. This is the heat sink. All you need to do is dip it in cold water. A glass would do, a nicely designed tray with a good strong lid with a hole for the heat sink to poke through would be better. Chuck in a few ice cubes and you're getting way better heat transfer than you'd get from ambient air. Is this done?

          (as in, is this done simply and cheaply in rigs costing less than thousands? I know top end gaming rigs get liquid cooled, I meant something simpler.)

          1. m4r35n357 Silver badge

            Re: Noisy fans

            Well I'm guessing here, but if the water is not circulating then you will probably need to replace it periodically. With the right workload you might get a cup of tea out of it ;)

            1. SonofRojBlake

              Re: Noisy fans

              You would indeed need to replace it periodically. But I need to replace the water in the water dispenser in my fridge periodically. It's not that onerous.

              If I were designing a liquid cooling system for e.g. something that had to be somewhere sensitive, then there would be a number of things I'd do. I'd limit the inventory of cooling fluid to minimise the consequences if it leaked. I might use something like glycol to give me a lower freezing point. I'd run it through tiny labyrinthine pipes and circulate it to maximise transfer, and when the hot side got back to the reservoir, I'd actively cool it with some kind of refrigerant setup, because with limited inventory you'd need to shed the heat to the air quickly before reusing it. I've more or less described a domestic fridge, there.

              BUT...

              If I were designing a cooling setup for something I'm just using casually at home, my model would not be the fridge, it would be the sink full of ice water I use to cool beer cans.

              For device cooling, step one is make the device heat sink long enough (150mm?) and heat conductive enough that the device and sit on one side of a reservoir lid and dip through it into the cooling medium, which is just tapwater, with optional ice. With an essentially unlimited inventory (a five litre tank wouldn't be terribly inconvenient to have on your desk) there's a HUGE capacity for absorbing heat there. Little tap on it to drain it off when it's hot, funnel at the opposite corner for topping it up from a jug, largish lidded opening for adding ice-cubes. You might top it up once a day? Convection alone would probably be enough but if not a tiny stirrer just to get the water moving would do. Little cheap instrument sitting on top to alert you if the temp gets too high. Can't see the whole setup costing more than £50 retail. That said, can't see many domestic customers for it either - it's slightly more faff than just switching your PC on and going, and slightly more faff = no interest, I suspect.

              I lack the expertise to know if anyone cares enough about cooling Pi's and similar to make something like this interesting enough to produce. Anyone?

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Noisy fans

                Not to poke fun at your engineering experiments here, but I'd note that if you need to add enough space for a 5 liter water container you're kinda venturing off the NUC playfield..

                :)

                1. SonofRojBlake

                  Re: Noisy fans

                  Yeah, fair enough. I wasn't thinking of applications where the small size was vital, more the sort of hobbyist who's running the thing for pleasure on a desktop with plenty of room.

  2. sebacoustic

    pushing PDFs

    am i missing something here? is this a legit IT industry use case or just Vulture derision for regular office dronery?

    1. Apollo-Soyuz 1975
      Meh

      Re: pushing PDFs

      In my experience, it is a perfectly accurate description of modern office dronery.

  3. Steve Graham

    Reader, I bought one.

    I bought a 12th-gen one recently, to replace my ancient i5 laptop. I'm very happy with it. There is a fan, but it only kicks in occasionally and is quiet enough for me, even sitting on the desk 50cm from my ears. I had no problems installing Linux on it, and Intel even maintain (currently) a .deb archive for firmware and video drivers.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Reader, I bought one.

      I bought a NUC wannabee with an AMD Ryzen 5 in it a while back.

      I haven't found anything heavy enough to throw at it to make its fans audible, but then again, the first thing I did was replace the WIn10 it came with with Linux (still working out which distro works best for me - the chipsets in it are fully supported on the latest kernel). It makes about as much noise as my Mac Mini M1, i.e. nothing I can detect. The only time I ever heard that one's fans was by throwing a couple of video conversion jobs at it while ignoring its built in H265 abilities, that got it warmed up, and even that only for a while.

      Does anyone have a recommendation for a Linux benchtest so I can make the AMD sweat for a bit? I'd love to see just how hard I can push that thing before it starts to struggle - I reckon it'll comfortably run a few VMs without breaking much of a sweat.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Reader, I bought one.

      Just out of curiosity, how did you arrange your desk so that a computer on its surface is only 50cm from your ears?

      :)

  4. clive1
    IT Angle

    not-NUC

    Surely we should be calling this things NUC-Offs ?

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