Intel has focused much of its time on this year’s virtual event CES in your new Workspace and mobile processors, in addition to highlighting the laptops that will have their new hardware debuting in the coming months. But what did not draw much attention was the line of mini PCs or NUCsand NUC kits. Intel is giving these Tiger Lake-refresh at a more reasonable price this time, depending on the configuration and where you buy a unit from.
The first is the enthusiastic model from Intel, or the NUC 11 Enthusiast, which comes as a complete mini PC or as a kit. The full PC includes an 11th generation Core i7-1165G7 processor with integrated Iris Xe graphics, RTX 2060 graphics card, 16 GB DDR4-3200 memory, Intel Optane Memory H10 storage (32 GB + 512 GB) and even a cable specific food for geographic areas option for the USA, Europe and China. Windows 10 Home also comes preloaded.
There are also a variety of ports: HDMI 2.0, Mini DisplayPort 1.4, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, Intel 2.5 GB Ethernet port, support for Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5, plus six USB 3.1 Gen2 ports.
The kit includes the same CPU and GPU, plus the same type and number of ports, but memory, storage and the operating system are all BYOB situations – although they support up to 64 GB of memory. Also note that if you are interested in following this path, the card supports PCIe 3.0 NVMe M.2 SSDs, not PCIe 4.0. There are also additional power cable options for the UK, Australia and India.
The NUC 11 Performance model comes with a choice of Core i7-1165G7, Core i5-1135G7 or Core i3-1115G4, with options i7 and i5 including Iris Xe graphics and i3 with normal UHD. None of the pre-assembled mini PCs comes with a discrete GPU. They all also come with 8 GB of DDR4-3200 memory, 500 GB NVMe SSD PCIe 4.0 storage (strange, as the enthusiast model does not have Gen4, but perhaps the Intel Optane memory has something to do with it), Windows 10 Home pre -charged and the same number of ports, minus three USB ports.
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The final model, the NUC 11 Pro Mini, comes with a Core i7-1165G7 or Core i5-1145G7 with Iris Xe graphics, a 500GB Gen 4 NVMe SSD (again, odd), 8GB of DDR4-3200 memory and Windows 10 Home pre -loaded. Like the Enthusiast kit, Performance and Pro kits are BYO memory, storage and operating system. And if you look at the support pages for both Pro Mini PCs, Intel already has an expected discontinuation date in the first half of 2024. The other NUC PCs do not.
Unfortunately, all of these models come with a welded BGA socket, which means that the processor cannot be easily removed and upgraded in the future. The CPU you get is the CPU you get.
But there is a kind of saving grace: the price. A fully configured enthusiast model of SimplyNUC starts at $ 1,350, but with 8 GB of memory and only 128 GB NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD. If you start to specify the NUC 11 Enthusiast with the same components that Intel advertises, the price increases quickly, although it is still better than the NUC 9 Extreme Kit we reviewed last year.
[TechRadar]