A powerful PC doesn’t have to take up your entire desk. Intel’s NUCs (New Units of Computing) are tiny 4 x 4 inch PCs loaded with some of its latest CPUs. The catch? They come as kits you need to assemble—but don’t worry, it’s a breeze for even a novice.
Don’t let the prospect of building your own NUC scare you off. It’s easy. Compared to assembling the entire computer including securing the motherboard to the case, hooking up the PSU correctly, and so on, setting up a NUC is more akin to snapping some LEGO bricks together.
Good Things Come in Small Packages
The “Bean Canyon” NUC8i7BEH i7 NUC that Intel provided us with lacks only three things to be a hard-working tiny desktop—RAM, a storage drive, and the Windows operating system. Everything else is contained in (and already attached to) the case right out of the gate.
As far as memory and storage go, they’re easy to find and easy to install. We used two Kingston 16GB SO-DIMM RAM modules as well as a 960GB SSD hard drive. And just because we had it in our review pile, we also added a Western Digital Blue SN500 M.2 SATA drive, as the NUC we used can support both a 2.5-inch drive and a PCI M.2 SATA drive.
Other models in the NUC lineup are slimmer in height and support only an M.2 form factor SSD and not the 2.5-inch model we included in our build. Having both gives the PC a second speedy drive which can be used to store files or applications that are used frequently. Finally, we had a copy of Windows 10 Home Editon. You could install the Professional Edition, but that will cost you an additional $40-$50.
Not a Bargain Basement PC
Just because the NUC is tiny, doesn’t mean it’s less expensive than an equivalently configured desktop that you purchase already assembled, though it may very well be. As configured, our build topped out at $870, just a bit more than buying an equivalent regular-sized desktop from HP, Dell, or Lenovo. Here’s the way it breaks down:
- i7 NUC (NUC8i7BEH): $470
- 32GB Kingston RAM: $150
- 960GB Kingston SSD: $100
- 250GB Western Digital Blue SN500: $50
- Windows 10 Home Edition: $100
- Total Build Cost: $870
That’s not cheap, but that’s the cost fully loaded. If you halve the RAM, use a smaller SSD, and knock out the second SSD M.2 drive, you can bring the build home for considerably less. And you still wind up with a tiny PC with plenty of muscle. If you can live with an i5 CPU—or even an i3—you can bring the cost down even more. And a bare-bones Celeron-based NUC can run as little as $125. Add 8GB RAM and 480GB hard drive, and you can have a NUC capable of web browsing and even running Microsoft Office for about $350 or less.
The bare-bones NUC kit contains the PC, a 19-volt power supply, and an adapter plate. This plate is a VESA adapter and allows you to mount the completed NUC on the rear of most current monitors and even some TV sets, further freeing up desk space. The VESA plate is screwed onto the back of a compatible monitor, and two screws are added to the bottom of the NUC. You can then hang the NUC on the adapter plate by lining up the new screws on the bottom of the PC with the holes on the adapter.
