too underpowered to use at length
With 4k Incoming, basically You have to have something that has hardware accelerated h265 decoding.
4k H265 is too processor intensive for cpu decoding..
Nothing on the market currently has guaranteed support
Bought a NUC a month or so ago. Older version. It's my living room / kitchen computer. Using it at the moment.
For basic utility, it's great. Paid $270 for a complete setup, so bang for the buck was decent (i5, 8 GB RAM, 120 GB m2 SSD).
I'm pretty hot for this one: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/nuc/change-the-game-with-nuc.html
I've used a chromebox and installed ubuntu onto it and it's super slow. Using an i5 with basic usage including chrome, spotify with 8gbs of ram and 32GB m2 SSD
I have seen the NUC have some great performance upgrades, but it's really limited at the CPU.
I've seen a lot of NUC's being praised for being able to install OS X(hackintosh), which I think is a great value add IMHO. They're definitely great propositions for a "living room" pc, or a "behind the monitor" setup.
Here's a video on a hackintosh nuc
I have a corsair 350D and I wish I had the patience to build something smaller. I saw a ton of small cases at dreamhack that looked cool as hell.You don't need patience, just a change in how you look at your computer, I used to HATE small cases, no room to work in them. However the loss of DVD roms made me realize something, a lot of the space in my computers was taken up by the drive bays, which I was using less and less often. It drives me nuts seeing all these new, massive cases being released with tons of drive bays, that few use anymore. Luckily this way of thinking is changing, but slowly.
I have a corsair 350D and I wish I had the patience to build something smaller. I saw a ton of small cases at dreamhack that looked cool as hell.You don't need patience, just a change in how you look at your computer, I used to HATE small cases, no room to work in them. However the loss of DVD roms made me realize something, a lot of the space in my computers was taken up by the drive bays, which I was using less and less often. It drives me nuts seeing all these new, massive cases being released with tons of drive bays, that few use anymore. Luckily this way of thinking is changing, but slowly.
So I did this.
This has a raid ssd* tucked under the graphics card and a dual 120mm water cooling system. I paid $29 for the case, it had a full mesh front (with filter). I only left the upper drive cage to hide wires (non-modular power supply at the time this was taken), the rest of the drive cage was removed for video card and radiator clearance.
(Attachment Link)
As you can see, it's very easy to work in, there's no wires running everywhere in the way and everything stays cool. To remove the cage, I drilled out 3 rivets. For the radiator, I did cut part of the front, but it took like 10 minutes with a Dremel and drilled two more mounting holes (the case was meant for a single 120mm fan). I spend 30 seconds hiding wires (it's good enough). It runs cool, I can overclock just fine, and it's the easiest case I've owned to work on, especially the easiest watercooled. Ignore the fans, they were what I had laying around and since this sits in the basement on a shelf, I don't care, they were quiet, decent flow and available for free.
(Attachment Link)
Storage? While I could easily bolt a drive to the bottom of my case, I use a file server. It too sits inside an identical MATX box, and while it does have the drive cages, it doesn't have a graphics card to get in the way. I prefer the file server simply because I can turn off my high power desktop and still access files on my laptop. I also offload drive imaging (work), backups, downloads, remote access and more to the server, leaving my desktop free. I can rebuild, change OS, or simply turn it off and still have access to all my files. It uses 15-25 watts when idle (never standby), 40-45 when working, compared to my desktop (120 idle, 200 when working, 400 when gaming). I bought the processor, the rest was spare parts, it paid for itself with power savings in less than a year and made things so much easier. I'm going shrink it in half soon and cut the power in half.
* I made my own version of this to hold the drives, eventually buying one when companies started making them.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Kingwin-Dual-Bay-PCI-E-HDD-Bracket-For-2-5inch-IDE-SATA-HDD-SSD-KW-PCI2H25-/390853038839?hash=item5b00a812f7:g:YXIAAOxyBvZTQ6is
I have a corsair 350D and I wish I had the patience to build something smaller. I saw a ton of small cases at dreamhack that looked cool as hell.
BTW. I don't like how Intel's marketing is dishonest with the specs for the CPUs that are in the NUCs.
A "Core i7" in the U or M series is NOT a hyperthreaded quad-core like in a regular desktop but a four-thread dual-core chip like a desktop "i3". My mom's i3 micro-tower is a few times bigger than a NUC, sure, but it was also cheaper.
Nvidia does the same thing with their "mobile" GPUs: a 980M is less powerful than a desktop 970 but not as bad as a desktop 960. Then I see machines with a "960A"... wth is that?
IMHO the best case is one of those steam machine cases with the Horizontal riser card for the Pcie graphics card..
silverstone rvz02Show Image(http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/1062/images/Image_22.jpg)
IMHO the best case is one of those steam machine cases with the Horizontal riser card for the Pcie graphics card..
silverstone rvz02Show Image(http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/1062/images/Image_22.jpg)
IMHO the best case is one of those steam machine cases with the Horizontal riser card for the Pcie graphics card..
silverstone rvz02Show Image(http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/1062/images/Image_22.jpg)
to be fair the thermals aren't all that great. ncase m1 is amazing, it's quite a bit more but it'll fit a custom loop if need be.
IMHO the best case is one of those steam machine cases with the Horizontal riser card for the Pcie graphics card..
silverstone rvz02Show Image(http://www.techspot.com/articles-info/1062/images/Image_22.jpg)
to be fair the thermals aren't all that great. ncase m1 is amazing, it's quite a bit more but it'll fit a custom loop if need be.
Rvz02 is fit for water as well, but you may need to bolt those radiators externally.
It still looks really cool even with external radiators..
you'd have the dremel holes for the tubes as well. a bit too DIY.If you use a short GPU you could put a 120 radiator next to it, or even a 240 if you don't use a GPU.
Back in 2008 I built this little thing. Pico-ITX motherboard in an old Gamecube shell running some flavour of Linux I can't remember. At the time it did fine for what I needed; light browsing and Openoffice. I don't use it now of course as I have far outgrown the capabilities of this machine. It was a fun project.Show Image(http://i.imgur.com/ccIdHBal.jpg)
Back in 2008 I built this little thing. Pico-ITX motherboard in an old Gamecube shell running some flavour of Linux I can't remember. At the time it did fine for what I needed; light browsing and Openoffice. I don't use it now of course as I have far outgrown the capabilities of this machine. It was a fun project.Show Image(http://i.imgur.com/ccIdHBal.jpg)
Back in 2008 I built this little thing. Pico-ITX motherboard in an old Gamecube shell running some flavour of Linux I can't remember. At the time it did fine for what I needed; light browsing and Openoffice. I don't use it now of course as I have far outgrown the capabilities of this machine. It was a fun project.That's adorable!Show Image(http://i.imgur.com/ccIdHBal.jpg)
It was a Pico-ITX from Via. I think the idea was pretty much born and died with that board. They were hard to get and the daughterboard with extra ports was even more rare, here at least. Pretty limited, but it was a fun project. I think what we have now is so much better due to Mini-ITX being an actually supported standard.
I did end up just buying another motherboard for my mini itx build rather than purchase a Mini PC. Gigabyte this time. Noticeably better than the Aaron motherboard that died on me. Probably will never buy another asrock motherboard, just feels like a discount brand.Well it is. They're usually pretty dependable though.
I did end up just buying another motherboard for my mini itx build rather than purchase a Mini PC. Gigabyte this time. Noticeably better than the Aaron motherboard that died on me. Probably will never buy another asrock motherboard, just feels like a discount brand.Well it is. They're usually pretty dependable though.