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Review on πŸ–₯️ Intel NUC 8 Mainstream Kit (NUC8i3BEH) - Core i3, Tall, Additional Components Required by Darryl Pendall

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Small but not silent

The problem with i7-nucs is that they are small but not silent. This generation will not fix it. For all normal tasks like watching YouTube, working in the office or really light gaming, it's reasonably quiet and stays around 40 degrees. with annoying fan noise. The single best solution I've found to deal with the noise is to disable TurboBoost in the BIOS. For example, I have a Python script that does some data analysis. Without turbo, it ran quietly for around 19 minutes at a pack temperature of 50 degrees (ambient temperature was 23 degrees). With the turbo on, it only lasted 11 minutes, but at the expense of hitting 90 degrees with a very loud fan. Also remember that if you want to analyze the performance of your code, you still need to disable TurboBoost to get reproducible results. You can also look to Akasa to release their cases for the new 28W Nuc to see if they offer better cooling. .Now for Linux compatibility, in my case it is OpenSUSE. As usual with nuc's (and all other PCs I've had), the microphone hisses from the 3.5 mm jack socket. This can be solved with a USB microphone/headset, I personally use a Logitech H800 (+ it's wireless). What's new to me is that the Wi-Fi map doesn't show up on the first boot after the Nuc shuts down. I have to restart it for it to appear, don't know what the problem is yet. Last note. If you want to use hardware encryption for an NVMe drive, I don't think the BIOS supports it yet. But there are software solutions like LUKS on Linux.

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Cons
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