- #IS INTEL SMART CONNECT TECHNOLOGY WORTH IT UPGRADE#
- #IS INTEL SMART CONNECT TECHNOLOGY WORTH IT FULL#
#IS INTEL SMART CONNECT TECHNOLOGY WORTH IT UPGRADE#
Theoretically, a tech-savvy user could double the unit’s RAM by adding an identical stick, or go whole hog and upgrade to 16GB or even 32GB of memory. There’s only one RAM module pre-installed in the NUC7i5BNH, which leaves the second slot empty. Personally I feel like 4GB of RAM is on the low side, but it’s still more than suitable for email and internet browsing, and even some light gaming, especially when combined with the i5-7260U CPU. Even though the NUC7i5BNH has all of it’s storage on a SATA spindle-disk, load times for games and other programs still feel nice and quick, because of the way Optane optimizes data retrieval and storage. The Optane Memory module is the big star here, and we’ve covered some other uses of Intel’s Optane Technology before. The NUC7i5BNH is one of the mid-range offerings in the current NUC lineup, and includes the following specs:
#IS INTEL SMART CONNECT TECHNOLOGY WORTH IT FULL#
They each came through with some sticks of SODIMM for our NUC units, so that we would have the chance to extract the best performance we could from Intel’s mini-powerhouses.įirst up on our list is the NUC7i5BNH, which is the one model we received which is a full system, meaning it includes RAM, storage, and a pre-installed copy of Windows 10 Home. We also put out the call to our friends at Crucial Memory, Corsair, and G.Skill and told them we had some NUC kits we wanted to test out, and needed hardware to help bring them to life. We’ll talk more below about each unit’s specifications, and we’ll go through a few of the many use-cases that can take advantage of a NUC’s minuscule footprint. Thanks to our partnership with Intel, we were given the opportunity to go hands-on with three of their NUC products: two different kits and one full system. While many of these cases are available separately, some third-party vendors sell full systems of their own design, all built around a genuine Intel NUC. Interestingly, a fairly substantial secondary market has sprung up focused on the construction of specialized NUC cases with enhanced and/or special purpose thermal or durability properties. Intel also offers standalone NUC motherboards, though these are mostly intended for industrial users, makers and hobbyists, and embedded solutions. The kits are much less expensive than full systems of equivalent power, and thus a tech-savvy consumer gains the flexibility to buy components that better fit their needs. Kits universally come without RAM, storage, or a preinstalled operating system. There are also NUC kits, again offering different configurations and features. Most common to the consumer electronics market are fully operational NUC systems with a variety of difference in specification. It’s also worth noting that Intel sells its NUC offerings in three main ways.
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Unlike CPUs intended for a more traditional ATX-based build, NUC processors are hard-soldered to the mainboard, and thus aren’t intended to be installed, uninstalled, nor swapped out by the end-user. Currently, Intel produces NUCs with ATOM™, Celeron™, Pentium™, and all three main variants of Core™ ultra-low power (U) processors. Intel has been producing NUCs for years, and as such, the CPUs in these units have evolved in tandem with Intel’s mainline processor development, all the way up to 7th generation (as of this article’s publication).
NUCs almost uniformly use 260-pin SODIMM memory modules, and the latest ones support DDR4 memory. Modern NUC models commonly have one or more M.2 slots, and can also often accommodate a 2.5” SATA storage drive. Indeed, many of the same technologies that have allowed laptops to shrink in size and increase in performance are leveraged in the design of the NUC. In hardware terms, it might be simplest to think of a NUC as a laptop, minus the built-in screen and battery. While pluralizing NUC as “Next Unit of Computing s” is odd if you think about it too much, NUCs is the accepted parlance. The acronym NUC stands for Next Unit of Computing, which perhaps purveys the idea that in the near future, home computers could become this small as a matter of standard. Let’s start with the basics: NUC is Intel’s designation for their ultra-small self-contained personal computers.
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However, that doesn’t really explain what a NUC is, or what one is capable of.