Not all that long ago, if you had asked me about PCs for your office, I would have told you to build some small-form-factor desktop boxes. These days, I recommend you just throw some NUCs on the backs of your monitors. The NUCs based on Intel's low-power SoCs are quiet, power-efficient, and surprisingly quick. That should be especially true of the company's latest NUC7JY series based on Gemini Lake SoCs.

The NUC7JY kits are mini-PCs that include the NUC7JYB boards inside. There are three separate boards, and as such there are also three separate kits. Two of the boards differ only in the SoC onboard: the NUC7CJY models have the Celeron J4005 soldered on, while the NUC7PJY model has the Pentium Silver J5005. That Celeron is a dual-core 10-W SoC that runs at 2 GHz and can turbo to 2.7 GHz. Meanwhile, the Pentium Silver J5005 is a quad-core CPU with a starting clock of 1.5 GHz and a turbo clock of 2.8 GHz. Both chips have Gen 9.5 graphics, although the Intel UHD Graphics 605 IGP in the Pentium chip has 18 execution units to the 12 in the UHD Graphics 600 inside the Celeron.

Intel will sell these NUCs in varying states of completeness. All of the kits come with the system board, case, and power adapter, and base models will need aftermarket storage and memory. Unfortunately, there's still no M.2 socket on these. You'll have to make use of a SATA device in the 2.5" bay instead. The Celeron-based NUC7CJY boards and kits also come in a version with a 32 GB eMMC module on board. If you buy one of those more complete kits, you'll get the case and power adapter along with a pre-installed 4-GB DDR4 SO-DIMM and a copy of Windows 10.

All of the new NUCs have Gigabit Ethernet ports, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. The Ethernet connection is powered by a ubiquitous Realtek 8111-series chip, while the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are run off a soldered-down Intel 9462 chip. The Consumer IR (CIR) port is still hanging around, and there's an SD card reader as well. These NUCs have finally dropped the old VGA connector and now offer a pair of HDMI 2.0a ports. The only other audio connections are a 3.5-mm combo jack on the front and a mini-TOSLINK optical connection on the back.

These NUCs are so new that there's no product page for them on Intel's website—only the datasheet linked above. Obviously, they're also not for sale yet. While we don't have any hard information, we wouldn't expect these machines to go for much more than the previous-generation low-power NUC kits.