Specs at a glance: Intel NUC D54250WYK1 (as reviewed) OS Windows 8.1 x64 CPU 1.3GHz Core i5-4250U (Turbo Boost up to 2.6GHz) RAM 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 (supports up to 16GB) GPU Intel HD Graphics 5000 (integrated) HDD 128GB Crucial M500 mSATA SSD Networking 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, Gigabit Ethernet Ports 4x USB 3.0, 1x mini DisplayPort 1.2, 1x mini HDMI 1.4a, DisplayPort, audio Size 4.6” x 4.4” x 1.4” (116.8 x 111.8 x 35.6mm) Other perks Kensington lock Warranty 3 years Price $389.99 (barebones), $702.99 with selected components and software

A couple of months back, Intel sent us the latest version of its "Next Unit of Computing," or NUC for short.

The NUC is sort of a side-project for Intel. It's a some-assembly-required desktop computer aimed at hobbyists who like playing with new tech and building their own PCs, but who also want something that's as small as possible. It gives up much of the expandability that we've come to associate with desktops, but in exchange you get more processing power than anyone else is offering in a computer this size.

When we originally got the NUC, we asked you what kinds of things you were interested in using it for. We can't get to all of your questions, but here's a list of the ones we'll try to answer, along with some of our standard performance analyses and comparisons to an Ivy Bridge model.

What is the NUC for (and more importantly, what is it not for)?

for)? Why would you buy one instead of building your own mini PC?

What is power consumption like?

Could you use it as a mini gaming box?

How does the NUC perform as an HTPC?

Some of the other questions asked may be revisited in future articles, but these are the use cases we felt the NUC would be best-suited to.

Why buy a NUC?

More than a few of you had questions about just why one would choose to buy a NUC rather than building a mini-ITX or microATX desktop. There are a few tradeoffs to consider, but the largest one (pun intended) is size. Even among pre-built mini PCs from the OEMs, it’s difficult to find a desktop as tiny as the NUC that doesn’t use weaker, Atom-class CPUs.

System Width × Depth × Height Haswell NUC 4.6” x 4.4” x 1.4” Ivy Bridge NUC 4.6" x 4.4" x 1.55" 2012 Mac Mini 7.7" x 7.7" x 1.4" Lenovo M93P 7" x 7.17" x 1.35" M350 mini ITX case 7.55" x 8.27" x 2.44"

Comparing the NUC to a mini-ITX PC you’d build yourself makes for an even more lopsided comparison—the cheaper ITX cases are generally shoebox-ish in size. The better, more expandable ones like the BitFenix Prodigy we used to build our Steam Machine are closer to microATX-sized. Cases like the M350 exist on the smaller end of the spectrum, but they lack the readily accessible front USB or audio jacks that you might want if you’ve got the computer under your TV.

In return for its small size, the NUC requires you to give up expandability and flexibility. Current models have one connector for mSATA solid-state drives, one slot for a half-height PCI Express Wi-Fi card, two slots for laptop DDR3 DIMMs, and that's it. The Ultrabook-class CPUs used in the NUCs are all of the soldered-in, ball grid array (BGA) variety, so there are no upgrades possible there. SATA data and power ports on the motherboard point to a possible future variant with room for a 2.5-inch hard drive or SSD (or for those of you who want to pop the NUC's board in some other case, since it has the necessary headers), but there isn't room for one in the current models.

Putting together Intel's NUC. Music: "Electrodoodle" by Kevin MacLeod.

Going with a larger system (either self-built or from an OEM) opens up other possibilities, including faster quad-core desktop processors, large pools of storage, and proper PCI Express expansion slots that can be used for high-end GPUs and other peripherals. A system with even a single 2.5-inch drive bay will give you a much wider range of SSDs to choose from—mSATA drives are rarer and a little more expensive than their 2.5-inch counterparts, and certain big names like Samsung sell most of their mSATA drives to OEMs, not direct to consumers. That said, Crucial, Mushkin, Intel, and a handful of smaller players do sell mSATA drives on sites like Newegg, and their prices aren't too far off from their 2.5-inch counterparts. Capacities generally top out at 480GB as of this writing, though 1TB mSATA SSDs are on the horizon.

Capacity 2.5-inch mSATA 120GB $95 $110 240GB $150 $165 480GB $305 $320

What it's not good for

The NUC's size and the amount of performance it crams into its tiny case gave readers a lot of interesting ideas, some less plausible than others. Before going further, let's talk about some tasks the NUC just isn't suited for, based on some of your questions.

First, the NUC is emphatically not built to be a good Bitcoin miner. The best machine for this sort of work is a dedicated box like the Butterfly Labs miner we tested last year. If you insist on mining with your PC, a strong dedicated GPU is much better suited to hashing than a CPU, and Intel's integrated GPUs pale in comparison to even low-end and midrange dedicated parts. While this mining hardware comparison chart only lists Intel's last-generation HD 4000 part rather than the new HD 5000, the two are architecturally similar enough that AMD's GPUs in particular are still going to beat the NUC easily. At this late date, mining Bitcoins has become difficult enough that even a high-end GPU likely won't make you back the money you're spending on electricity—a dedicated ASIC miner is the best way to go, and something like the NUC is basically the worst way.

By the same token, the NUC won't be very good for graphics-heavy work like CAD software or high-end gaming. As we'll see soon, the NUC isn't a bad gaming box if you manage your expectations properly, but a dedicated card is still the only way to go for fluid gaming at 1080p. The NUC will do you just fine if light gaming or drafting work is one of the many things you'll use it for, but as a primary 3D workstation or gaming machine it will probably disappoint.

Next, some of you were wondering about using the NUC as a server, perhaps with some virtual machines configured to save even more space. Depending on what you wanted to use the system for, this sort of usage isn't entirely out of the question. However, two things make the NUC a less-than-perfect server: the first is storage space. Since the NUC only includes the one mSATA SSD slot, storage is expensive, and there's no way to set any kind of RAID up for redundancy's sake. Second, it has only two physical CPU cores, and if you install very many virtual machines on it they're all going to become CPU starved pretty quickly. If you install 16GB of RAM and you know your VMs just won't need a lot of CPU power, there's nothing stopping you from using it as a server box (the i5-4250U it uses supports all of Intel's virtualization extensions), but we'd hesitate to recommend it for a mission-critical production environment.

Finally, a lot of you suggested mounting the NUC to wheels or something that flies or floats, taking advantage of its small size to make something ultra-portable. What these suggestions fail to account for is the fact that the NUC uses Ultrabook-class hardware, and as we'll see, this means it features Ultrabook-esque power consumption. At this point, flying computers and makeshift robots are best left to cheaper, more power-sipping hardware like the Arduino, the Raspberry Pi, and their ilk. The NUC just isn't very well-suited for trips away from an outlet.

Bang-for-buck (or lack thereof)

The NUC is a barebones PC kit, meaning that you'll need to bring your own storage, Wi-Fi, and RAM to fill it up and make it actually work. The maximum cost of the NUC depends on which components you decide to fill it with, but the base model's MSRP is $389.99 no matter what you fill it with. A Haswell NUC with the slower HD 4400 GPU retails for $299.99, and you can spend as little as $159.99 if you step down to one of the Celeron-equipped Ivy Bridge models.

To that $390 base model we've added a 128GB Crucial M500 SSD ($110), 8GB of DDR3 laptop RAM (about $70, depending on the brand), and an Intel 7260 Wi-Fi module ($33 on eBay), chosen in part because it includes Bluetooth 4.0 in addition to a two-stream, 867Mbps 802.11ac implementation. That's all you need if you plan to build a Linux-based NUC or if you already have a Windows license you can use, but we'll add another $100 to cover an OEM license for Windows 8.1. The final price tag of $702.99 is reasonably competitive compared to other OEM systems, especially once you take Intel's three-year warranty into account.

Haswell NUC 2012 Mac Mini Lenovo M93P CPU 1.3GHz (2.6GHz Turbo) i5-4250U 2.5GHz (3.1GHz Turbo) i5-3210M 2.9GHz (3.6GHz Turbo) i5-4570T GPU HD 5000 HD 4000 HD 4600 RAM 8GB DDR3 4GB DDR3 4GB DDR3 Storage 128GB SSD 500GB HDD 500GB HDD Wi-Fi 867Mbps 802.11ac 450Mbps dual-band 802.11n Single-band 802.11n (upgrades to dual-band n and ac available) Warranty 3-year 1-year 1-year Price $702.99 $599.99 $699.00

The OEM systems give you more CPU power but less GPU power, somewhat slower Wi-Fi, less RAM, and a slower-but-larger HDD instead of an SSD. Whether a fast SSD or a large HDD is more important to your build will depend on what you're using the system for, but we tend to prefer speed to size for most use cases. Finally, it's important to remember that Intel's Turbo Boost will make the NUC's 1.3 GHz CPU run at speeds of up to 2.6 GHz if there's enough thermal headroom, making the clock speed gap feel smaller than it looks on paper for many tasks.

Pricing gets trickier if you're comparing the NUC to a home-built computer. Let's throw together a quick Haswell-based mini ITX PC just to get an idea of the tradeoffs you'll make. We'll use:

A Cooler Master Elite 130 case is reviewed reasonably well, has a good selection of front-facing ports, and is reasonably attractive. It's $50 .

. A mini ITX motherboard based on Intel's H81 chipset: pricing is all over the place for these, but you can expect to spend at least $70 on one from an OEM with a decent reputation like MSI's H81I. For $96, you could step up to Zotac's H87ITX-A-E, which has built-in Wi-Fi antennas and an integrated slot for a Wi-Fi mini card.

on one from an OEM with a decent reputation like MSI's H81I. For $96, you could step up to Zotac's H87ITX-A-E, which has built-in Wi-Fi antennas and an integrated slot for a Wi-Fi mini card. A Haswell CPU will run you at least $70 as of this writing, which will get you a 3.0GHz dual-core Pentium. This is a pretty good chip for basic work, but the nice thing about using desktop CPUs is that you could step up to something like the quad-core i5-4430 for $190 if you needed the extra power. The bad thing is that none of Intel's desktop CPUs include the HD 5000 GPU, limiting your integrated GPU's performance to barely better than Ivy Bridge levels.

as of this writing, which will get you a 3.0GHz dual-core Pentium. This is a pretty good chip for basic work, but the nice thing about using desktop CPUs is that you could step up to something like the quad-core i5-4430 for $190 if you needed the extra power. The bad thing is that none of Intel's desktop CPUs include the HD 5000 GPU, limiting your integrated GPU's performance to barely better than Ivy Bridge levels. A decent power supply: you can spend as much or as little here as you're comfortable with, though cheaping out on your PSU can have disastrous consequences. We grabbed this Antec VP-450 for our Steam Machine, which should cover you for anything up to a mid-range gaming box. It has an MSRP of $50, though right now it's going for a mere $35.

Using these components, you can build a decent Haswell-based barebones PC starting for just $225, and you can add a hefty quad-core desktop CPU and Wi-Fi-ready motherboard for $371, both less than the price of our NUC. That system's performance will usually run circles around the NUC, though graphics performance and power consumption won't be as good. A custom build will also fit an integrated DVD or Blu-ray drive, and it will be able to fit at least a couple of 2.5-inch HDDs or SSDs. What you give up are the NUC's small size and its low idle noise level—this home-built system would have the PSU and CPU fans going at the very least, plus whatever case fans you decide to hook up.

We won't price out components for a mini gaming PC here, since those of you looking for more GPU power than the HD 5000 can provide won't really be considering the NUC in the first place. If you're looking for a solid recommendation in the same ballpark as the finished NUC, our $600-ish homemade Steam Machine is a pretty well-balanced box.