I wanted to wait until after I had this product for a couple of days to get a feel for it, and that time has now elapsed.
I will likely re-visit this review in the future, due to some minor expected issues due to it being a new product.
For what this system is, it is incredible. This is a complete system (including windows 10 license), with everything you need to get started.
And, it is upgradeable, which for most use cases I would highly recommend pursuing.
I was quite surprised at how well the system ran with just the included 2GB of ram. When I had the system connected to a 1080P display, I did not have many complaints with the 2GB, however I could tell some things were a bit sluggish than they otherwise should be and memory usage hovered very close to maximum.
Switching over to my 4K tv, though, and I REALLY will need more. (I have placed an order for two 4GB sticks to max this system out while getting the speed advantage of dual-channel. You could also go with a single stick of 8GB for a huge boost, you would just be missing out on the interleaving gains).
Basically, when using 4K output, especially when attempting to play videos, I was seeing dropped frames any time I did anything as intensive as moving my mouse. When everything except the video was still, the system was fine, using very little processing power despite playing 4K video.
And about that 4K video out. This is a bit of a caveat at present, but in another month or two I expect this to have been resolved.
If you use Microsoft's Edge browser, you will have no worries. Hardware accelerated VP9 (youtube) and HEVC (everything else 4K) will work just fine. If you use Chrome, however, you will need to do a workaround to force the browser to use hardware acceleration. I am not going to get into the details of how to do this, but know that there has already been a code commit to unrestrict this, it is just a matter of waiting for it to filter into the released version of the browser.
(This restriction on VP9 decoding in Chrome had been put in place from the Skylake generation of CPUs, which for a time supported a hybrid GPU/CPU decode for this codec. It turns out it was very buggy, and so Intel recently removed support for it from the driver, but not before Chrome took their own step of blacklisting accelerated VP9 decode on all Intel graphic chipsets.)
It is worth noting that even before I took the steps to force-enable the VP9 decoding in chrome, the system was able to mostly handle up to 1080P 60FPS content with very few drops. 4K, however, definitely required the hardware acceleration for smooth playback.
Other than the small amount of included RAM, the other obvious limitation on this system is in the included disk, which is actually effectively seen as an internal MMC card. This means serialized writes and relatively poor performance. I have not benchmarked it specifically, but the flashing activity light was very prolonged in its activity while I had it as my primary storage.
I was fairly quick to install a SATA SSD in the system and clone the internal storage to it. Since then, disk activity has gone way down and responsiveness has increased.
During my install of the SSD, I ran into an issue that surprised me from an Intel system. Specifically, I was unable to get the BIOS to detect an external USB CD drive as a boot device.
Routinely when I use a new system, I will boot to a Linux live cd to clone the disk image for backup purposes.
I tried two different optical drives, both of which I have recently used successfully in other systems, and in both cases this new NUC could not see them, despite selecting appropriate BIOS options to enable legacy booting.
I ended up using a bootable thumb drive to accomplish my disk cloning task, so the USB booting in general clearly DOES work.
I would expect this USB CD boot issue to be resolved with a future BIOS update. (The system as I received it included version 0027, but I upgraded it to the latest 0029. I experienced the CD issue with both releases.)
I will revisit this review after I upgrade to dual channel 8GB ram, as I expect that will greatly improve things.
My only other experience with NUCs is a skylake-generation i3 NUC (NUC6i3SYH). That NUC clearly has a more powerful processor than this one, as evidenced by it software decoding 1080P 60FPS vp9 with lower than 50% processor usage, whereas this one pegs out and drops a few frames attempting to do the same. (As I mentioned earlier in my review, this won't be an issue anymore in the near future as more programs get updated to take advantage of the hardware accelerated decoding, however it does show a limitation regarding other cpu-intensive tasks.)
The included wifi module worked perfectly, seeing both my 5ghz and 2.4ghz networks.
For remote control, I paired it with a
Logitech Wireless Touch Keyboard K400 Plus
Again, I went with 5 stars not because this product is perfect, but because the only issues I have currently experienced are perfectly expected for a system at this price point that is brand new to market. Additionally, I expect the issues that it does have will be addressed in the near future. This is also coming from the perspective of intending to use this system as a media center on a 4K television. If I were expecting to use this system for gaming or as a daily driver, I would likely have come to a different conclusion.
| Standing screen display size | 21 Inches |
|---|---|
| Graphics Coprocessor | Intel Integrated Graphics |
| Card Description | Integrated |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 1 GB |
| Wireless Type | 802.11ac |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 2 |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 4 |
