Intel NUCs for Development

Intel has been creating these little machines called NUC, Next Unit of Computing, for more than a few years. I purchased my first one last year, the NUC7PJYH, which has the quad-core Pentium Silver. I built it out with 2x4GB 2400Mhz RAM and a 256GB Samsung 850 EVO only running various flavors of Linux. This little machine has been a dream, the small size combined with the rock solid support for Intel products in the Linux kernel has made it a pleasure to use to perform work. It has HDMI 2.0 and can drive my LG 34in Ultrawide 3840 x 1440 without any issue, all ports are USB 3.0, and a Thunderbolt port. It’s also very quiet and doesn’t produce any noise. I plan to take the NUC7PJYH and install a server Linux distro. I will configure it to be a TeamCity server as I want to be able to perform my own local builds. I will post back on that once I get completed.

However, I have decided to step up my game and start producing video content which is going to require more RAM and a little more processing power than the NUC7PJYH can muster. I wanted a small form factor, and I was considering an ITX build or the ASRock DeskMini A300. With either of those, I would have gone with the Ryzen 5 2400G. After some consideration, I decided that the NUC was a great size and that is what I wanted. After looking around I decided to go with the NUC8i5BEK, the 8th gen Core i5 is a 4 core, 8 thread processor that has the Intel Iris Plus 655 graphics which would be equivalent to the Ryzen 5 2400G. I decided to go a little crazy, so I picked up 2x16GB RAM 2400Mhz RAM along with a 256GB M.2 NVMe drive. I have been using it a week, and I have to say that it is everything that I wanted, it has more speed and power than I could have thought in such a small package. I am running Xubuntu 19.04 as my OS. Overall, I would highly recommend anyone wanting a small form factor machine to consider the Intel NUC line up.