NUC thoughts

~ nelsonminar

I put together my new home media server. This is my first time working with a tiny Intel NUC, here’s some thoughts. See also this review.

Hardware install

  • The core hardware kit is very nicely designed.
  • There’s a lot of ports. 4 USB, HDMI, Ethernet, Thunderbolt / USB C, analog audio.
  • Building it is easy, way easier than building a custom PC. Case, power supply, motherboard, CPU are all already assembled. All you need to do is plug in RAM and an SSD and an optional spinning drive.
  • Installing the RAM is super easy. Just be sure and get SODIMMs (laptop RAM) and not regular DRAMs like some friend of mine I heard about did.
  • Plugging in the SSD is a little fiddly because you have to anchor it with a tiny screw. It looks like the screw could get trapped underneath the motherboard. It’s too bad they didn’t come up with some clip solution for it.
  • Installing the hard drive is very easy too. There’s a nice tray that pulls out. Also requires screws, but these are much less fiddly.
  • The case is very nice. The power supply brick is pretty good.
  • There are fancy blinkenlights on the front of the case you can configure, including driving via software.

It was pretty easy to put the NUC together but I’d consider paying $50-$100 to someone to pre-select and install all the hardware for me. System76 will do that but for more like $300, at least for the system I priced out.

Software, BIOS

  • The Arch Linux page on NUCs has some useful info.
  • Ubuntu 18’s server installer kernel doesn’t seem to include a driver for the WiFi. It only recognizes the onboard ethernet adapter at install time. Once installed though there’s a iwlwifi driver that seems to work. I didn’t bother trying to configure it.
  • By default the fan is running even when idle in the BIOS screen. This seems to be a particular problem with the i5 NUCs but you can adjust the settings in the BIOS to let it run hotter and quieter. I put it in the “quiet” preset which isn’t too aggressive but seems to let the fan spin down when idle and keep the CPU at about 36C.
  • lm-sensors doesn’t detect a lot of useful info, just basic CPU temperature. No fan speed and apparently it’s impossible because the interface is Intel proprietary.
  • It boots really fast. Like < 20 seconds from power on to ssh login.

Transcoding performance, GPU encoding, temperature

  • Plex supports hardware acceleration of video transcoding but it requires you be a paying subscriber, which I’m not.
  • I think general Linux hardware support for video encoding is enabled via libva but it’s complicated. I got as far as verifying with vainfo that it can use “Intel i965 driver for Intel(R) Kaby Lake – 2.1.0”. I didn’t test ffmpeg, that would be the next thing to do.
  • With software encoding Plex converts 1080p HEVC to 1080p H.264 just fine. It bursts up to 400% CPU at the start and then seems to settle down around 180% CPU. Fine for a single stream, wouldn’t work for 10.
  • CPU temperatures when transcoding vary from +50.0°C to +78.0°C. The fan is definitely running but is not very loud at all, I’d be fine with it sitting on my desk.
  • I don’t have my power meter but this review says the machine takes 13-50W.