Despite everything that we had read, we were all pretty astonished when we opened the box!
OK – so Intel have done something pretty novel (geeky!) with the box – what about the rest?
The size is remarkable. We all know that componentary is getting smaller and smaller, but I hadn’t really appreciated the significance of that. When you buy a laptop in particular, you have no real idea of the size of anything on the inside. The NUC 128GB SSD is 5cm x 2cm and less than 1cm thick. The wireless/bluetooth module is smaller than a large postage stamp!
The instructions are really clear and it is easy to assmeble. We have gone for an i5 device with 8GB RAM, HDMI, display port and USB3.0 ports.
This is really an office machine come server, so we were mainly interested in being able to hook additional storage to it. At the same time we ordered a 1TB external USB3.0 drive so instantly increased the capacity for less than $150.
The internal graphics card manages to support 2 displays with ease and the performance is more than adequate for accessing Office 365 and using our everyday tools. HDMI provides audio through the LCD monitor.
The completed unit is very smart – only a little larger than the USB drive! For scale we have added a New Zealand $1 coin!
We’ve installed Windows 8 Pro on it and it is now ready for use. Our next question is whether we establish private cloud access to it using CloudLocker? Perhaps that is next weeks new toy!?
– Neil