I woke up last Saturday morning with my home router, a PC Engines APU2 that had been fault free for the past four years not booting making a clicking noise. In the end it turned out to be a fault with the powers supply but I didn’t know that at the time and needed internet so purchased a Protectli Intel J6412 from Amazon as it had next day delivery and I didn’t have time to wait a few days for PC Engines support who recently announced they where closing down to get back to me or shipping a new unit from overseas. As it happens PC Engines replied very quickly on a Sunday!
Anyway the Protectli J6412 turns out to be old gen hardware, however I’ve been extremely impressed. It’s idling away running Proxmox with an Opnsense a VM, Unifi, PiHole and NGINX reverse proxy in LXC containers.
That sent me researching some more as I have an old Ryzen 2600 running as a dev server but as idling away most of the time using a good bit more power than the Protectli. That rabbit hole has lead me to Intel N100 boxes such as the CWWK n100 on Amazon/AliExpress. They look like great low powered machines if you can live with a single SSD/16GB memory. They’ll do virtualisation/proxmox, run k3s, 6w max tbp, fanless, multiple nics. Not a cheap option but also not an expensive option all things considered. They even do a N305 which looks to be on par cpu wise to my current Ryzen 2600
It seems the market for small nuc type devices is getting very good right now.
The fan kicks in under heavy load and sounds like a laptop, but if you want it completely silent you can get a new casing which is made to be fanless[2].
[1]: https://www.asus.com/us/displays-desktops/mini-pcs/pn-series...
[2]: https://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=product/product.deta...
Where NUCs become very attractive in my opinion is when you need reliability. Rpis are cute, but anyone who has ran one consistently for 6months has likely had some sort of issue. Bad SD card, random restart, or what have you. Most NUCs will not do that to you. But there are also other SBCs with a price range in between that wont either.
In Europe, the prices, with all taxes included, for an Intel NUC Pro with Raptor Lake vary from around EUR 400 for an i3 CPU with 16 GB of DRAM to around EUR 800 for an i7 CPU with 64 GB of DRAM.
Similar Chinese computers are cheaper. If one searches for a Mini-ITX MB with at least the same number of peripheral interfaces as a NUC and one adds the costs for a CPU of similar performance, for PSU, case, cooler, DRAM and a small discrete GPU, to match the performance of an integrated mobile GPU, it is impossible to build a significantly cheaper computer.
Some economies vs. a NUC can be achieved only by building an even larger computer, with a microATX or ATX MB and by omitting some of the interfaces provided by a NUC, e.g. by not having any USB 4 / Thunderbolt interfaces.
A complete NUC-like computer with a slower Alder Lake-N CPU (e.g. Intel N100) can be found at less than $200, which is a price difficult to match with any bigger computer.
Some people like to point that there are complete laptops that have the same price as NUCs. Nevertheless, those laptops are garbage that I would not use even if offered for free. A NUC is much faster than most laptops that seem to have the same components (due to better cooling) and it has more peripheral interfaces that are also faster. A laptop that matches in features and performance a $800 NUC has typically a price of at least $3000 and it is marketed as a mobile workstation or as a top model of gaming computer.
For instance, searching NUC13ANKi3 on amazon.de finds it for EUR 325 + EUR 10 for shipping.
Searching 8 GB DDR4-3200 SODIMM finds them at prices between EUR 19 (no name) and EUR 24 (Kingston or Corsair) + EUR 6 for shipping.
So the total is 325 + 10 + 24 + 24 + 6 = EUR 389 for an Intel NUC Pro with Raptor Lake i3-1315U + 16 GB DRAM, including all taxes and shipping.
A NUC13ANKi7, with Raptor Lake i7-1360P can be found at EUR 600 ... EUR 650. Adding EUR 150 for 64 GB DDR4-3200 makes EUR 750 ... EUR 800.