New Intel NUC Gives More Power At Less Cost

January 28, 2014 by Dave Haynes

Intel has added a low-cost but more powerful version of its NUC mini-mini PCs.

The little Next Unit of Computing boxes that many digital signage companies seem to be using have been given a significant bump in graphics processing and multimedia capability using Intel’s Bay Trail Atom SoC (System On Chip) design. That’s big, because the techs I have spoken with have said the originals were slugs when it came to playing back video and motion graphics. The ones I saw in the wild last year struggled just to handle HD video.

The new NUC DN2820FYKH Kit offers a dual-core Bay Trail Celeron N2820 chip, with a 2.4GHz. The barebones starts at $128, so you are maybe double that when all kitted out with RAM, storage, etc.

Not bad at all, given the first NUCs were billed as $300 but were something like $600 once you got them all kitted.

The units can take up to 8GB of RAM and supports a 2.5-inch HDD or SSD for storage.

Specs:

• On-board Intel HD graphic
• PCIe wireless mini-card with 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, and Intel WiDi.
• Gigabit Ethernet connectivity
• one USB 3.0,
• two USB 2.0,
• one HDMI 1.4a output and a
• combo headphone/mic jack that supports 8-channel, 7.1 surround sound audio.

The unit is predictably teeny: 116.6mm x 112mm x 51.5mm, or about 4.5 inches square for the metric-impaired. It comes WITH  a power brick.