Ten years ago, this would have been far more exciting news. However, given the quality issues Asus has been having for several years, this is not the company that should be picking up the baton. I’d have preferred to see ASRock, given their portfolio of NUC-alikes.
I have a bunch of NUC-sized AMD systems - mostly from asrock, but one from asus as well, as the asrock ones were not available at the moment.
Buying that thing yet again proved all prejudices against asus. Half the special features are not working, support is incompetent, and firmware updating is a mess - as is the documentation. asrock has a detailed description of every pin header on the board over multiple pages - while asus used that space with a detailed guide on how to find and press the power button.
I never realized until recently that a NUC is the perfect device for my aging mother-in-law. She has an old gaming desktop (sans-gpu) with a i5-4670 that is plugged up to a 1080p monitor next to her recliner chair. At some point that PC will die and these seem like a pretty meaty upgrade in a tiny box.
I got an N95 (4-core, 15W TDP, 30W system max) NUC-alike in May with 16GB of DDR4 and a 500GB SATA m.2 drive as my HTPC. Thanks to a deal + coupon, it was $99 with Win11 Pro and benchmarks about 15% lower than my erstwhile 3770K while driving 4K on the iGPU. The low end is a pretty exciting place these days … buy a Windows license, get a free PC. (I of course immediately switched to KDE Neon.)
That’s awesome and what a deal. I think my mother-in-law has at least another year or so before we need to think about swapping hardware, but these little guys make so much sense.
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