Intel Refreshes NUCs With New Design, Kaby Lake & Thunderbolt 3

Intel’s Next Unit of Computing bare-bones systems started off with a bit of a slow start, but over the years have not only made themselves a niche, but came to the forefront of Small Form Factor computing. Mini PCs are one of the few growing desktop markets left, and it’s not hard to understand why.

While laptops serve their purpose in mobility, desktops are still the go-to device when it comes to anything ‘serious’. However, not everyone needs a lumbering huge beast of a desktop tower to do it. Intel’s NUCs can be either secured to the back of a monitor or tucked away on the corner of a desk and provide all the computational needs you could think of in a small office. The low-end Core i3 versions are especially good for small and cheap thin-clients.

As part of the desktop Kaby Lake roll-out, Intel is refreshing the NUCs to go with them. There has been a styling tweak to a gun-metal gray rather than the standard silvered aluminum, which does make them a bit on the dark side. The power button has also been moved to the front of the unit, rather than on the top.

Since Kaby Lake is mostly a clock increase over Skylake, there is not much in the way of performance improvements over the previous generation. The Core i5 and i7 versions will come with the new Iris Plus graphics, which adds 64MB of eDRAM on package, which does improve graphics handling somewhat.

Short and tall versions of the i3 and i5 still exist, denoting whether the unit supports an extra SATA drive for either another SSD or 2.5-inch hard drive. The i7 only comes in the extended form factor. Another small change is the removal of the Display Port adapter in favor of HDMI 2.0 and a USB Type-C connector. This Type-C connector works as a DP output on the i3 model, but on the i5 and i7, it’s a Thunderbolt 3 port.

The TB 3.0 port does open up the possibility of external graphics, much like it did with the Skull Canyon NUC released last year, but since the CPU is still a little 15W TDP chip, don’t expect to be able to plug-in a GTX 1080 and start playing games at 4K without issue.

Pricing is unknown, but will likely follow the same as all other NUCs in the past, typically $350, $450 and $550 for the NUC7i3BNH/K, NUC7i5BNH and NUC7i7BNK respectively (i3, i5, i7). These are bare-bones systems that require an M.2 or SATA for storage and DDR4 SO-DIMM memory.

Now if only Intel would make a dual NIC version of the NUC, then we’d have an excellent little router, without having to worry about an often temperamental USB 3.0 Gigabit Ethernet NIC.