A few years back, Intel noticed that fewer and fewer people were interested in buying traditional PCs which left the market for them in a precarious state. As the sales continued to decline, Intel decided to mix the best of both worlds which ultimately gave rise to the miniaturization trend with the evolution of computing platforms, their new line of NUC computers is the result of that experiment.
However, what Intel NUC is exactly and other related products? Keeping the confusing acronyms aside, Intel's tiny little boxes are barebone desktop computer called NUCs that are typically tiny and modular. NUC stands for Next Unit of Computing. To begin with, it all started when the first Intel NUC launched known as the Sandy Bridge processor. Since Sandy Bridge, every generation of NUC has seen multiple NUCs based on corresponding U series processors and Intel's Skylake is no different.
The Intel NUC mini products can be the ultimate choice for any tech geek or gaming freak who wants to make the leap from laptop to tablet or desktop but does not have space or because of financial constraints and work commitments is not able to buy a whole desktop system and set up according to their needs and requirements.
Intel NUC Skylake
Note that, Intel NUCs all products have been barebones machines, which means the end-user can choose appropriate storage media, operating system, storage drives, carry replaceable lids for possible customizations, and much more.
Since the size of the PC market has been decreasing in the past few years, however, Intel when it comes to their PC divisions has always been able to cope up with the existing trends and find ways to maintain their profitability. The Skylake processor was introduced when they released their 4th generation NUC code known as 'Swift Canyon', which features the series of processors known as 'SkyLake' with the latest 6th generation Intel core. Plus, the SkyLake processors are U-series ones that can be commonly found in Ultrabooks and portable AIOs. The SkyLake NUCs are the first UUFs PC that moved over to DD4 memory for the very first time with these series. PCIe 3.0 and M.2 SSDs are supported in particular.
Though it does not come with any pre-installed OS. However, drivers can be bought online from reputable vendors. The power you can get out of NUC usually depends and can vary on the type of unit you want to opt for. In general, the barebones NUCs are fairly limited on the number of ports they can hold, to add extra features there is always a requirement for replaceable lids to equip them with extra features you require.
Other NUC Products
Because of the factors like tiny and modular, no NUC products come with an optical drive, nor do they come with a pre-installed OS that is a ready out-of-the-box version of windows. However, when it comes to selecting products Intel offers various options. If you think will it work for on-the-go professionals, the answer is definitely a yes. These work best if you are constantly traveling and need a powerful PC that you can tow along with you when you need a big display for your upcoming presentation or just to pull of the functions like editing videos that a regular laptop may not be able to handle.
If you are planning to get any of the Intel products, be sure that you acquire the licensed copy of the operating system. And then the question you need to answer is what you want it to do for you. Do you require a capable machine that only handles the processing of media and to perform your daily computing tasks or also load the device with a little gaming on the side while experiencing the beauty of some 4K content? As anyone doing the math out there, you might have perhaps figured out what is exactly needed with all the extra ports that can make your tasks easier and handle ever more demanding applications.