NUC required - help needed please

robfosters

robfosters

robfosters

Caporegime
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I’m looking for an NUC for my brother and I have no knowledge at all of this sector. He wants it for office work, youtube, browsing, general stuff like that. I‘d like a complete system and I have a budget of £600.

Wondering what my best options are? Do I need 16GB of RAM or is 8GB ok?

Just NUC needed with windows. No peripherals required.

Lastly, can NUC’s do very light gaming, like the Sims? TIA.
 
robfosters said:
I’m looking for an NUC for my brother and I have no knowledge at all of this sector. He wants it for office work, youtube, browsing, general stuff like that. I‘d like a complete system and I have a budget of £600.

Wondering what my best options are? Do I need 16GB of RAM or is 8GB ok?

Just NUC needed with windows. No peripherals required.

Lastly, can NUC’s do very light gaming, like the Sims? TIA.
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Depends what he means by "office work". If it's literally outlook, and word/excel/PowerPoint then you'd probably get away with 8GB being plenty.

I think some of the higher end NUCs have onboard GPUs that might be able to play some games at low settings.

I guess a question back, why a NUC and not a laptop?
 
Semple said:
Depends what he means by "office work". If it's literally outlook, and word/excel/PowerPoint then you'd probably get away with 8GB being plenty.

I think some of the higher end NUCs have onboard GPUs that might be able to play some games at low settings.

I guess a question back, why a NUC and not a laptop?
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Yep, just the MS office stuff. He’d much rather a desktop as he has his setup already and just wants to replace a tower with a much smaller unit. Instead of an NUC, are micro form factor PC’s like the Optiplex a good option?
 
You can get a Beelink with 5th gen Ryzen, 16gig RAM and a 500gig SSD for £343 (5500u) model, or £398 for the (5600H) model.
Way under budget and will breeze through the use-case you say.

Beelink seemed a bit hit-and-miss in the older gen machines, but these recent ones seem to have much better QC.
For what it's required to do, I wouldn't bother buying one with the newer 6000 series, despite the GPU being much better in it.
 
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Another vote for beelink. We bought a load for work to use as dumb VDI terminals, and they were so good I bought one myself for a plex server.

They have loads of different models. Even our cheap £90 ones ran windows and office really well, although I'd probably spend a bit more myself and have top performance.

You'd be surprised how fast this is for windows/office/internet and it's super efficient.


also look out for vouchers, you can get some good deals
 
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Another vote for Beelink… just picked up an N100 cpu S12 Pro for less than £200, 16GB memory and 500GB SSD. It’s an absolute monster for media streaming to devices, and sits nicely to run a Stream Deck v2 for some “can’t be bothered to fire up gaming PC to fiddle with lights“ situations.
 
Beelink SER6 Pro with 5600H here. Picked up on ebay for around £350, with ram, ssd and windows included. Bargain compared to what Intel charges for NUCs. Is very powerful for the size, and mostly inaudible when placed behind the monitor, unless heavy cpu load. Great machines.
 
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