Small case build - is it do-able?

gonegreynow

gonegreynow

gonegreynow

Associate
Joined
30 Nov 2013
Posts
28
Morning all,
Any help would be very much appreciated.
The last build was several years ago. Midi tower, mini ATX, graphics card, etc.
I now need to update and I am thinking about a PC which functions as a full desktop (not too bothered about a large graphics card) but which is small/light enough to be moved between rooms when needed. I don’t want to be lugging a heavy tower up and down stairs and I’m not a laptop person.
My main thinking here is photo editing, where it would be great to move the PC into the lounge, plug it into the TV and sit in my comfortable chair.
In many ways, the most obvious option would perhaps be to get a Mac mini m4 but being a windows user, I just can’t face the prospect of learning to use Mac OS from scratch.
So I’ve looked at NUCs (Asus and MSI) and wonder if the integrated graphics is good enough to run Lightroom.
I seem to be going round and round in circles, not knowing what to do for the best.
Any help/guidance/straight talking would be much appreciated.
Happy to spend the cash but can’t afford to make a silly mistake.
Thanks
 
I bought a BOSGame P4 Plus a while back. It's got an 8 core 16 thread CPU and pretty reasonable integrated GPU (it'll run Unreal Engine fine). Would be plenty for Lightroom. Mac Mini M4 is a beast. The newer Asus/MSI, Beelink etc. NUCs would also be fine.

I've got a Mac Air as well as my PC and honestly switching between the two is not that big a deal. Main difference is a couple of keyboard shortcuts which I should probably just unify to stop the annoyance!

There's really no need to end up in decision paralysis on this....NUC-scale hardware is pretty commoditised now and any of the £300+ ones are going to work fine for your use cases. Just avoid the real low-power N100/N150 which are more designed to sip power on home servers/NAS setups, than deliver desktop performance.
 
The biggest problem with small builds historically (IMO) was that they were pain to wire, configure etc because there was so little space to jam your fingers in.

If you're buying a NUC then that's all resolved. You can fit plenty of power into a small form factor.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom