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Old July 18th 19, 06:22 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware
Peter Jason
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Posts: 160
Default Scrapping mid & large-tower cases?

On Wed, 17 Jul 2019 20:08:46 -0400, John McGaw
wrote:

On 7/17/2019 6:51 PM, Peter Jason wrote:
Due to unreliability problems I'm scrapping my old units & going over
to Barebones computers. I have one already operating with an M2 drive
& a 500GB SSD.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us...-kits/nuc.html

Is there any fundamental problem with these small units? Are the
classical tower machines any better?


I've been building and using Shuttle "Cube" computers for years now but
they are, obviously, huge compared to those little NUC machines. I guess
how "good" any computer is depends on what you intend to do with it. If you
need massive heatsinks and cooling for overclocked gaming with multiple
GPUs you will obviously need a correspondingly huge case. On the other hand
if you are doing lightweight tasks a tiny computer is probably more than
anybody will need. I find that the Shuttle machines are a good in-between
solution since they will allow a double-wide graphics card and their
built-in cooling is very efficient with a reasonably-rated CPU.

Except for internal storage I'd think that one of the Intel NUCs would make
a great home theater computer but if media is stored on the network that
would eliminate the storage problem. My home theater computer is in a
half-height case and has a 6tB hard drive and SSD. I finally had to give in
to the inevitable and start putting media file on the network as the 6tB
got too full.


I am not a gamer so I've not pushed things to the limit. I do not
notice any change in performance in reading photos or videos. The
only further adjustment I must make is for a stand-alone optical drive
enclosure.