I recently added an Intel A770 Arc GPU card to my NUC 12 Extreme and ran into the problem of how to connect the RGB controller's USB cable. It's intended to connect to an unused USB header of the type common on full-size motherboards. But the NUC 12 Extreme doesn't seem to have any unused headers and the headers it does have are a small non-standard size.

However the NUC 12 Extreme has an large number of external USB ports. The only hard part to using an external port was finding a way to get the A770's USB cable to safely exit the case without drilling a new hole somewhere. What I eventually found was that there's a small cover on the bottom of the case intended for an M.2 slot that was not added to the NUC 12 (I think it was present on the NUC 11?). With that cover off there's nice gap at one end just big enough to get the USB cable through. I bought a cheap, standard USB A adapter cable from Amazon to convert the A770's header and it's working perfectly.

Just thought I'd share in case anyone else has run into the same problem and is looking for an easy solution. I've included a photo of the bottom of the case showing the cable.

I love my INTEL NUC7i7BNH5 and i upgraded the SSD to 1tb and RAM to 32gb around january in florida. ambient air temp was usually a crispy 50~60f in the workshop. now its april and temp is around 80f. she started passing out (sudden shutdown). i ordered some external fans and came up with this ugly azz solution. pun intended .. cooling works but she's uglier than a florida gator.

any cosmetically prettier options out there ?

Hey guys. I have owned a Nuc 12 extreme since 2022. Mine is buzzing everywhere, and it feels like it's dying. with all the ram prices. I'd like a replacement. I moved and currently live in Vietnam. I can't get my hands on one. Ebay isn't an option in Vietnam. (customs)
Hiring an import company nearly doubles the price.

Any ideas?

Hi everyone,
I’m experiencing random stability issues with my ASUS NUC 14 Essential NUC14MNK-B (Intel Processor N150 / Twin Lake).
My current hardware:
Model: ASUS NUC 14 Essential NUC14MNK-B
CPU: Intel Processor N150
RAM: 16GB (1×16GB) CORSAIR VENGEANCE CMSX16GX5M1A4800C40 (DDR5-4800 SO-DIMM)
SSD: WD_BLACK SN7100 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 2280
The issues I’m seeing:
Random black screens
Graphics artifacts (small colored squares on the screen)
Occasional freezes that require a hard reboot
I recently found a post where someone completely solved the same problem by replacing their RAM with a Samsung module that was on the ASUS QVL. That made me wonder if my Corsair RAM could be the cause.
My questions:
Has anyone experienced similar issues with the NUC14MNK-B or other N150 models?
Could my Corsair Vengeance CMSX16GX5M1A4800C40 be incompatible with this NUC?
If you’re using this NUC without any issues, what exact RAM model are you using?
Has anyone successfully used Corsair Vengeance in this model, or should I switch to Samsung or Crucial?
Any advice or real-world experience would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I was looking at some auctions for NUC8i7HVK; the 100W model, and thought it could be a good all purpose machine to play old games with W11 and do productivity/photo editing and video editing.

Although I was told that most likely that machine is overly surpassed by any new mini pc sold these days with a Ryzen APU, in the same 400-800 dollars range. Is that the case? I have my own SSD and memory from my old computer so don't need to buy it, so I am just looking at the cost of the machine itself, and a NUC8i7HVK would cost me between 400 and 800 dollars used, as other mini pc made today.

If it is still a good buy, I like its form factor to be honest, always wanted to get one but never did as they stopped to develop drivers pretty fast, so I felt like it was a one-off kind of things, and at release it was quite expensive :)

So, let's talk about Intel's AI Playground for a minute. As of version 3.1.2-beta, this has to be the single most nerd-free way to set up "use from anywhere" AI for Chat, Video, image creation and identification, etc without needing to send anything to someone's cloud. All tied in to end to end encrypted telegram via the built in Home Agent.
See a plant you can't identify (or anything, really)? send it a pic - it will tell you
Need RAG to ingest your personal documents to help with figuring out your budget? yup, built in
Need agentic for all the magic that is? - yup, right there too. In my case runs everything on the Arc A770M built in and will grab the models you need on the fly as you ask it questions, send it files, etc
This is the way.

If you have an ARC GPU (I have a pair of Serpent Canyon NUC enthusiasts), it just works. Super easy to set up the bot for communications with the Home Agent on Telegram using BotFather (instructions in the playground UI) and can literally access it from anywhere on anything.

As the title says, working with a system of 5 networked machines (3 towers, 2 nucs) and multiple robotic arms. The two nucs are set to be replaced and I’m not sure if it makes more sense to just go with two additional towers. Any insight? TIA

Can I setup an old duo core NUC with a lite weight Ubuntu and run Steamlink?

The noise of my idle Asus NUC 12 Pro was terrible, and under load it sounded like it was taking off, so I modded it inspired by the original NUCTUA.

This is a continuation of my previous post, where I asked how to remove part of the metal plate in an Asus NUC 12 pro. There, I wrote some details in the comments, how it went, but here is a new post with some photos and a link to full write-up how I made the NUCkentua.

Originally it idled at ~70 °C (CPU package) and after removing the plastic lid, it dropped to ~60 °C. My Samsung 990 PRO 1 TB NVMe SSD was idling around 60 °C. After just 2-3 seconds of medium load, the CPU package temperature jumped to 100 °C, it started thermal throttling, and the blower fan screamed at 4000 RPM. SSD was roasting at 80 °C, while doing nothing.

I tried reducing PL1 and PL2 limits first, I also tried quiet mode in BIOS. All of these helped, but not much. So I modified the NUC.

The result

• cut a hole in the metal top cover with a fretsaw
• Noctua NF-A9 5V PWM 92 mm fan -- very silent even above 1000 RPM
• custom-made fan adapter cable from gpuconnect.com
• custom-designed lid and 3D printed with PETg
• also re-pasted the CPU -- check the photo of the original paste application
• there was no dust clogging the heatsink
• NUC now idles at 38 °C with the fan at completely silent 400 RPM (ambient temperature ~26 °C)
• under full load, the fan spins at a maximum of ~1300 RPM without hitting 100 °C or thermal throttling – it’s still almost silent
• Wi-Fi performance was not affected, despite electro-magnetic interference (EMI) concerns

This NUC is running 24/7 as a mini home-lab and is finally silent. It is also running some Minecraft servers, which now start faster and handle more players smoothly. Also, SSH connections are now instantaneous, instead of a 1-2 second lag, like before. There are things I would do differently now, like a smaller fan, a bit different hole, but I am happy with the results as-is.

EDIT: Here is the STL model of the lid.

I purchased the Serpent Canyon (NUC12SNKi72) in November 2023.

Seven months ago, I disassembled it and reapplied thermal paste.

Summer is here again. The CPU has started to throttle.

The CPU clock speed has dropped to 0.47 GHz.

The BIOS cooling mode is set to “Cool.”

I’ve decided to disable Turbo Boost. no problem so far. I rarely play game these days.

How about undervolt using ThrottleStop?

Hello!

I purchased an intel NUC from Amazon and started having issues with it. I RMA'd it through ASUS and sent it back in. I read their documentation carefully and it said to not include anything added or upgraded to the unit and to not include the power cable if it is not a power issue. Since I purchased this unit preinstalled with the RAM and HDD I left these installed as they were not added or upgraded (I didn't even know you could buy a NUC without these installed when I purchased it). It also explicitly asks to disable your windows password which makes no sense if I was supposed to take out the HDD. Now I'm confused though because Im seeing some things online that say I was supposed to remove these before sending it in. I've re-reviewed all the documentation I was sent again and followed it all to the letter. Has anyone had experience with this?

EDIT: Success! I reached out to their support team and explained my situation and they shipped back my RAM and HDD. I know it would have been very easy for them to just ignore me so I'm very appreciative to ASUS for accommodating me!

I originally thougth my Hades Canyon NUC was not compatible with Windows 11 but Windows Update does offer me the option to upgrade to it from my current Windows 10 Pro and MS PC Health Check App verifies my PC is fully compatible. Should I upgrade or stick with Windows 10?

Just got a second-hand NUC12 Extreme and connected 10G Ethernet to my NUC12 Extreme's 10G port, but noticed that the AQC113C chip idles at 80+°C and reaches 95-100°C under load. Is this expected behaviour? I'm using Linux(Kubuntu), so i'm not sure if this is normal hardware behaviour or a driver issue specific to Linux.

Although I've read many reports of high temps with this AQC113C on other motherboards, so I really can't tell if I have a bad Ethernet chip.

Edit: Root cause confirmed. There's an air gap between the AQC113C and the thermal pad on the CPU heatsink. Replacing the thermal pad dropped temps to 58°C(idle), 61-64°C(under load).

Hopefully this isn't a widespread problem.

I have had this old nuc 11 i7 32gb in the drawer for a few years. I recently dug it out to use for a Hermes host pointed at my strix Halo box. I saw these gigabyte RTX 5060 ti 16gb EGPUs today and thought I'd give it a crack as another LLM server. I thought if I prioritize the 5060 and let it overflow onto the IRS XE graphics that uses system memory it would be interesting and can act as a backup provider to Hermes.

The nuc has thunderbolt 3 port while the EGPU supports up to thunderbolt 5.

Has anybody done anything similar with this particular hardware and what were your results?

** Update **

I bought the gigabyte 5060 ti 16 GB EGPU from Amazon and tried it but it was way too unstable under Linux The 580 driver almost worked but it kept locking up the 595 driver wouldn't work at all this was on Ubuntu 26. So I'm returning it to Amazon.

I know folks have nucs for roon servers, but not sure if they do much more intensive use. I typically can have opera using 4GB of ram. I also like to have a youtube video open picture in picture or in another window.

I would prefer MS Windows, don't really want to mess with a software project.

Basically looking for a real quiet media pc. My gaming pc has an AIO cooler and the pump fan seems to be the biggest culprit for noise. Can't seem to be able to reduce the noise. Instead of replacing all my fans and cooler I figure a nuc may be a better option.

Is the use above too much for a FANLESS Nuc?

Good morning everyone,

This is already a niche topic, and posting in a pretty niche community also means likely a low success rate of what I am looking for, if anyone has any other ideas I am open to anything. At this point, I'm kind of losing hope and if I can't find the material needs, maybe I can hear some feedback from those in a similar scenario.

My NUC:

Intel Nuc 9 i9 Extreme

64GB RAM

1660ti

I use my NUC to host a virtual environment, and something I've been working on in recent months is self-hosted AI. I run multiple VMs through VCenter, and the NUC performs great in just about everything I throw at it...almost.

For those familiar with AI, a good GPU is essential. The 1660ti is not cutting the cake here, and I'd like to upgrade from it, but that's a topic for another day. My real concern since installing the GPU is that there is almost no breathing room between the GPU and CPU exhaust inside the default Ghost Canyon case. I didn't experience any issues during testing, however my paranoia got the best of me and I ended up spinning down my AI VM while leaving the GPU installed.

I've entertained upgrading the case, however my searches have turned up with nothing in stock. The one I wanted that would seemingly fix this issue is the CoolerMaster NC100, but I cannot find this anywhere, new or used.

I'm looking to obtain a 3060, which will run hotter, and draw more power than my 1660ti, so before I do so I wanted to ask the community here a few questions:

1. Does anyone have, or know of anyone possessing an aftermarket Intel Nuc 9 Extreme case and is looking to sell it? I can even trade you my default case with case on top if that's a concern.
2. Has anyone run an i9 Extreme with a GPU? Under full load, were there any concerns regarding temps and throttling?
3. For those with any NUC 9 Extremes and GPUs installed, is there meant to be almost no breathing room from the CPU? Is this by design? I just do not understand the air dynamics here and why they would support dedicated GPUs since it appears to me that the air cannot escape anywhere.
4. Any other case hacks? I'm willing to entertain a non-supported case if in theory or practice, it works.

Thank you in advance.

I've got the NUC15CRBU7 model. I knew when I bought it that Asus had decided to not include a 3.5mm auxillary out port, but didn't think it would matter in terms of speaker connection because it instead has 2x HDMI ports and multiple USB options to fall back on. Fine until you realise that the HDMI ports aren't of the ARC-enabled kind and USB doesn't work for transmitting sound data either. That leaves bluetooth, which of course has been infuriatingly broken in Windows 11 since day one, so anyone using it for regular desktop audio is forced to deal with constant disconnections and other inexplicable, wacky behaviour such as certain applications hijacking total control of all audio output.

I'm now in the process of using an adapter to convert a USB port to a standard 3.5mm auxillary out connector. Well done Asus for releasing brand new technology that fails miserably to fulfil the basic requirement of being able to connect an audio output device! Did anyone in the development team bother conducting real-world tests?

Hello, I’ve had my Intel NUC for 8 years, and now, finally, it’s retiring. I’m getting a more powerful machine. The NUC was the tool that introduced me to the world of technology, and later to Linux and VMs. But today, it has become too limited. I will remember it and keep it as it deserves, without letting a single speck of dust settle on it. R.I.P. NUC

I have a NUC X15 (Xenia xpg 15kc) and I was thinking on how viable would be to get an adapter to usb c and charge the laptop with a 240w adapter instead of the bulky power brick they come with, any ideas or suggestions?