Intel NUC8i7BEH mini PC

After experimenting with various virtual machines and facing lots of weird issues, I decided to go for a dedicated hardware for the build machine. It is an Intel NUC8i7BEH.

 

Regardless how good the Intel pictures are, the first surprise one has when seeing the NUC for the first time is… how small it is: about 11 cm wide (slightly above 4″).

Thermal considerations

The first concern when using such a small machine for long builds is thermal stress. The CPU is quad core Intel i7, which is expected to generate some heat when running at full speed. The box is equipped with a fan, which seems powerful enough to take the heat out, and do this quietly enough to be acceptable in a normal room.

It should be noted however that when running at full speed, the box is occasionally throttled down for short moments, but this should not be a problem, most of the time it runs at full speed.

Headless mode

Except for the initial operating system install, the NUC works without problems in a headless mode (i.e. without monitor/keyboard/mouse), with only an Ethernet connection.

Memory

The NUC8i7BEH comes as a kit, with 2 DDR4-2400 1.2V SO-DIMM connectors, but without any memory installed.

I added two Corsair Vengeance modules (CMSX32GX4M2A2400C16), for a total of 32 GB.

Storage

Internally, the NUC has one M.2 slot with PCIe X4 lane, where I installed a very fast Western Digital WDS500G2X0C module (3,400/2,800 MB/s read/write), which gives 500 GB of space, more than enough for the current use case.

Peripherals

The NUC has an Intel Gigabit Ethernet, fully supported by GNU/Linux and Windows.

It also has a modern Thunderbolt 3 (40Gbps), several USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) and DP 1.2 via USB-C; it also includes a microSDXC card slot, dual microphones, HDMI, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, infrared.

As graphics, the NUC uses the CPU Integrated Graphics, available via HDMI 2.0a; USB-C (DP1.2).

Conclusion

After more than one month of intense usage and no problems, the NUC seems a nice addition to my development environment.