[lhl]

Most of these MiniPC companies like Beelink, Minisforum, Morefine, etc are small Shenzen-based operations so personally I wouldn't expect much in terms of support (whether it's BIOS updates or warranty). If you're going to get one, I'd recommend ordering from Amazon or somewhere local you can easily return it if it's DOA, or going for a more established brand w/ a local distributor/support (Asus, Gigabyte, HP, Lenovo all ship AMD minipc models).

[paulmd]

Also, while I know this is a personal values judgement, Intel does a pretty good job with the NUCs (at least the mainstream 4x4 line) and given the SFF form factor involved, there is value in being the "mainstream product".

Things like good power management are not a given on competing products, I routinely see the "clones" coming in with 5-10w higher idle power (which is like, double) than the first-party product (most recently Atlas Canyon vs the third-party Tremont clones). Intel is selling to big corporate customers who care a lot about wasting 5W here and 10W there and they took the time to squeeze that.

Also (and this is a more general problem) Intel actually took the time to make the wireless work properly. I've had good bluetooth on exactly three products: intel macbooks, apple silicon macbooks, and intel NUCs. This cuts across cheap/premium, even my Dell Latitude coffee lake laptop from my last job had problems - the keyboard would disconnect, or get stuck repeating a key over and over again. Part of it is that the Intel Wireless chipsets are notoriously bad... but Intel and Apple seem to be able to make them work, so.. To be clear I did have some occasional issues on my NUC but it was way way better than the laptop or any other machine I've ever used (including motherboard wifi with external antenna placed close, dongles on usb 2.0, dongles placed close, etc). On a USFF machine like a NUC that's kind of an important thing, the odds of users using wifi or bluetooth is much higher and it needs to be reliable.

Finally, if you are ever planning to do anything custom/fancy it's potentially nice to have the standardized product. You can get things like plug an OpenUPS directly into the aux power header on the NUC (and again, Intel deserves credit for taking the time to consistently implement these things!) or put it in a HDPlex or Akasa chassis for fanless operation or upgrading it with a pcie card (which runs off the m.2 slot). There's just a ton more of those options available if you're the industry standard.

It sucks, I really want to like the AMD stuff, and maybe it'd be fine just as a desktop replacement. But Intel is one of those cases where it's potentially worth it to spend slightly more for a slightly worse product and just accept that there is an unknown (but probably nonzero) amount of time and effort being saved for that expense, because you're buying a standard, fully-baked product.

[paulmd]

Welp

[lhl]

Ha, yeah, I was going to say... the writing was sadly pretty much on the wall for a while it seemed like. SimplyNUC (led by ex-Intel NUC guys) will still be chugging on, but for enterprise/business use, personally I actually recommend looking at "industrial" models as well. While there are no guarantees for the business continuing, and they're not always cutting edge, these version typically have 5yr EOLs for each model. For those interested, "embedded 4x4" is a good search term and and you'll get a number of options. ASRock, Sapphire, Advantech, etc have all been around for decades.

[paulmd]

asus has apparently been heavily involved for a long time. some of the recent nucs supposedly had "powered by asus" or something on one of the screens apparently. So this is more just finalizing the terms of the handover.

Not that it doesn't mean Asus won't change the product eventually. Again, NUC in many ways was a very polished and premium product, and usually it was relatively expensive for what you got (which in a NUC7i7 was only a 2C4T!). Skull Canyon was Crystal Well 6775R 4C8T. But you got very premium features like M.2 and Thunderbolt and dual NICs on some of the products, and the atoms were very cheap for throwaway uses. Will Asus keep doing that? I saw the cute rebrand of PN50 4800U/4600U/4400U to PN51 5700U/5500U/5300U (which are still zen2!) and it soured me on their handling of their mini-pcs.

that started me looking at the rando chinese brand alternatives, and none of those seem to be very refined.

> For those interested, "embedded 4x4" is a good search term

nice tip, didn't know this one!

aliexpress has some weird stuff. there's C3750 5x10gbe SFP (or something) soft-switches and 6x 2.5GbE (225v3 or 226) 1165g7 soft-switches (which sadly don't support ECC!) etc. I almost think sometimes they just throw together random shit they have cheaply. Here's some... C3750 and intel X510 or X520? poof it's a switch.

Sadly there is a lack of NAS chassis type stuff. You'd think cutting into Synology/QNAP's gig would be profitable. Can't even buy barebones NAS chassis for your own build in most cases, the one I've used is U-NAS 810A but there's some things I'm not fond of with it too.

Asrock Rack and Supermicro both have a lot of good shit for whitebox nerd shit though. Shoutout to HDPLEX and Akasa too (and these guys make stuff for NUCs too).

One other cool thing you can find on Aliexpress is the Asrock X300TM, which is an embedded-market-only thin-ITX board with no chipset, just running off the Ryzen SOC. And thin-ITX actually is designed to be powered off an external 19v brick if you want, and it actually uses Intel cooler pattern (which opens up compatibility with some smaller/lower-profile stuff.

[shmerl]

Yeah, I figured. Are there any good options with 7940HS?