Thoughts on Intel Skull Canyon NUC?

[zCypher]

AnandTech's review on the Intel Skull Canyon:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10343/the-intel-skull-canyon-nuc6i7kyk-minipc-review

In the past I've never been big on making any sacrifices for the sake of having a smaller PC, but this looks pretty sweet. I really haven't been into gaming as much lately, so something like this might work for me if it's snappy in every other way and can handle a decent work load / multi-tasking, which by the looks of those specs, it should be fine with.

It looks nice, it's so tiny almost like a router. Looks like it could be mounted in any number of ways in a nice clean minimal setup. What do you guys think? Any concerns for reliability/longevity vs a full PC setup?

 

[CSMR]

I'm interested in this too as it's the only Skylake quad core Iris Pro system out there (apart from the professional notebooks costing several thousand $).

I expect it will last and be reliable. Intel systems tend to be reliable, less room for bad part choice or setup to cause problems as in user-built systems, and I would expect the drivers to be maintained through future versions of windows.

I'm just bit worried about the fan noise of this as I need a silent system. I wonder if there is a chance of someone making a quieter case to go with the Skull Canyon board.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I'm the wrong audience. for a NUC I want tiny, silent or at least very quiet, fast enough for light work.

For a mini gaming PC I'd build a mITX shoebox instead. No need for external GPU enclosure, uses any desktop CPU, bigger fans and heatsink so less noise.

 

[VirtualLarry]

and I would expect the drivers to be maintained through future versions of windows.

LOL! You've got to be kidding me. Intel doesn't even officially support Sandy Bridge iGPU graphics on Windows 10.

 

[zCypher]

LOL! You've got to be kidding me. Intel doesn't even officially support Sandy Bridge iGPU graphics on Windows 10.

lol, seriously? wow, that's terribad.

 

[CSMR]

LOL! You've got to be kidding me. Intel doesn't even officially support Sandy Bridge iGPU graphics on Windows 10.

I have Arrandale laptops from 2010 on Intel iGPUs (family PCs) and didn't have any trouble with drivers on Win10. Seems stable even without official support. Out of all the hardware I see on device manager on the machines I've managed, most of it is Intel, while when a driver goes wrong or is missing and hard to find, it's usually not an Intel part. So I tend to trust Intel for stable drivers.

 

[IntelUser2000]

CSMR:

Intel has good all around support. No frills drivers. Of course in the beginning they are kinda finicky. When you first purchase their motherboards they are worse in stability than most. But they improve over time. And it gets better. I like that. I wish I could get Intel for lots of things. Most other vendors have the original driver that came with product release + 1 other driver.

Of course they use the same approach in graphics. The support AMD/Nvidia give in driver support is absolutely unparalleled, and of course even Intel is far behind them. But that's how the graphics market is.

Officially for graphics I think they support 3 generations. So with Skylake release Haswell is the oldest supported chip.