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Can anyone explain why use a NUC?

hvbias

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This is one of those things I have wondered about. It is fairly trivial to build a PC that has extremely low fan noise, as in you will only hear the fans with your ears right up against the back or front intake/exhaust. We've come a long way from the early 2000s with PC fans, no one really tolerates fans that can be heard any more. Heck I could make my computer look like a gay disco and even those types of fans are pretty quiet. I have to imagine the vast majority of people have listening rooms with much higher ambient noise. I am pretty lucky living in a low population area that I pretty much do have very close to dead black backgrounds. In the spring/summer the crickets can be annoying but music even at passive listening volumes will drown them out.

So what is the advantage of a NUC? This is a sincere question that I am curious about. I suppose I like the romantic notion of having a tiny ~ 15 watt PC being the only PC in my stereo hifi room with no ugly big tower, but even that notion is fairly easy to dismiss and probably easy enough to hide the tower.
 
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Jorj

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I think the attraction is the small form factor itself. VESA mountable, easy to hide. If you have more room and\or needs that don't come in the box, please move along.
 

maverickronin

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So what is the advantage of a NUC? This is a sincere question that I am curious about. I suppose I like the romantic notion of having a tiny ~ 15 watt PC being the only PC in my stereo hifi room with no ugly big tower, but even that notion is fairly easy to dismiss and probably easy enough to hide the tower.

I've always assumed it was people who didn't want to build a Mini ITX system on their own.
 

Grave

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All of the fans I have ever used can be heard. I replaced my PC fans with quieter ones recently though.
 

March Audio

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This is one of those things I have wondered about. It is fairly trivial to build a PC that has extremely low fan noise, as in you will only hear the fans with your ears right up against the back or front intake/exhaust. We've come a long way from the early 2000s with PC fans, no one really tolerates fans that can be heard any more. Heck I could make my computer look like a gay disco and even those types of fans are pretty quiet. I have to imagine the vast majority of people have listening rooms with much higher ambient noise. I am pretty lucky living in a low population area that I pretty much do have very close to dead black backgrounds. In the spring/summer the crickets can be annoying but music even at passive listening volumes will drown them out.

So what is the advantage of a NUC? This is a sincere question that I am curious about. I suppose I like the romantic notion of having a tiny ~ 15 watt PC being the only PC in my stereo hifi room with no ugly big tower, but even that notion is fairly easy to dismiss and probably easy enough to hide the tower.

Its small, low power consumption and the ones I have built are quiet. They are now probably way more powerful than is necessary for most home applications. They are quite cheap too. I just dont want a massive desktop unit cluttering the place, although I do have a 32 core dual Xeon hidden in a cupboard :) .

I use a Skull canyon NUC for my everyday use, music, email, word, excel and 3D cad.

Built this 4 core i7, 16Gb ram, 500Gb drive for my brother a couple of weeks ago.

IMG20181017144849.jpg
 
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hvbias

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Its small, low power consumption and the ones I have built are quiet. They are now probably way more powerful than is necessary for most home applications. They are quite cheap too. I just dont want a massive desktop unit cluttering the place, although I do have a 32 core dual Xeon hidden in a cupboard :) .

I use a Skull canyon NUC for my everyday use, music, email, word, excel and 3D cad.

Built this 4 core i7, 16Gb ram, 500Gb drive for my brother a couple of weeks ago.

View attachment 17529

Didn't realize they were doing i7's in this tiny form factor.

My use is a bit more specialized in that I am doing 8-10 channels worth of convolution/DSP crossovers in Acourate. So what I was thinking was using the NUC basically as a streamer from the main PC. This is assuming I wasn't able to hide the main tower sufficiently to my tastes.

But now that you've pointed this out it seems like the NUC should be able to do all of this? Then I would only need my NAS on the network to stream music from.
 

March Audio

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I use Acourate too. CPU load with Accurate is dependant on the FFT partition size. Smaller the size the lower the latency but higher the load.

If latency is not an issue, if you just use it for music playback and not trying to sync with video then a 4 core i7 nuc will do fine.

Are you using Acourate convolver. Or something else like JRiver? The reason I ask is you can adjust the FFT partition size in AC but other software won't have this option
 
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watchnerd

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This is one of those things I have wondered about. It is fairly trivial to build a PC that has extremely low fan noise, as in you will only hear the fans with your ears right up against the back or front intake/exhaust. We've come a long way from the early 2000s with PC fans, no one really tolerates fans that can be heard any more. Heck I could make my computer look like a gay disco and even those types of fans are pretty quiet. I have to imagine the vast majority of people have listening rooms with much higher ambient noise. I am pretty lucky living in a low population area that I pretty much do have very close to dead black backgrounds. In the spring/summer the crickets can be annoying but music even at passive listening volumes will drown them out.

So what is the advantage of a NUC? This is a sincere question that I am curious about. I suppose I like the romantic notion of having a tiny ~ 15 watt PC being the only PC in my stereo hifi room with no ugly big tower, but even that notion is fairly easy to dismiss and probably easy enough to hide the tower.

I don't know why anyone wants any kind of full blow PC in the living room when you can set up a Raspberry Pi as a Roon Bridge / Endpoint or Arduino streamer, with the server in another room entirely.
 
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hvbias

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I use Acourate too. CPU load with Accurate is dependant on the FFT partition size. Smaller the size the lower the latency but higher the load.

If latency is not an issue, if you just use it for music playback and not trying to sync with video then a 4 core i7 nuc will do fine.

Are you using Acourate convolver. Or something else like JRiver? The reason I ask is you can adjust the FFT partition size in AC but other software won't have this option

Purely audio, no video. I really like JRiver's GUI so I was planning on sticking with it.

I'm doing a separate room for HT, but will more than likely just stick with passive speakers, that many DSP crossovers/wires/amps just seems like a massive headache for just films.

I want the magical silent fans the OP has.

https://noctua.at/en/nf-s12a-pwm

There is nothing magic about them. It's just a low RPM fan with high quality bearings, built very well.

In my gaming PC with a 1080 I can only hear the computer if I put my ears up against the intake fans. From my normal distance from the computer I can not hear the PC even in the evenings when ambient noise here is essentially non-existent.

The guys at Silentpcreview (pretty much the gold standard for SPL measurements on fan noise) even stopped updating the website since it's so easy to build a quiet PC compared to the old days.

I don't know why anyone wants any kind of full blow PC in the living room when you can set up a Raspberry Pi as a Roon Bridge / Endpoint or Arduino streamer, with the server in another room entirely.

I'm not doing this in a living room, I'm building a room from the ground up for 2-channel.
 

Grave

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Oh, my fans have a similar noise rating and I can hear them. So, not possible unless you have turned the fans speeds down.
 
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hvbias

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Oh, my fans have a similar noise rating and I can hear them. So, not possible unless you have turned the fans speeds down.

I do use fan controller software with a custom curve. I also use an aw3418dw which takes up all my desk space so my computer isn't exactly close to me either. I should run some benchmarks and see how close I need to get to the computer before I can hear it. It will be louder under full load.

My point with this thread is that with a set of speakers the PC would be a minimum of 3 meters (probably more like 5 meters) away from me, so not really talking about the distances your average computer desk user would be sitting at. These small form factor fanless designs are also all the rage at Computer Audiophile, and I was trying to understand if it was more than just some audiophile neurosis.

But I totally get the appeal of them now and mind is probably even swung in their favor.
 
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hvbias

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Oh just to point out that nuc I showed does have a fan.

Gotcha. I suspect to be truly fanless I would have to look at one of those HTPC type of cases that have heatsinks integrated into the case on the sides if I want an all in one for Acourate. Otherwise just go the popular route of using the NUC just as a streamer with JRiver server backend on another PC doing the convolution.
 

Old Listener

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@hvbias, if you have a serious interest, read through this earlier thread.

A fanless NUC

There are some posts in that thread by people actually using NUCs.

I bought a NUC as my personal PC 2+ years ago with the idea that if the fan noise was a problem, I'd remove the fan and place the NUC in a case with a heatsink that attaches to the CPU chip. That hasn't been necessary.
 

Ron Texas

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I use a Pentium powered NUC for my AV system. It only has 4G of ram but plays music and 1080p video with ease. No fan noise, low power consumption.
 

Cosmik

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I use a tiny fanless PC running full active crossover software written in a not-very-efficient way - running at 44.1 kHz. Intel Atom based PCs are fine, but the Raspberry Pi isn't quite up to it.

Even fanless PCs are unbelievably powerful.
 
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hvbias

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@hvbias, if you have a serious interest, read through this earlier thread.

A fanless NUC

There are some posts in that thread by people actually using NUCs.

I bought a NUC as my personal PC 2+ years ago with the idea that if the fan noise was a problem, I'd remove the fan and place the NUC in a case with a heatsink that attaches to the CPU chip. That hasn't been necessary.

Thanks.

If it wasn't obvious already I have not been into computer audio going back for a while, my stereo still uses a fairly basic USB output to a DAC. I am now planning to overhaul my entire stereo to be active DSP, built from the ground up and turning to true SOTA digital. So this had me looking at a way to send digital into my listening room with something that doesn't have to be big and bulky.

A question to the group- is there any reason a streamer/NUC/NAA would sound different? I watched this review and it is littered with the usual audiophile descriptors, but I figured I would ask.

 

Maki

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This is one of those things I have wondered about. It is fairly trivial to build a PC that has extremely low fan noise, as in you will only hear the fans with your ears right up against the back or front intake/exhaust. We've come a long way from the early 2000s with PC fans, no one really tolerates fans that can be heard any more. Heck I could make my computer look like a gay disco and even those types of fans are pretty quiet. I have to imagine the vast majority of people have listening rooms with much higher ambient noise. I am pretty lucky living in a low population area that I pretty much do have very close to dead black backgrounds. In the spring/summer the crickets can be annoying but music even at passive listening volumes will drown them out.

So what is the advantage of a NUC? This is a sincere question that I am curious about. I suppose I like the romantic notion of having a tiny ~ 15 watt PC being the only PC in my stereo hifi room with no ugly big tower, but even that notion is fairly easy to dismiss and probably easy enough to hide the tower.
I use one as a dedicated device to seed torrents and do other mini-server related tasks. Sits comfortably on top of my soldering iron power station. I like using pretty intensive scaling algorithms so all my audio/video stuff is done on my real desktop. The liquid cooler in it gets pretty loud though.
 

derp1n

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That Beekhuyzen guy is a clueless loon (typical audiophile), you'd be doing yourself a favor by ignoring his ravings.
 
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