Intel NUC 13 Pro NUC13ANHi7 Barebone System - Socket BGA-1744-1 x Processor Support Core i7 13th Gen i7-1360P Dodeca-core (12 Core)

These little NUCs are great. They are really compact and joy to use. I get them bare boned and put my own RAM and SSDs in them. Very easy to open up and work with. The build quality is very apparent as you handle them. I have a couple of them. I use one as a dedicated Roon ROCK server. The other one is running a Linux Plex server. However you could install windows and use it as a tiny desktop computer. It's too bad Intel in going to discontinue these, because they are a really great product. There are certainly cheaper alternatives out there, but at least in this case, you get what you pay for.

I have used several older models of NUC before. This machine has a lot of power. I bought my first bare-bone unit to test for quality by arming it with UBUNTU 22.04, 64G memory, 1TB SSD and 2TB VMe SSD. It ran at around 40 degree Centigrade with 2% load which is acceptable. Then I bought two more for my project. The latter two were disappointment. Running it with less than 2% load, CPU heated up to 60 degree C, even after adjusting the fan to cool setting, it still runs at 55 degree C. At this rate, it will never be able to run with higher load without thermal shut down. The cooler machine actually has an older version of BIOS, and the thermally hot machines has the latest BIOS. Amazon arranged me to speak with Intel's support, and was told that a 20% quality variance should not be a surprise. Unfortunately, with a base of 40, 20 degrees over is 50% variance. The 2nd part of my review - after returning both units to Amazon for refund, I bought two new ones from Amazon as replacement. These two units are now running at 41 degree centigrade, which is similar to the first unit I bought. It further confirmed that the the unit I returned were having thermal issues. The 3rd part of my review - after couple months, working with 4 units that I bought from Amazon at different time, I noticed that these units are running on different version of BIOS. From the earliest which is dated 2022 to the latest that is dated 6/2023, they operates on different characteristics. I downloaded the latest BIOS from INTEL and upgrade all of them to the latest BIOS. Then I reinstalled all units to CENTOS 9. Amazingly, there are working just fine and in fact showed much performance improvement. Given this new observation, I offered to share such experience with others. Apparently, the problem is with firmware.