NUC 11 Extreme: I’m Still Not a Fan of Fans
I shall try not to drone on about the passing of my trusty Airtop-PC. Suffice it to say, it’s truly dead now so I must move on. I’ve tried the laptop-as-a-desktop thing, and while it’s a good stop-gap measure, it left me wanting something better. So, I rather impulsively bought a used NUC 11 Extreme to try something that is at least different, if not better.
I’ve long been interested in the NUC line. The NUC 11 Extreme is built for gaming, with an i9-11900KB CPU, 64 GB of DDR4 RAM and an RTX3060 Ti GPU. It has good specs on paper. While a few years behind the cutting edge, it should handle everything I need to do. It’s certainly vastly better than the Airtop-PC from 2016.
However….there is a catch. This beast (it’s literally known as “Beast Canyon”) has no fewer than 6 fans! There’s a CPU fan, two large GPU fans and a trio of 90mm fans arrayed across the entire top of the case.
This is stark contrast to the Airtop-PC which was a completely fanless, dead silent, workstation. After almost ten years of zero fan noise in my office I’m not clear if this will be acceptable.
To be fair, the fans only kick up when the box is working hard. Much of the time they’re not audible. On that basis, I’m giving it a try.
It has built-in LED lighting suitable for a tweenage gamer. Happily, the Ebay vendor provided the Intel NUC Software Studio that’s required to adjust the fans and the lighting. Intel has transitioned away from the NUC line, handing it off to Asus. In that transition it appears that this software is not longer available online.
I’ve yet to dive into the software in any depth. The UI is off-putting. At the outset, it’s massive! It reminds me of when my former employer started to make use of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF.) It was way to make, big, fat, UI components that were scalable, but never really made good use of screen real estate. Like Duplo blocks for programmers.
In order to make it sensible, the user must resize the application to something rational. Thereafter, it’s less offensive, but some containers don’t allow aspect ratio changed, so it will never be optimal.
The Performance Mode panel seems to allow reasonable control of the power profile, including fan speeds.
The NUC 11E came with a 1 TB NVMe SSD. I need more space, so I added a 4 TB NVMe SSD that I had on-hand. To do that I had to substantially disassemble the NUC.
It meant removing both the GPU and the “Compute Element.” This is what they call the module that contains the CPU, memory and storage. There are three NVMe slots in the compute module.
The wiring harness inside the NUC 11 E is fiddly. I found a great YouTube video the details a teardown to guide me in this process. They also have a really insightful review.
While I admire the mechanical design of the device, I wish the wiring harness was a little better conceived. Everything is so very short.
I managed to accidentally disconnect the cable that allows for control of the LED lights. However, I didn’t feel like taking it apart again to remedy that situation. So, for now, the LEDs are doing their default color cycle. Since I’m not twelve years old, I will eventually do what’s necessary to (hopefully) disable all or most of the LED lighting.
In truth, if I keep this system for any amount of time, I may end up having someone 3D print a custom front panel. It might be nice to have a backlit profile of our house or dog instead of the skull graphic.
I may also trying using the NUC 11 Extreme without the RTX GPU. That’s relatively easy to do and I’m curious to see how that impacts performance vs fan noise.
I wish that Compulab offered a new generation of Airtop-PC. The Airtop3, with its 9th generation Intel CPU (i9-9900K) is just too far back from current to justify the price. If I could buy one at a discount, even used, I’d certainly be interested. When I reached out to them they expressed no interest in such an arrangement. The only ones I’ve seen available used are the earlier generation models. And they are quite rare.
This whole “new desktop” exercise is starting to feel like Goldilocks-and-the-Three-Computers. This one’s to weird. That one’s too loud. I wonder If I’ll find one that’s just right?