“Now more than ever, businesses need flexible and scalable, eco-friendly, AI-ready systems that provide the peace of mind that comes with proven technology. The NUC 13 Pro is our latest step in providing our customers with the high-quality, reliable, enterprise-grade computing they need.”said Brian McCarson, general manager of the Intel NUC group.
Here is the Intel NUC 13 Pro, the “nothing new” mini PC
You have already seen the declarations of the head of the NUC division of Intel: we are dealing with a “proven technology”, that is to say used in previous generations. As much as Intel strives to present novelties, they are actually quite empty when there is no real news but only words… environmentally conscious? Artificial intelligence? Enterprise level computing? This all sounds pretty complicated in a NUC form factor, don’t you think?
As you can see in the image above, the 4 x 4 inch format returns to the Pro models, with some aesthetic changes like a homogeneous outer shell and a matte black color (until now they were silver underneath and glossy black above). The position of the power button has been changed, which is now on the front instead of on the top, and larger ventilation grilles have been added to the sides…no more, no less.
Fortunately, the connection has been updated, and in addition to the two HDMI outputs that we already had in previous versions, an RJ-45 connector is now included. 2.5GbE instead of traditional Gigabit, plus a total of two connectors UCB-C 3.2 Gen.2, three USB 3.2 Gen 1 and one USB 2.0. Under the hood there is an M.2 socket compatible with SSDs PCIe 4.0 x4as well as Wi-Fi 6E and built-in Bluetooth 5.3.
It is true that this line of NUCs is designed for business, but NUC mini PCs have always been also a powerful tool for people who need a mini PC to work, because they take up little space, are silent and powerful enough to do it all. type of task (excluding games) in a solvent manner. But it is also true that they do not cease to be barebones to which it is necessary to add RAM memory (in this case, up to 64 GB DDR4 at 3200 MHz in SO-DIMM format, already from the Pleistocene) and SSD at the expense of the user, and its price is not exactly cheap ($340-$1080 depending on hardware configuration).
Really, who needs this “news” that this generation of Intel NUC 13 Pro introduces? If we go back to the two previous generations, we continue with the SSD in M.2 format, we continue with the DDR4 RAM memory, and the only real novelties are in the form of connectivity, 2.5 GbE LAN ( which currently has a built-in 2.5 GbE network environment (with Gigabit is more than enough) and WiFi 6E.
It’s up to everyone to decide if it’s worth jumping to the new generation, but of course we don’t see that the news is really worth it because there is no real jump in performance.
