ASUS Now Makes the Intel NUC!? Let's Review the ASUS NUC 14 Pro Tall

[@rochellerochelle1488]

So I've had one for almost two years and struggled with PersistentWindows so that waking up monitors won't forget _all_ my window positions. And this is how I find out I have Persistent Display Emulation in the effin BIOS! You, sir, have earned my like and subscribe!

[@woldemunster9244]

Bingo!

[@milescarter7803]

Could have got a passive EDID emulator for $4 at any time. I know I had to for the media screens at the hall hanging off the splitter.

[@MeowMeowDeathRay]

ASUS + Intel? Good luck on your warranty!

[@init_yeah]

​@@ToroidalVorticesBro your spelling or am I tripping​

[@giomjava]

Ha ha true

[@snmdair]

You're only going be dealing with ASUS since it's a laptop CPU that is soldered to the board. Silver lining is you only have to deal with one terrible company with its terrible RMA experience instead of two.

[@Rusty_B_And_The_Gang]

Lol

[@thomasaquinas9550]

That's what I thought. I'll never buy another Asus product again.

[@Anonymous-m9f9j]

Will be looking forward to reliability in 5 years. I have 300 or so Gen 10 nucs in kiosks and have had zero fail since release

[@MarioCRO]

Still running my Intel NUC i5-10210U with 64GB DDR3... Up until recently was running 24/7. Now days being used for various testing but had to regrease the CPU vent to make it more silent, toher then that, works fine. For years it was running VMware ESXi 6.X with native support for Intel LAN (for VLANs) with multiple VMs, Windows Server, Windows, Linux... Always a good buy...

[@KenS1267]

I've sold a bunch of these, of several different vintages, as "cheap" office all in one type machines. You get a cheap monitor that accepts a VESA mount, put the NUC on the monitor and you're golden. They are, IMO, superior to the Dell and HP office towers.

[@stringsofair8039]

About a month ago I got a Minisforum NAB7 with a 12700H processor from Microcenter for $300 barebones, added 64gb DDR4 and a 2TB NVME plus 2TB SATA SSD I had lying around. It is decidedly not whisper quiet under load, but it's a decent little device. I have it mounted on the bottom of my desk using its included VESA mount, just needed a couple of 1/2" wood screws. It's nice to have a relatively power efficient computer completely out of the way and invisible aside from a decent wireless keyboard & mouse. Typically use it with an LG Dual Up in the split screen mode alongside a main desktop. Might have to get something like a newer NUC with better connectivity and thermals down the road.

[@richardhamilton-gibbs6360]

Love your short format and fast chatter. Don't ever slow down. Informative at the leading edge. I run a Windows 11 PC and an Ubuntu 24.04 laptop. I'd love to see this box running Ubuntu. My laptop can run 3 4X monitors, so I can use Chrome to run my media environment on big screens.

[@nekrosoft13]

14th gen (asus) nuc is manufactured by ECS. 11th, 12th and 13th gen (intel) nucs were manufactured by Pegratron. Older nucs (10th and older) were manufactured by ECS.

[@dankmemes3153]

When youre ordering this buy the bare bones kit.

[@wiziek]

Why?

[@Rayu25Demon]

who is buying mini PCs with intel cpu? there are many good and cheaper brands with better amd APUs

[@hk07666]

@@Rayu25Demon AMD is CPUs are pretty good (better in most cases) these days but some software still plays better with Intel and the engineering quality of the Intel NUC is quite a bit better than anything with an AMD CPU in this form factor.

[@Rayu25Demon]

@@hk07666 i know but you are talking about 0.01% of people. i know intel if better with hypervisors but because of heat i use AMD.

[@hk07666]

@@Rayu25Demon it's more than just hypervisors. OpenBSD based software does not play well with the latest Ryzen but works flawlessly with the latest Intel. And heat is only an issue with poorly configured desktop chips. These nucs run dead silent because they produce almost no heat. I understand the advantages of Ryzen but in an industrial environment, nucs are the way to go.

[@Snickersnack329]

Pray you don't require warranty repair some day. I sent in my NUC13 for a failed thunderbolt port and ASUS kept the RAM and SSD (that came with the NUC) while sending back an empty NUC. After 6 weeks of interaction with ASUS and the office of the CEO, today I spent $125 replacing what they took. This was an expensive and frustrating warranty repair. :-/

[@GarethFairclough]

Tbh, I'd have taken them out as a matter of course before sending the machine off.

[@Snickersnack329]

@@GarethFairclough I totally agree _now_, but their RMA instructions were very clear that I was to leave them in since they originally came with the unit. Obviously I wouldn’t follow those instructions now.

[@GarethFairclough]

@Snickersnack329 wait, really?? They said to leave it all in??! Wtf!!? That's so questionable on so many levels. Data protection for a start!! 0.o Not to mention wtf do they do with the drives and ram...

[@adampippert8314]

Most of the NUC engineers that I worked with in my Intel days made the jump to ASUS. If there’s any vendor out there that will carry on the spirit of the NUC, it’s the same ex-Intel-mobo engineers that have been working with that form factor since its inception.

[@denvera1g1]

Who remembers when HDMI/DVI CEC was included in basic video drivers from Intel, AMD/ATI, and Nvidia? Pepridge farms remembers. My HTPC became alot less usable when i upgraded from a.... GTX 660 to a 960 and i could no longer log in with the keyboard on my Vizio remote, nor could i navigate XBMC/other

[@pedro.alcatra]

good times bro. today my 800$ GPU does not suport CEC

[@denvera1g1]

@@pedro.alcatra I need to try the quado RTX A4000s we have at work. I've got a little 24 inch vizio somewhere with one of those double sided remotes, remote +num pad on the front, QWERTY keyboard on the back. Edit: To clarify, i think its just something omitted from the drivers, not anything in the hardware, though its entirely possible software/hardware was omitted to cut licensing and standards testing costs for CEC

[@zwerko]

It's very annoying that even in 2024 we still consider 'display persistence' as some sort of an esoteric feature. Unless supported/emulated by the system itself, we still need to use hardware ID cloners to tell the underlying OS that 'believe us, the screen is still connected'. Adding such a feature to display drivers would be a breeze (remember the last state until asked differently) but nooooo, we can't have that. It's so, so annoying...

[@profosist]

My HTPC gets so freaking grumpy if only!

[@peyton_uwu]

+bump

[@rochellerochelle1488]

@@zwerko what, do you mean people don't switch between monitors all the effin time like apparently all the engineers, hardware and software, seem to have thought all this time???

[@MikeBob2023]

Thank you, Wendellman! 🙏🏼👍🏼🤠

[@treyquattro]

I'm sold! I've been looking for a mini PC. Thanks Wendell.

[@NickCharles]

Just bought a 13th gen model myself to replace an outgoing nuc8i5beh. That thing was a solid do-everything server for me since college, but it started having some stability issues after nearly 7 years of just being on 24/7. Was tempted by the Asus ones but the pricing is just nuts. After factoring in the cost to upgrade to DDR5 memory, it was more than double the cost of the 13th gen upgrade. Hopefully they can bring the pricing down a bit over time! As for the 13th gen model, it's actually strong enough I was able to run proxmox on it with a media server, NVR (on full Windows 11...), a few python services, and home assistant, and it still has memory and cpu cycles to spare!

[@FSK1138]

XEON NUC !!!!!!😱 you just opened up a whole new world for me i just discovered the Intel NUC 9 Pro Kit🥰

[@LanceThumping]

I didn't know that HDMI CEC is often being left out of the mini-pcs from other places. That's really really lame and nearly kills them for me. Only use-case for mini-pcs in my head is as a media center, so it not being able to handle messing with the TV or sleeping when the TV is off is a big hole in it.

[@joeturner7604]

I've turned several of these barebones into systems now and they are really nice. Asus now has all the drivers loading from a batch file. The Expercenters had issues with that flimsy sata data cable popping off, making people think they just did a major boo boo. Then ASUS started shipping them with a tape across it to hold it in place.

[@pm2tube]

I stubbled upon this one trying to recover my Intel NUC 12th Gen last week when I mismatched the power supplies from the OWC TB hard drive bay I use and the NUC's one. Turns out the brand was literally written in capital letters on both power bricks... I can tell ASUS did take the job seriously and may profit from Intel's work. Despite my stupid mistake, the recovery process did run fine, even with insufficient power and I was able to update my BIOS. Although swapping back the power bricks was what fixed my stupid problem, running a BIOS update while being that stupid never worked for me before and therefor I'm impressed !

[@markmonroe7330]

Excellent presentation. Thank you. I have always like the NUCs and have 4-5 of them that I tinker with. All of mine are "pre-hybrid cpu" units though. I run some form of virtualization on just about everything now, even the NUC that I use to run the big TV. I just cant get past the issues with hybrid cores and have started shifting everything to AMD now.

[@disco.volante]

Good review. I‘m very happy with my NUC13 pro with the i7, great little machine with a lot of threads. It even has a very nice aluminum case. BIOS updates come from ASUS now, but no major issues. Good to see that the series is continued.

[@sarahsaffel9955]

Lol, 'Power Buttom' i was just recommending a nuc to my father today. he's old enough he doesn't care to build another system and these are.. amazing. although I did say grab a used one off ebay.. but.. I'm glad asus is carrying on the good work.

[@theminer49erz]

Definitely go SSD

[@phasechange5053]

We have been selling these they are so-so make sure you do all Bios/FW updates.

[@TheEditorify]

More on Linux support please and possibly a comparison with a Ryzen AI powered PC when it comes out?

[@theoldironqueen8224]

I am more interested in the 200 Series Intel, especially because of the on-package memory, but nice to see that NUC live on.

[@BigEightiesNewWave]

This guy is really good.

[@Ironic-Social-Phobia]

Let's hope Wendell doesn't get into bell ringing because if he did you'd hear him screaming over the bells "I'M A PEALING"

[@bakakafka4428]

Power use at idle/load?

[@akin242002]

If you don't have iGPU/GPU needs, the barebones Intel NUC 13 Pro with i7 1360P CPU is still an excellent option. Excellent for programmers, photographers, data analysts, general office work, and general web browsing. For photography, you may need a cheap $10 dongle to compensate for the lack of a full SD card reader.

[@petroniobonavides3530]

Hello Man, thanks for de video.. Please.. I have liked you keyboard.. Which brand and model is this Keyboard? It is superslim and small!!! Thans for the wonderful video

[@cedrust4111]

Asus with ubuntu or other linux distro are the drivers supported? What about the use-case of dual-booting? If on WSL2, would the igpu and NPU get passed thru into WSL environment?

[@rkan2]

Generally Intel drivers are already in the kernels and should work fine...

[@rkan2]

8:00

[@cedrust4111]

@@rkan2tyvm

[@ChrisCebelenski]

NUC's have always been solid, if what they do is what you want. Of course today there's a ton of "Laptop in the mini desktop" type machines and because of that I'm not sure the premium is worth it anymore. The form factor will always be what it is (I am excited to see legac... um, SATA support!) but I think the field is very saturated beyond a few of the NUC specialty tricks as mentioned. And I'm not telling you anything you don't know of course, which is why this review was 12 minutes long - same crap different package. I've let my opinion be known that i don't like the current trend of system designs mostly because 1) No ECC, and 2) jack-all PCIe lanes. Someone needs to revive the old Amiga sidecar concept and let me slap some serious add-ons to a SFF machine. OccuLink has potential but not-quite-there for usability right now. The market is changing and these generation of Intel CPU's are going to be the Pentium 4 of our time.

[@jamesbuckwas6575]

I completely agree that the lack of PCIe lanes on modern CPU platforms is quite frustrating. I won't pay $1,500 for a CPU with any good amount of lanes. And I'm not paying $500 for a motherboard where the 28 PCIe lanes aren't wasted on more than 2 NVMe drives instead of something sane like a 8x/8x/8x configuration, or even 8x/8x/4x with good features elsewhere, forget even PCIe 5.

[@HEXGlenn]

"Power Buttom" @4:18

[@QuantumKurator]

The New Egg NUC configurator looks interesting. The memory options are many so not sure what to pick.

[@JohnWilliams-gy5yc]

Embedded memory NUC on Lunar Lake will be even more niche. It means all new Intel miniPC NUC-ify themselves to impossible to upgrade memory.

[@falsemcnuggethope]

Does this come with the Intel CPU reliability we all crave for?

[@robnobert]

And the ASUS reliability! 😑

[@Hugh_I]

there's probably a "trust me bro, Intel pinky swears it's only a RPL issue" sticker on there somewhere

[@youp1tralala]

There are minipcs with comparable specs and price but with an oculink connector which is a better proposition for connecting a GPU at better performance than usual TB4

[@jackthatmonkey8994]

I got the last gen. Thought I'd be hacker man. Get two USB-C to 10Gbit network adapters, and have a 10Gbit pfSense router with space for minecraft servers, RetroNAS, and a VM distrohopper all-in-one. All of the above is possible except that 2,5 Gbit network to usb-c appear to be the limit

[@fracturedlife1393]

they have an ARC discrete equipped one yet

[@alonzosmith6189]

Nice, Tk U for sharing

[@789654123654789]

Getting an RMA out of Intel was hard enough, but at least it was Intel. With ASUS handling warranties now? HA!

[@Always.Smarter]

thank you for doing the peel on camera

[@squatch545]

Wow, that thing is small. I wouldn't mind it if they made it larger, like the size of the box it comes in, so they could fit a desktop CPU in there with lots of cooling. It would be about the size of a Mac Studio, which would be fine.

[@NatesRandomVideo]

Nope. ASUS gets zero dimes from me until they fix their customer support culture. Which likely means never.

[@geodad4782]

I used to work tech support for them back from 07-10 when they sent our jobs overseas. Back when we had domestic support, it was much better.

[@NatesRandomVideo]

@@geodad4782 I bet... that's how it always goes. Makes some MBA happy and screws the customers.

[@KellyIndigo]

Intel desktop boards were manufactured by Pegatron, Asus is the retail arm of Pegatron... Pegasus.

[@dafoomie]

Business customers want the headphone jack, Dell, HP, and Lenovo all have them for a reason.

[@hk07666]

Isn't Intel supposed to announce a new CPU generation next month? This doesn't seem like a good buy at the moment.

[@fixitman2174]

I was thinking about moving my Home Assistant server to a new NUC. Now that I know they're being made by Asus, I'll pass. I wouldn't be surprised if they were made by them for much longer. The last NUC I had lasted just past the warranty.

[@Jamesaepp]

"I found that appealing" *groan*

[@ON8AD]

Hey Wendell @Level1Techs - did you by any chance test this device on Linux? On Windows, I can get ultra wide displays working without any issues, but on Linux, the ARC driver doesn't seem to support it, so it must be a bug.

[@gabrielgaspar3744]

That's my main problem with Asus. Asus and Samsung, actually, they both act the same way. Every time I ran into problems or weird behavior under Linux and tried contacting either of those, the answer I get is always on these lines: "This machine was made exclusively for Windows. Please refrain from using anything else, as it will not be supported. If your issue still persists under Windows, then try customer support." This attitude makes anything Asus/Samsung useless to me.

[@ON8AD]

@@gabrielgaspar3744 for this NUC, they explicitely mention ubuntu 24.. but the out-of-tree linux ARC drivers don't support 24 yet.. 🫣

[@milescarter7803]

I can't with the form factor. A cube is the absolute worst for putting anywhere. Could *almost* be forgiven if the APU was as powerful as an RX6600 and all the height was for heatsink. But it's not, its for optional 2.5". That part should be in an optional extension. This is for people who prominently put it on their desk, or have the room for a honking blister attached to the back of their monitor. Ideally I would like to see the 2.5" close to the top side (in the other half of the board from the tall ports, IE where it makes sense for dense packaging). And then the blower fan next to it evacuating heat from the PCB. Put the heatsink outside the motherboard footprint off to the side, it only needs to be 25% or so more width than the current setup. TLDR: NUC is still half baked, MiniSTX was a better 'standard' that just lacked a Parallel IO PCIe port to really take off.

[@user-ot7wb8sy1v]

Xeon NUC. Now that i never heard of before.

[@lesslighter]

XEON NUC.... but but.... slap it in a NAS CASE.... COMEON ASUSTOR YOU KNOW YOU WANT IT

[@Jmartin1204]

I have this mini but 32gb ram and 1 TB version. Could this run a 49 inch ultrawide for productivity?

[@ShaneMcGrath.]

No good anymore, NUC's are finished for me and I own 2 older one's 6th gen and 11th gen, They removed the one feature that was it's main selling point for a HTPC, ASUS bring back the CIR(Consumer infrared) on the front so we can use a universal remote control. I don't mind paying a little extra for CIR, Make it a limited edition if need be.

[@jrogerss8616]

I'd like to know just when Asus first got their grubby little hands on the NUC? We standardized on the NUC platform many years ago shortly after they were first introduced. I've notice that over time, the quality has greatly diminished. Somewhere around the 7th and 8th cpu generation, we started getting odd power and display issues that would seem to come from nowhere. And the fans would not last as long as they used to. We finally stopped buying NUCs last year when Asus announced they were taking them over.

[@Jagerbomber]

I don't think wendell would be able to work on the Short NUC

[@Artificial.Unintelligence]

So thunderbolt 4 is the one that could actually do good for eGPUs right? Do they still also need external power? And the gen after this for Intel might actually make a significant leap in performance per watt etc. Did you say ram is upgradeable?Downside vs other mini PCs is others allow you to upgrade RAM and some will let you put like 128gb or something crazy and THAT helps you do LLM/AI stuff with less GPU and not requiring a 4090 or commercial shit.. 4090 stuck at 24gb remember but some models are like 70gb? If the price stays reasonable I'm heavily considering a few of these in future generations to do home media, mini server/nas stuff, or even mini gaming PC. The vesa mount is cool but then you can't mount the TV or monitor itself so they need to think of a different attachment method like grabbing onto a monitor or TV arm

[@ranjitmandal1612]

Looks great

[@bradyanon]

I want this with 2 x 3.5 bays. all i want is a mini diy nas running not ancient hardware, and not some china special

[@SuperMari026]

Baffles me that Wendell knows exactly when I am sitting down for supper and turn on my screen 🤌

[@norkshit]

he is a wizard, what did you expect?

[@keyboard_g]

“The intel experience that you know and crave” lmao! 😂

[@KidoKatsuragi]

So what about warranty? Can you test it's support?

[@pabloagogo1]

HI, can this ASUS NUC 14 Pro be powered by a wall GaN Charger via the Type-C port? I read some documentation that seems to say it cannot! Hope you can tell me. Really appreciate your input on this.

[@john_whately]

What would be your recommendations for a small form factor k8s powerhouse? Something with a high core count that can run gitlab etc?

[@Thedohdoh]

But no 3.5 mm jack stick? How do I connect non wireless headphones to it?

[@NexGen-3D]

Thanks for the video, but NUC's were not great, not sure why ASUS would take them on, 90% of them were only duel core machines, maybe they will pump the specs on them and make them better value.

[@myusrn]

Is there a lunar lake SoC with integrated lpddr5 memory around the corner?

[@rkan2]

When a 15W TV stick?? Or even better a 25W stick with MEMS cooler. 😅

[@tomhollins5303]

You slide the bottom section to remove it and that separates the thermal pad from the SSD? How does that work exactly?

[@cphuntington97]

Have you noticed any issues with Windows 11, version 24H2?

[@aflury]

I don't think Meteor Lake's NPU can handle Copilot+, but maybe it's useful for something?

[@danieloberhofer9035]

Sure thing! Useful for marketing.

[@pieterrossouw8596]

yeah I'm not in the US and ASUS warranty is indeed shocking so nope.

[@yuan.pingchen3056]

Is it still iSCSI boot capable? this is the key feature that intel NUC attract me..........

[@patrickwburnett]

Would something like this run Proxmox well?

[@TerryOtsubo]

AMI Aptio V UEFI firmware. Nice.

[@ferysery]

hi. is it possible to have 4 display monitors connected to this model? two on hdmi and another additional two with typeC->hmdi convertors.

[@myusrn]

Can you use an external desktop display usb-c / thunderbolt pd + dp alt mode + usb data single cable mode connection to power this NUC using one of its usb-c thunderbolt ports instead of having to plug in the provided power supply?

[@ancapistan]

egpu gaming tests?

[@eyupyoruk2783]

the configuration for cooling in bios a little bit too much. it takes some time... to figure it out...

[@angusmatheson9997]

Can you compare to Mac mini M4

[@kamertonaudiophileplayer847]

But NUC had SD card slot. It looks ASUS ditched it.

[@keyboard_g]

Just give us an option with a pizza box style case!

[@SegoMan]

We all have proof a pizza box will fit anywhere and be stable for long periods of time.

[@bravefastrabbit770]

Funnily enough ASUS laptops are NOTORIOUSLY overrepresented in the repair community either for their horrible quality (or QA/QC, if u can even test those) of SMD components. Correct me if I'm mistaken but this is just a laptop in a different formfactor. Now don't get me wrong, some models will work just fine. But expect a higher failure rate. Imagine the pain of having a 10¢ capacitor short our your entire pc lmao

[@kettusnuhveli]

I hope you know 10 cents is quite expensive for a SMD (something like 0402) capacitor! 😂

[@ColeAvenue]

ASUS screwed me on my monitor RMA. Imagine giving them money for something meant to protect data. No way in hell.

[@nebadon2025]

I still don't trust asus warranty process, it will be many years before I consider any more new asus hardware.

[@hermanthotan]

This asus intel nuc 165h, when install windows server alot of drivers is not working. Can you try to install win server 2022.

[@getas1990]

Why logo is only on box?

[@pedro.alcatra]

I cant undestand why our gpus dont come with CEC

[@loghome7061]

This better than the NUC 13 Pro?

[@Rayu25Demon]

i dont want to sound like aminisforum fanboy but 1000$ can get you a barbone AtomMan G7 PT it has R9 7945HX cpu and RX 7600M gpu.

[@jonathanmatthew5631]

This or beelink ser8?

[@jacobburgin826]

Still no TB5?

[@Md.AbdullahAlMamun-w3k]

Does it support NVME raid on linux?

[@Level1Techs]

sure does Linux md

[@JKos-cz9lj]

does it support ECC ram?

[@CtrlAtlDel]

If it's Asus I am not buying. After sales service is nightmare

[@ShroudedWolf51]

"...This also has "AI" and has a NPU..." ....great. Just what we need. Ugh.

[@DupontHazel]

153 Bins Cliff

[@profosist]

Nvidia desktop GPU's need CEC dang it!