ASUS Will Manufacture and Develop New Intel NUC Mini PCs (engadget.com) 9
Intel has announced ASUS as the company's first partner for its Next Unit of Compute (NUC) mini PC business. From a report: The two companies have entered a non-binding agreement that will see ASUS manufacture, sell and support the 10th- to 13th-generation products in Intel's NUC line. ASUS will also develop future NUC designs. Based on the business' current lineup, ASUS could be developing future NUC mini PCs, DIY kits for mini PCs, DIY kits for laptops, customizable boards, chassis and other assembly elements.
If you'll recall, Intel recently told Engadget that it's ending its "direct investment" in its NUC business and will no longer produce first-party NUC products. It didn't elaborate on its reasoning, but working with partners for a non-essential business will free up resources it could use to concentrate on making chips. Intel previously said its first quarter earnings exceeded expectations, but its revenue was still down 36 percent year-over-year when compared to its results in the same period for 2022. The company also said that it remains cautious in this economy.
If you'll recall, Intel recently told Engadget that it's ending its "direct investment" in its NUC business and will no longer produce first-party NUC products. It didn't elaborate on its reasoning, but working with partners for a non-essential business will free up resources it could use to concentrate on making chips. Intel previously said its first quarter earnings exceeded expectations, but its revenue was still down 36 percent year-over-year when compared to its results in the same period for 2022. The company also said that it remains cautious in this economy.
Sooooo.... (Score:3)
Asus bought the trademark to slap on their existing small computers?
I mean they already make this.
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Those little custom fans in these are pretty much impossible to replace, well except the Intel Nucs you could find. Now, I'm a going to keep my distance from this ewaste.
Welcome to the special purpose side of the industry. You can't expect to buy something very much not a general purpose PC and have it act like it. Literally every PC in this formfactor has specialised parts in it. It's the the reality of scaling down.
Or you can scale down performance and buy a fan-less Fit-PC without moving parts. Bonus points they actually run from 12V so no special PSU either.
Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
What really made the NUC so great was its amazing driver support. Most modern-day Linux distributions worked out of the box without issue.
I doubt that ASUS is going to be able to match that.
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A large part of that is just the fact that NUCs were all-Intel up and down the line; CPU, Chipset, NIC, wifi, USB and Intel is pretty good with Linux support on their own hardware. It's when you mix in stuff from other vendors like Realtek etc where support gets hairy. (Realtek might have great support, just used them as a 3rd party example)
Hopefully part of developing these future NUC's will be to keep them on a maximal Intel platform all around.
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ASUS of the past might have. Last few years, ASUS was an absolute shit show when it comes to reliability and support. Drivers, firmware, and production quality of their motherboards and GPUs nosedived hard.
We're at the point where popular hardware reviewers have several price categories for things like motherboards where even ASRock is recommended over ASUS because of recent quality issues. Though to be fair, that's also because ASRock is no longer "cheap shit" tier manufacturer.
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When a company attempts to build a motherboard for every niche situation or recycle motherboard models frequently (or so it seems) ...what do you expect quality to do?
Yes, the OLD ASUS was pretty darn good. The NEW ASUS is trying to be all things to all people (or so it seems).
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I still run an average ASUS motherboard with i6600k on it. My parents have an even older desktop with I think intel 4th gen on a cheap ASUS motherboard. Zero problems.
Oh my god the rig my friend got with what the fuck level of expensive ASUS motherboard. Two flashes of BIOS just to get the damn thing to boot with memory working right. Constant weird bugs that are fixed with newer BIOS versions, that introduce new bugs.
Sorry, but ASUS "NUC" are total shit. (Score:1)
I have about 25+ ASUS UN42 from back in the day, and their design was completely utter shit.
Custom CR2032 battery that can't easily be swapped, overheating design, display port and hdmi connector weakness where plastic break, bugged bios image that wouldn't POST past the logo splashscreen 1 time on 2. Plus there are getting exposed for having shaddy business practice around their bios images repository management and versioning (bricking customer boards)
As much as I like asus for screens monitor, PC and Ser