PC Specialist NUC Lite review

Intel’s NUC Kit is generally sold as a barebones unit you build yourself, but if the thought of assembling your own mini PC is a little daunting, there are an increasing number of system builders who will build a NUC for you, as well as install Windows. PC Specialist’s NUC Lite is based on Intel’s Core i3 NUC Kit barebones, and comes in a standard NUC chassis, measuring a tiny 35x117x112mm. It remains one of the smallest mini PCs available, beaten only by the Chillblast Fusion Brix.

With a barebones NUC, you’d have to add your own RAM, storage, wireless card and operating system, but these all come as standard on the NUC Lite. Alongside its 1.7GHz Intel Core i3-4010U processor, PC Specialist has included 8GB of RAM, a 120GB Kingston SMS200S3120G mSATA SSD and an Intel Centrino Wireless-N 135 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adaptor, and has installed Windows 8.1.

Of course, a barebones NUC gives you greater flexibility in adding or removing your own components, but when we priced up the same components and operating system inside the NUC Lite on top of a Core i3 NUC Kit (£225 from www.dabs.com), it came out almost £10 more expensive doing it ourselves. Building one yourself would also mean the extra step of installing Windows 8, so you’re definitely getting a good value system with the NUC Lite.

The only thing we would have liked to have seen included is a mini HDMI to HDMI adaptor, to make it easy to plug into a TV or a non-DisplayPort monitor. These are cheap and easy to come by, though; for example, www.ebuyer.com sells a Belkin model for as little as £3.60. Along with its graphics outputs, the NUC has four USB3 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port and a combined headphone and microphone jack.

Its Core i3-4010U processor isn’t blisteringly fast, but it still scored a reasonable 33 overall in our multimedia benchmarks – about the same as a mid-range laptop. It took a while to finish the multi-tasking section of our test, but it handled image and video encoding well, putting it on par with the more expensive Chillblast Fusion Brix. Video editing may be sluggish and encoding would take a while, but most desktop tasks will be fine. 8GB or RAM is also enough for pretty much anything you want to throw at Windows 8.

The PC has the same Intel HD Graphics 4400 chipset as the Chillblast Fusion Brix, but oddly it didn’t perform quite as well in our graphics tests. However, it’s still perfectly capable of handling 3D games if you’re prepared to lower the detail settings. Dirt Showdown produced just 17.4fps on High quality at 1,280×720, but the Trine 2 platform game was much smoother, as we regularly hit 31.7fps on High quality settings at 1,280×720, as long as we left anti-aliasing turned off. Sadly, the PC is not quite quick enough to run games at 1,920×1,080, as it only managed 17fps in Trine 2 with Low graphics and no anti-aliasing at this resolution.

As a media centre PC, the NUC Lite is an excellent choice. It comes with a VESA mount so you can connect it to the back of your TV or monitor, and its easy-to-use BIOS settings let us wake the PC via LAN from Sleep mode with an Wake on LAN Android app on our phone. The PC could also play back our 4K test footage smoothly, showing its Ultra HD power; Windows 8’s Start screen animations were jerky at this resolution, however.

The PC Specialist NUC Lite is an excellent mini PC. Its unspectacular graphics performance just nudges it out of Best Buy territory, but at just under £450, it’s a lot cheaper than the equally powerful Chillblast Fusion Brix. The faster Zotac Zbox Nano ID64 Plus makes a compelling case, but it also requires you to buy and install your own operating system. If you favour convenience and want a good value tiny system for under £500, the PC Specialist NUC Lite is for you.