I wish Asus the best with their new NUC business. They haven't exactly been the gold standard for NUC and SFF since ever, but they did show how much they can cram into handhelds and laptops.
And then there is the Asus RMA process, which is painstaking enough that you hope to never get a lemon from them. I do hope they are better than that with NUC
All I know is that it would be tough for them to do worse. We deployed hundreds of NUCs into a corp environment as part of a point of sale system and it was a disaster. Unreliable, broken remote management, it was bad. Ended up having to rip them out and go for off the shelf HP solutions at nearly 3x the price. But they just worked.
Hopefully Asus can right the ship as I love the form factor, but they are strictly enthusiast class as Intel designed them.
Having had extensive experience with NUCs in deployment (one or the other has been my daily desktop driver since 2015), I too have encountered situations in which the hardware behaves erratically. Almost always, a disassembly followed by cleaning up the fan blades + vents helps. For one of the deployments, I transferred the board to an Akasa Turing fanless case, and that has been running flawless 24x7 for 3+ years now.
I can imagine the active fan solution + vents cleaning is not possible in a PoS sale system involving many NUCs. I think those are situations where a vaue-adding vendor like OnLogic (who have their own 'NUCs' in the same form-factor / fanless) can help.
Btw, I am curious what was the model deployed for the point-of-sale system?
Our issues were generally around terrible and unreliable wifi performance, random fail to boot and the remote UEFi update tools being flaky and bricking devices on occasion. The fans weren't great either but that wasn't the big issue for us. They always seemed like a not fully baked product, they had vPro and other enterprise features but in practice it all just never worked quite right.
Reflex, i found the opensource intel sponsored MeshCentral project to be very reliable. Does not need vPro hardware and firmware if using the agent. vPro can be a problem especially for old hardware. Needless to say, vPro has had so many major security flaws, but even if disabled, the vPro nic swallows the Wake-On-Lan packets, but i digress.
Something I'll keep in mind should i be in that situation again, but I left that team back in 2019 so not a problem I need to solve at the moment. Thank you for the info though, I'm always curious what the alternatives are.
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meacupla - Wednesday, July 19, 2023 - link
I wish Asus the best with their new NUC business. They haven't exactly been the gold standard for NUC and SFF since ever, but they did show how much they can cram into handhelds and laptops.And then there is the Asus RMA process, which is painstaking enough that you hope to never get a lemon from them. I do hope they are better than that with NUC
Reflex - Wednesday, July 19, 2023 - link
All I know is that it would be tough for them to do worse. We deployed hundreds of NUCs into a corp environment as part of a point of sale system and it was a disaster. Unreliable, broken remote management, it was bad. Ended up having to rip them out and go for off the shelf HP solutions at nearly 3x the price. But they just worked.Hopefully Asus can right the ship as I love the form factor, but they are strictly enthusiast class as Intel designed them.
ganeshts - Wednesday, July 19, 2023 - link
Having had extensive experience with NUCs in deployment (one or the other has been my daily desktop driver since 2015), I too have encountered situations in which the hardware behaves erratically. Almost always, a disassembly followed by cleaning up the fan blades + vents helps. For one of the deployments, I transferred the board to an Akasa Turing fanless case, and that has been running flawless 24x7 for 3+ years now.I can imagine the active fan solution + vents cleaning is not possible in a PoS sale system involving many NUCs. I think those are situations where a vaue-adding vendor like OnLogic (who have their own 'NUCs' in the same form-factor / fanless) can help.
Btw, I am curious what was the model deployed for the point-of-sale system?
Reflex - Thursday, July 20, 2023 - link
Our issues were generally around terrible and unreliable wifi performance, random fail to boot and the remote UEFi update tools being flaky and bricking devices on occasion. The fans weren't great either but that wasn't the big issue for us. They always seemed like a not fully baked product, they had vPro and other enterprise features but in practice it all just never worked quite right.rjt - Thursday, July 20, 2023 - link
Reflex, i found the opensource intel sponsored MeshCentral project to be very reliable. Does not need vPro hardware and firmware if using the agent. vPro can be a problem especially for old hardware. Needless to say, vPro has had so many major security flaws, but even if disabled, the vPro nic swallows the Wake-On-Lan packets, but i digress.Reflex - Thursday, July 20, 2023 - link
Something I'll keep in mind should i be in that situation again, but I left that team back in 2019 so not a problem I need to solve at the moment. Thank you for the info though, I'm always curious what the alternatives are.