Intel NUC Kit D54250WYK Review - Big Things Come in Small Packages

Introduction

The first Intel NUC I reviewed was an extremely awesome device. It had some great power, and it was tiny. But, there were a few things I didn't like about it, and that's where the new NUC comes into play.

Intel sent me the NUC Kit D54250WYK unit, which is a very powerful little machine. We'll start off with the specs of the NUC itself, and what we've installed into it for our testing.

First, we'll take a look around the NUC itself. We've started with the back of the NUC, where most of the connectivity is located. From left to right, we have power, mini DisplayPort, micro HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet and two USB 3.0 ports.

On the front, we have two USB 3.0 ports and the 3.5mm audio jack.

On the side, we have a Kensington lock, if you wanted to keep it secure.

We have Intel's Core i5-4250U, which is mixed with Intel HD Graphics 5000. This is not too bad at all, considering the total power consumption of the NUC - hint, it's not much at all. Inside the NUC, we have two SO-DIMM slots for a total of 16GB of DDR3 RAM, a full-length PCIe mini slot, and one half-length PCIe mini slot.

These two slots can be used for a Wi-Fi module, and mSATA SSD. I didn't end up using the Wi-Fi module, because it has Gigabit Ethernet, which I prefer, always. The mSATA drive we used was Intel SSD 520 Series, the same 180GB, SATA 6Gbps drive we used in our original NUC review.

The RAM was provided by G.SKILL, who were kind enough to provide their high-end 16GB kit of RipJaws, 1600MHz, 1.35V DDR3 RAM. It looks great, and works in the NUC like a charm.

Filling out the rest of the specs on the NUC, we have 4 x USB 3.0 ports, a mini DisplayPort port, Gigabit Ethernet, and a microHDMI port. Connectivity is something that is not an issue on this model, which is one of the main areas of improvement over the previous generation NUC kits.

Taking a look inside the NUC, you can see all of its glorious innards, above.

There's even some VESA mounting holes on the NUC, which is a great way of using the NUC in the enterprise/work environment. You could just screw the entire computer onto the back of the monitor, keeping just the monitor, mouse and keyboard on the desk. Impressive stuff!

Moving onto price, with the Intel NUC Kit D54250WYK selling for $399.99 on Amazon. This is not too bad at all considering what you get for that price, and the size of the unit itself. With the RAM and SSD, you're bumping it up to the $600-$700 price point, which is still not too expensive at all.