I’m thinking about investing into an intel nuc, long story short I need something that’s very powerful & somewhat portable. One major win about the nucs for me is that you can choose to upgrade the memory, storage & GPU with the likes of the nuc 9 extreme. Plus if they end up making more of those cool little compute units, I can easily swap those out as & when I need to upgrade the CPU… You get the idea…
That alone is a major reason why I’m not too keen on a laptop… But fundamentally I need a power house that’s portable!
I’ve also been wondering about memory, inn my previous positions that I’ve held in my development career, you could easily develop on a machine that has 8GB of RAM, 16GB being all round sound, but now… Well, let’s put it like this, I’m using an ol’ 6th gen i7 CPU with 16GB of RAM & my daily tasks just brings my system to its knees, CPU & memory pinned at nearly 100% all day long, earlier today alone I had to do several hard restarts because of the fact that my system just got that unresponsive.
Obviously I’ve tried keeping the amount of tasks running in the background to a minimum, but even then, even when I have the bare essentials running for my day to day tasks, it struggles like crazy, it’s getting to the point where I’m banging my head against the desk. That’s why I’m wondering if 64GB of RAM might actually make sense? …
Also out of the NUC’s that I’ve been looking at, I’m toying with the NUC 9 because it seems all round better, but the NUC 11 is cheaper… What do you guys think about that? I’m kinda sheepish of the NUC 11 because of the 4 cores if anything, despite how good or bad intel has done with the 11th gen CPU’s, again my current system has 4 cores & it just gets pounded into the ground.
Opinions please? - I know that I’ve mostly made my mind up, I’m just second guessing myself…
I think your choice to go with the NUC 9 is the best performance you can get per liter I think.
I don’t think there is any other machine that can touch it unless you go with a Velka 3 system, but that would require a very short GPU limting you to short 2070 at best, if you can even find one right now.
Yeah, unfortunately is pretty pricey compared to a custom build. If you feel like you lug around a bigger machine you can go for a bigger sandwich layout case or a “console style” one.
Yeah, I mean realistically I’m not too bothered as long as I can realistically carry it in a backpack… If it wasn’t for the fact that I need the portability side of things, I’d just go midi tower… And laptops, well… When you find 'em with 32-64GB RAM, it seems like they just get into stupid price regions…
I don’t think there are any SFF cases that you can carry in a backpack because even if they fit in one the weight is significant. I can tell you that my SFF build (details in the profile) weighs at least 8Kg. Going around with that weight on your shoulders every day is gonna be painful on the long run with just an average backpack.
An option could be to go with a Ryzen 7 4800u or 4750 Pro system, like this one:
Graphics are pretty meh (around a GTX 1030), but 8 cores, 16 threads and 15-35W power draw? Definitely not meh. Just remember to buy 64 GB of RAM for that.
If you want beefier graphics, invest in a Velka 5 case, it should still be small enough to fit in a backpack.
There are plenty of laptops with both socketed processors and swappable ram. You might consider looking at some of the clevo amd systems. @SoulFallen works for a company that does work with them IIRC. He might be able to help you out.
Also, worth noting that I’m fairly certain the nucs do not have socketed processors. Last I checked, they’re soldered.
Not sure what kind of cash you’re planning to spend though.
All of our devs (working with a large java stack) are on 32gb macbooks. They get by just fine. I get pretty close to the wire with 64gb with my tasks, but I’m mostly working with simulating huge amounts of containers.