Small (But Powerful) Msecore Mini-PCs, Reviewed

I have to laugh at how some ideas that flop get re-spun as the next big thing once technology catches up with the concept. For example, Microsoft pushed the idea of a tablet PC years before Apple popularized it. Back in 2001, the first list of specifications, designed to run Windows XP Tablet PC Edition yielded bulky, slow, and expensive products with uninspiring battery life. Almost a decade later, the iPad showed up with light weight, a better interface, and excellent battery life. It made all of the difference in the world.

Intel is hoping that its Next Unit of Computing (NUC) is doing the same thing for the mini-PC market. We were first introduced to the NUC at last year's CES. It leveraged the highly-integrated Sandy Bridge architecture to get a Celeron CPU, HD Graphics 2000, HDMI display output, USB connectivity, and GbE connectivity into a tiny little enclosure. Of course, the NUC generated buzz because of its size, the efficiency of its host platform, and the respectable performance Sandy Bridge was known to confer.

The first msecore mini-PC round-up I put together in 2009 (Three Slim Atom/Ion 2 Based Nettop PCs Compared) was limited to dual-core Atom D500-series processors with 1 MB of cache that topped out at 1.8 GHz. The systems were sold with 2 GB of RAM. They were fast enough to surf the Web and play back 1080p video (so long as you were willing to live with occasional hiccups), but compared to low-end desktop PCs, they were simply slow. Most of the workloads in our benchmark suite weren't even viable, and you could forget about casual gaming.example：i5-5257U Fanless Mini PC

That's not true of Intel's NUC and the other new systems we're testing in today's round-up. Power-sipping Intel Core i3, i5, and even i7 processors sport a minimum of 3 MB shared L3 cache, facilitating true desktop-class performance that is not only suitable for everyday productivity tasks, but even some serious work. Smooth video playback and moderate gaming are an added bonus.

Interestingly, despite the Core i3, i5, and i7 nomenclature, each machine in our round-up sports a dual-core Hyper-Threaded processor with at least 3 MB of shared L3 cache and clock rates between 1.3 and 2.5 GHz. The Core i3s don't benefit from Turbo Boost of course, and the Core i7s enjoy 4 MB of L3, but their basic specifications are so similar that we aren't expecting huge differences in processing power.

Although these msecore mini-PCs share some important traits, they're targeted at very specific usage models. We'll discuss each one's characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses on the following pages.