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title: Intel NUC

date: 2023-12-20T00:21:20+09:00

---

A few days ago, my oldest daughter upgraded her six-year-old computer. I thought for a while about what I was going to do with the now-obsolete but apparently perfectly good computer, and then I thought about using it as a home mail server. So today I wiped the disk and installed FreeBSD.

When I first got her a computer, I intentionally got her a minicomputer so she wouldn't be able to play high-end games. I don't know if it was a good thing or not, but her favorite games are low-end indie games, so they don't take much out of the computer, so it has served as a good gaming machine regardless of my intentions. The machine is a computer called the NUC, made by Intel, which is now out of the minicomputer market, and I used it today and it was amazing in two ways.

First of all, it's insanely quiet. I can't hear the fan spinning at all, which makes me wonder if Intel deliberately left it out when they designed it. No matter what I do, the body doesn't get hot. I don't know if it's because the CPU specs are so low that it can't generate thermal energy in the first place, but either way, it's impressively silent.

Second, it's painfully slow. My daughter played a game on this thing? Does it really play games? I thought it would be roughly comparable to an instance on AWS with a 2 core CPU and 8GB of RAM, although not the same specs, but when I actually put it to work, I was embarrassed. The network speed is fine, so it's no problem to get the binary package from the Internet and install it, but the source code compilation speed is ridiculously slow. I knew it was disrespectful to Xeon to compare it to Celeron in the first place, but I didn't expect it to be this bad.

So here are my conclusions today.

First, as a development machine, needless to say, it fails. It's too slow to use unless you're really serious about being disciplined. Even my old laptop isn't that slow.

Secondly, as a service machine, it's still perfectly serviceable, and as a mail delivery server, I don't think it needs to be any better. If you don't need to send a lot of spam, it's enough for a small startup. In addition to the mail server, it is also a console roguelike game server, and it is full of fun to run. It's not a web server, but a gopher or gemini hosting device, so you can rent it out to other users.

Third, it's still hard to make a judgment call on whether or not you should run this machine at home. These days, running an AWS Lightsail 8GB RAM instance is basically $40 a month, even though there are additional costs, and running it at home doesn't give you that much performance, and I don't know how much more I'm going to pay for electricity, and I can't guarantee that the server will be up and running 24/7.

Let's run it for a month and get the electricity bill and decide.