ASUS NUC 13 Rugged Short Power Consumption and Noise
The system came with a 65W LiteOn power supply. One of the benefits of getting a fanless system from a well-known vendor is that things like the power supplies are better and include more regulatory and compliance markings.
For the total system power consumption, we saw only 3.7-5W idle. The Intel N50 package was showing only 0.7-0.8W at idle. Under load, we could get the entire system up to 17-18W with the N50 package using up to 11.6W.
From a noise perspective, this was great since it is fanless and silent.
Key Lessons Learned
The Intel N50 is not a fast CPU, and there is no way to get around that. It does not feel like something that we would use on a daily basis without perceiving a performance difference.
At the same time, it is a far cry from the performance of something like an Atom C3338/ C3338R dual core or a quad core Celeron J4125. Having higher performance per core certainly helps.
The M.2 3042 is a strange one. On the one hand, we would prefer another M.2 slot for a second SSD, but realistically, with the 64GB of onboard eMMC, that is unnecessary. Indeed, we can imagine a number of these systems will get an 8GB SODIMM and be done with their configuration. Perhaps having the M.2 3042 with SATA, PCIe, and USB connectivity is significantly more flexible, and that makes sense in a system like this.
Final Words
To say our team was apprehensive about testing this system would be an understatement. It is likely going to be the slowest CPU we test all year. At the same time, we have multiple display outputs and USB ports, dual 2.5GbE, and WiFi 6E. There is a lot of connectivity. Also, the N50 was not fast, but it has decent single-threaded performance, which really helps its usability, especially when interacting with graphical user interfaces.
One is paying a bit of a premium with the list price of this system at $235, but that is perhaps worth it to get a power supply from a known brand an a system from a known brand. For a fanless and low-cost system with surprisingly versatile connectivity, we went from being apprehensive about testing the system to actually liking it.
An important bit that seems to be missing: What NICs does it use?
@James
The N50 and X7211E versions are using dual Intel I226-V. The X7245E version is using dual Intel i226-LM due to more advanced capabilities like Time Coordinated Computing and Time-Sensitive Networking.
Nice. Looks like it could be a good computer for a shop location that gets a lot of heat/dust/metal shavings. Or even a good computer for inside a sound recording booth.
All these numbers are nice for comparison with other devices, but what would a typical use case for these things be? Would it be powerful enough to run basic networking services like dns/dhcp and routing/firewall on linux for a small home?