While it’s getting easier to build your own mini PC for gaming, many of you might still want a pre-built compact PC. Something that works straight out of the box and fits in the cosiest of nooks or crannies. Well, for a PC that fits nicely into one of these nooks, look no further than Intel’s NUC 8 Home, a cheap, small form-factor (SFF) PC capable of more than you might initially expect!
Intel’s NUC (‘Next Unit of Computing’) series features SFF barebones PC kits, most often with their internal components soldered onto the motherboard, acting as tidy all-in-one packages. The NUC 8 Home hosts an 8th Gen Intel CPU and discrete AMD graphics card, and normally retails for $584 USD. But it’s now discounted by a whopping 41%, making it approximately $239 cheaper at $344.88. A great bargain for those of you looking for a small, all-in-one, easy to set up, and easy to use PC.
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What is it?
The Intel NUC 8 Home is a SFF PC that comes as an all-in-one system ready to plug in and play your favourite games or tackle general desktop workloads. It comes with Windows 10 Home already installed, saving you a fair amount on the operating system. Its dual-core 15W Intel Core i3-8121U processor, 8GB LPDDR4 RAM, and AMD Radeon 540 discrete graphics card are enough to get you hitting those headshots in Fortnite or CS:GO, but aren’t quite enough to run the most demanding games.
Why should you buy it?
You want a tiny, portable PC that’s capable of running less graphically intensive games like Fortnite or League of Legends, or just one that will give you a smooth desktop experience capable of handling moderate workloads. Perhaps you have limited space available and want something that’s small enough to fit on your desk while also being powerful enough to give you a snappy desktop experience. At any rate, the massive discount makes this already inexpensive mini PC an absolutely cracking bargain.
What options do you have?
This Intel NUC 8 Home discount is only available on Amazon’s US site, but those of us across the pond can still get it for its retail price.
One thing I would definitely recommend doing, should you buy this NUC PC, is installing an M.2 NVMe SSD (perhaps picking out one from our guide on the best SSDs for gaming), which is as simple as sliding it into the M.2 header on the motherboard. The included storage is a 1TB HDD, only running at 5,400rpm. The good news is that, because it includes this 1TB HDD, you only really need a cheap 250GB NVMe SSD to host Windows 10 and a few applications, and you can use the included HDD for the rest of your storage.
It’s pretty easy to clone Windows 10 over from the HDD to your new SSD. Switching to a decent NVMe SSD could mean the difference between a 60-second boot and a ten-second boot into Windows, and between a sluggish desktop experience and an incredibly snappy one. It’s well worth it.