A First Look At The Intel Broadwell NUC Kit

Written by Michael Larabel in Computers on 5 February 2015 at 11:50 AM EST. Page 1 of 3. 11 Comments.

With wrapping up my Core i7 5600U Broadwell Linux tests using the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon in the next few days, fortunately the Intel BOXNUC5I3RYH just arrived as the first available NUC Kit shipping with a Broadwell processor. The NUC5i3RYH features a Broadwell Core i3 processor, HD Graphics 5500, and support for a M.2 SSD card and 2.5-inch HDD/SSD.

Arriving this morning was the Intel BOXNUC5I3RYH that I managed to buy at Amazon.com earlier this week as the first Broadwell NUC Kit I've found for sale in the United States. Given the great experience I've had with the new X1 Carbon on Linux with i7-5600U, I picked up this Broadwell NUC right away rather than waiting on any review samples, in being very curious how the spectrum of Intel Broadwell hardware is panning out.

My preliminary Broadwell tests with the i7-5600U found the Linux OpenGL performance to run behind Intel's Windows 8 driver for this fifth-generation Core processor, Broadwell has very nice power efficiency improvements over Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, the Linux support is maturing, and overall things are turning out nicely for Intel Broadwell on Linux. Being published tomorrow is my ~9 way Linux laptop comparison that includes the X1 Carbon compared to a wide-range of older ultrabooks/laptops while all running Ubuntu 15.04 in its present development form.

Included with this Broadwell NUC was a VESA mounting bracket, a 19V 65 Watt power adapter, and the product documentation.

The Core i3 5010U processor is dual-core with Hyper Threading and has a 2.1GHz base frequency without any form of a turbo boost. The TDP of the i3-5010U is 15 Watts -- the same as the i7-5600U -- but has a TDP-down of 10 Watts if dropping the frequency to 600MHz.

The Core i3 5010U has a 3MB cache, 900MHz HD Graphics 5500, and the other common Broadwell features. For those that may try to compare the HD Graphics 5500 of my earlier i7-5600U testing as it too had HD Graphics 5500, that higher-end ultrabook processor had its maximum graphics frequency at 950MHz rather than 900MHz with this i3 CPU.

The Intel BOXNUC5I3RYH supports two sticks of DDR3L memory with a top supported frequency of 1866MHz and handling up to 16GB of RAM. For storage there's room for an M.2 SSD card and for a Serial ATA 3.0 SSD/HDD 2.5-inch drive.


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