Intel NUC 11 NUC11PAHI5 Panther Canyon Mini PC, i5-1135G7, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Mini Computers Windows 10 Pro for Business Home Office, Support 8K/WiFi 6/4K Quad Display/Bluetooth 5/Thunderbolt 3

This little thing surprised me. I thought nothing this small would work as well as it does. Easy to get it up and running.

The Intel NUC 11 Mini PC is a powerful and versatile computer thats perfect for home use. Nowadays I almost exclusively use my work computer, but for personal media streaming, paperwork, and social media I prefer to take it off of corp. When my old laptop died, the NUC 11 was the perfect, affordable replacement.

I bought the NUC!11 i5 barebones and added 16gb (2 x 8) of GSkill 3200 ram and a 500gb Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe hard drive. Then I installed the Linux/Ubuntu based POP!_OS 21.04 operating system available for free from System 76. Its been only a few weeks, but this system works very well. I am not a gamer or programmer, but use the TOS trading platform that can be taxing on older systems. Its no problem with this setup. The machine is quite silent and runs very cool.

I got my hands on the Intel NUC 11 NUC11PAHI5 Panther Canyon Mini PC from Amazon, and oh boy, this little thing is a server superhero! Its so small and cute, yet it packs a serious punch when it comes to running my Discord bot and juggling virtual machines.

Had high expectations however the pc lasted 3 weeks before the motherboard died. Getting it replaced is complicated and it takes time. A waste of money.

Update of my original review - after posting I was contacted by the seller who offered to replace the computer with a new one, after which the problems were resolved, and the replacement computer works as expected.

I have an LG Gram laptop with the new 11th gen intel processor in it and was extremely impressed with it. So, when it came time to replace an older second computer that is a desktop, I waited patiently to see which companies would start producing NUC form factor devices with the 11th gen processor.

20221220 Update

The Intel NUC has state of the art technology in a very small form factor.

I update my review to clarify that the memory coming in the unit is indeed DDR4. I initially mentioned that it was DDR3 because the frequency I read was 2667 MHz instead of 3200 MHz (the maximum freq. spec for DDR4). However, the max frequency spec for DDR3 is 2133 MHz not 2667 MHz. Therefore the memory is indeed DDR4 so I made a mistake in my initial review which I want to correct in this updated review.