Intel's NUC mini PC DC3217IYE and DC3217BY will costs $300 will on sale on December

Intel's next unit of computing(NUC), a custom form factor motherboard that fits into an intel supplied "4x4x2" chassis.The first generation NUC built with a dual-core ULV Ivy bridge CPU,the core i3 3217U. Intel will be selling two versions of the NUC the DC3217IYE and DC3217BY: Intel NUC kit comparison DC3217IYE DC3217BY CPU Intel core i3-3217U Intel core i3-3217U Chipset Intel QS77 Express Intel QS77 Express RAM 2xDDR3 SO-DIMM slots 2xDDR3 SO-DIMM slots HDMI Output 2 1 USB 3xUSB 2.0 3xUSB 2.0 Gigabit Ethernet Y N Thunderbolt N Y mini PCIe(half-height) 1 1 mini PCIe(full-height,mSATA support) 1 1 Power Supply External 19V DC External 19V DC Intel DC3217BY expected to be on sale around early december for $300 and $320 via Amazon and Newegg.For that price you will get the mother board(including PC) and chassis. Memory,miniCPIe cards and even the power cord all come separately.The power cord should be C6 type that plug's into power adapter's C5 type connector,the 3-plug C6 connector is also known as a cloverleaf connector.The kit also include VESA nounting bracket.The main difference between the two models is the presence of Gige (-IYE suffix) vs Thunderbolt (-BY suffix), although the version without Thunderbolt comes with two HDMI ports intead of one.you can drive a 2500x1440 panel off of the Thunderbolt port,although the usual windows Thunderbolt compatibility requirements apply here.The Thunderbolt version ships with a dark red glossy top.

Its incredibly simple to built NUC.There are four screws that hold the chassis together ,removing them will give you access to the motherboard: You can see the motherboard here you can install up to two 8GB DDR3 SO-DIMMs.the bottom mini-PCIe slot accepts half-height card,while the top slot can take full height card or an mSATA drive.The antenna pigtails for WiFi are already routed to the appropriate spot inside the chassis.This model has an integrated Thunderbolt controller which you can see in the upper right of the machine. Intel sent along its mSATA SSD 250,which is a SandForce based mSATA drive from Intel using 25nm MLC NAND.SandForce controllers work very well in mSATA form factor since they don't require any external DRAM.There are only four IC packages on the mSATA 520 the controller itself plus 3x64GB 25nm MLC NAND devices.

On the underside of the motherboard you'll find the Heatsink/Fan covering the QS77 chipset and core i3 CPU.

Under heavy load the fan will kick in.The top of the plastic chassis does get quite warm while the CPU is running full tilt.The 65W power adapter will pull around 10W for the full system at the idle and the peak power consumption for the NUC tops out at 19.3W when running our x264 HD test.