Last time I posted about this. Here are some further thoughts after using a NUC for 2 1/2 weeks. In addition to HTPC, I took the NUC with me on a holiday in the south of New Zealand, leveraging its tiny form factor to save on transport space/weight.
The NUC has been a very useful and dependable replacement for the AMD E350 computers I used to use in the HTPC role at home. With current driver support available in Xubuntu, the graphics performance is very satisfactory, as is other performance. While down south I used it to run the maps drawing software Qgis as well as for more general tasks, and it handled the heavy load of rendering the screen and composer output just fine. If anything, the hardware does seem to be quite fast with a Celeron J3455 quad core and 8 GB of RAM compared with the Pentium G dual core and 24 GB of RAM in my main pc.
The main issue you do have to be aware of in these NUCs is the built in wireless capability. The internal wireless card which is preinstalled comes with a couple of small antenna wires already attached to the case. The performance of these will not be as good as a regular whip antenna so you have to be careful with where you put the NUC. On holiday I was only getting 1 Mbps from the campground's free Wifi which was very disappointing and almost unusable (the iwconfig command is used to get details of wireless performance). I even burned through several GB of Vodem data (and had to pay topup charges as well) to be able to use the NUC to do all the usual stuff that I do at home on the internet. However as soon as I raised the chassis to a high windowsill the wireless speed vastly improved to around 65 Mbps and now everything seems to be working just fine. Even at home the wireless speed is slower than what the Ubiquiti wireless bridge cabled onto the old computer was capable of, but I will have a look at the location of the box if I decide more speed is mandated.
