Arches Canyon NUCs--who likes them?

[UNCjigga]

I picked up a NUC6CAYS a few months ago and so far so good--for me it's the perfect entry-level HTPC in a box. The barebones kit is only $150, but for $225 you get a bit of RAM, eMMC, and a full Windows 10 Home license. I bought the full kit for the license alone, as I already had spare RAM and an older SSD lying around.

There were some initial HDMI firmware issues that have since been resolved (it uses an LSPCon DP1.2 to HDMI 2.0 chip) and the little Celeron chip is surprisingly fast (no hyperthreading but 4 real cores). Even though the GPU shows as an HD Graphics 500 series part, the media block is nearly identical to Kaby Lake (full VP9 and HEVC 10 bit decode @ 4K.) I have it hooked up to a 65" Samsung JS8500 at 4Kp60 with no issues thus far.

Only problem now is finding content...I've dabbled with Kodi but haven't found many sources to stream 4K HDR (how do I even know if I'm outputting in HDR?)

 

[QueBert]

Looks sweet, how loud is the fan? I was about to order an Nvidia shield for Kodi. But with a pc I could use my Amazon echo to control Kodi. Don't need windows o memory so $150 sounds crazy good. I need to go Google the video performance, I use a pretty intensive skin graphically. Which skin do you use? I used Kodi on a system with an older igpu and it was pretty laggy with the Aeon skin

 

[UNCjigga]

Looks sweet, how loud is the fan? Which skin do you use? I used Kodi on a system with an older igpu and it was pretty laggy with the Aeon skin

I have the NUC behind a glass door in a media cabinet that's 8 feet away in a wide open room--suffice it to say that I've never heard it the fan. I'm not sure which skin I'm using (Kodi noob) but it was something that I got off of a wizard--I think it's called Prism. It lags a bit on startup while updating sources and DB but once everything is cached it's pretty smooth.

 

[Malogeek]

Damn this thing looks perfect for my kids play room I'm setting up for them and I need a HTPC for their TV. Can't believe it's $225 with the storage and W10 preinstalled. 32Gb is at the limit of useful storage but I can always throw in an SSD later.

 

[UNCjigga]

Just be aware that the 32GB is an eMMC, so don't expect great IO performance (enough to boot Windows, run a few browser tabs and watch a stream though.) I was able to clone/resize all the native partitions to my SSD and ended up disabling the embedded MMC (BIOS option) as I no longer needed it.

 

[Malogeek]

Just be aware that the 32GB is an eMMC, so don't expect great IO performance (enough to boot Windows, run a few browser tabs and watch a stream though.) I was able to clone/resize all the native partitions to my SSD and ended up disabling the embedded MMC (BIOS option) as I no longer needed it.

Yeah I don't really need much IO performance as it will be pretty much all streaming through Kodi from a NAS, TV via HDHomerun DVR and some gaming streaming via Steam.