I recently had the opportunity to play with some Mac Minis. The thing is real sleeper. Sure, it has a fan, but afaik it's off on light loads, and it's as whisper quiet as the macbooks when its on. Granted, I've never owned a nuc. I'm working under the assumption that it's louder than a Mac Mini just because I havent heard anyone call it a quiet device. It's also expensive considering the mac mini is almost the same price.
I'd love a semi-passive mini pc. I can tolerate the fact that fully passive mini PCs are still expensive, rare, and for some reason, european, but what about silence oriented mini PCs, and semi-passive? I see a whole lot of Atoms and Celerons
![Rolling Eyes :roll:](./images/smilies/icon_rolleyes.gif)
The entire quiet PC industry has made leaps toward semi-passive and silence oriented (think laptops, Video Cards, new hybrid PSUs) but for some reason the Mini PC industry is stagnating. Heck, we have Core M fanless laptops but no Core M Fanless mini PCs!
It would be really nice for Intel or someone else to release a semi-passive NUC or Compute Stick product, and advertise it as such. In the current market situation, the best value purchase for a mini pc is still a old laptop (perhaps with a broken display) that has a known-functioning fan control software (dell, lenovo to name a couple)