Ultimate NUC killer under 500

14 Feb 2020 - by 'Maurits van der Schee'

I've built another PC. This time I wanted to replace my Intel NUC i5 with something more powerful. I've chosen an ASRock DeskMini A300 case (with a STX-sized motherboard) and a Ryzen 3 3200G processor. This little machine costs less than 500 euro, is super fast and not too noisy. I run Xubuntu 18.04 LTS and it works great, I'm very pleased with the results!

List of materials

The materials used in this build:

152 Asrock DeskMini A300
 76 Corsair DDR4 Vengeance LPX 2x8GB 3200 SO-DIMM
 99 AMD Ryzen 3 3200G Boxed
120 Intel 660p 1TB NVMe SSD
 45 Noctua CPU Cooler NH-L9a-AM4
--- +
492 Total

It is not the most power efficient machine, and I would not recommend it as an always-on (or HTPC) server, due to it's high idle power usage, but it is an awesome fast, quiet and small workstation. Note that the motherboard supports 32GB RAM and you may upgrade to the AMD 3400G for even more performance.

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TQ
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