It comes with the screws (and the specialized power/sata cables), so all you need to do is mount the 2.5" drive to the case and attach the cables.
I did end up buying four more of these and all of them tested out fine. I ordered them without disks or RAM, and opted to install my own SSDs, though, so I could get the slightly newer Phison controller.
thanks, mateā¦
would the MSATA drives that come with these things be OK? i can get 2.5"
SSDās, but the price for the MSATA drive seems OKā¦
You can do slightly better buying your own SSDs; you can scroll up to see my results. Depends how much you care about disk perf. Is the stuff they include āgood enoughā? I think for most uses it is. But you can do a bit better for not much extra 
, if you want to squeak out a bit more disk perf.
thanks again, mateā¦
iāll probably get my own msata and ssd drivesā¦
keep up the good work. these types of write-ups are excellentā¦ 
@codinghorror Jeff which NUC would you recommend for the lowest power draw? Ideally i5, possibly i3, could you link me to an AliExpress item/seller? Thinking of possibly replacing my Raspberry PI Blog server
For lowest possible power draw? Something with Intel Atom, but it wonāt be super fast.
Has anyone had any luck getting these things to boot up when power is applied? (Maybe a āRestore from AC power lossā option?)
Enter BIOS, find
Chipset > PCI Express Configuration > Restore from AC power loss
It is very hard to find ā I had to ask the vendor!
That works perfectly ā thank you so much!
Would the same model still be recommended?
Iām looking for something to initially start out as my home router. Iām also interested in something like this for the living room?
50C at stress is fine, but what would their temperatures be around for normal use?
Sure, these or something very much like them would be great. Get a Skylake CPU if you can though, should be available now, and make sure it is passively cooled with no more than a 15w TDP. The vendors that stuff 30w or even 40-60w TDP CPUs into passive enclosures are nuts.
Will this boot without an mSATA drive? Iām thinking of installing only a SATA drive and leaving the mSATA/mPCIe port empty.
Regarding your recommendation to get skylake: it seems the vendor sells that now (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Fanless-i5-Mini-PC-Windows-Barebone-PC-Broadwell-Intell-Core-i5-5200U-2-7GHz-4K-HTPC/32366202925.html)
The spec sheet shows a āConfigurable TDP-upā of 25w at 2.4ghz. Is this something to be worried about? Will this run too hot to be passively cooled, when itās under load?
Should be fine on all counts. Out of box tdp is 15w.
Does anyone know why the Kaby Lake refresh of this fanless computer is slower than the Broadwell one?
Even the faster Kaby Lake i7 7500U is significantly slower than the i5 5257U thatās currently in my system.
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-5257U-vs-Intel-7500U
Iām experiencing some issues with sound lag while watching a 1080p 60 fps Youtube video and expected better performance from the newer models.
I suspect that would be a video or sound driver issue more than CPU. What does Task Manager say when viewing the video, for CPU usage?
Make sure you download the latest Intel video drivers (for onboard video).
I ordered the Kaby Lake i5-7200u version of this box for testing. Same exact processor, just 2 generations ahead. Should be around 20% faster factoring in the additional clock speed and Skylake architectural improvements.
Thereās only one network port in this model, the VGA port replaced the 2nd network port. If you remove the wireless card (as I did in the above picture) you can in theory install a mini pci express network card. Otherwise itās about the same design.
32GB RAM does work, but you need DDR3 SODIMMs of 16GB size which are quite expensive! I stuck with 8GB + 8GB.
I can definitely verify it sticks to fairly high clock speeds, even with 1 thread fully loaded with MPrime
sysbench ā 17.4s (multicore) 24s (single core)
4 thread ā 2.8 GHz (36w)
2 thread ā 2.9 Ghz (40w)
1 thread ā 3.1 Ghz (23w)
I also have the same box with the Kaby Lake i7-7500u versus the i5-7200u:
sysbench ā 15.5s (multicore) 21s (single core)
4 thread ā 3.3 GHz
2 thread ā 3.4 Ghz
1 thread ā 3.5 Ghz
The peak power is a little concerning as the i5-5200u box only went to 26w in the same circumstancesā¦ but due to the AVX2 optimization in MPrime, Iām trusting it a little less as a real baseline of potential CPU load power usage these daysā¦
Just a quick note for anyone who comes this way in future:
Mine has an i5-5300U @ 2.30GHz. Recently I started getting hardware errors like this:
$ sudo mcelog --ascii < crash2
Hardware event. This is not a software error.
CPU 0 BANK 4
MISC 7fc35d266dc2 ADDR 7fc35d266dc0
TIME 1485201141 Mon Jan 23 19:52:21 2017
MCG status:
MCi status:
Uncorrected error
Error enabled
MCi_MISC register valid
MCi_ADDR register valid
Processor context corrupt
MCA: Internal Timer error
STATUS be00000000800400 MCGSTATUS 0
CPUID Vendor Intel Family 6 Model 61
SOCKET 0 APIC 0 microcode 0
or like this (roughly):
kernel panic --not syncing --not all cpus entered broadcast exception handler
They seem to have gone away after I installed the intel-microcode Ubuntu package, which keeps the CPUās āfirmwareā up-to-date.
Hopefully this saves someone else the time and panic it took meā¦
One thing to note, in the Kaby Lake i7 version of this box, the auto-boot after power loss setting got renamed:
It is in roughly the same place as it was on the Broadwell box in the BIOS settings, but itās now called
State after G3
and you want it set to
S0 state
Pretty confusing terminology thereā¦
Hey. Just want want to warn anyone from using eGlobal. I got their computer, formatted it to put Linux on it, and then on the next reboot it would only boot to a black screen. I took a video and sent it to eGlobal, and then they asked me if Iām able to solder a new bios chip onto the motherboard to try and fix it.
Thereās no way I can do that kind of delicate soldering, so they had me mail the motherboard with ssd & ram back to them. They mailed it back to me and used the cheapest mail option, China Post to USPS. The package was lost.
Now theyāre ignoring me. Thinking of taking them to small claims court, not sure what else to do. I knew the risks going into this, and thankfully I can afford to lose $500, but just want to put this up as a warning to anyone considering this.
Weird we have purchased 16 of these now and I have never seen that
behavior. So you could not boot even into the BIOS?
