I recently purchased this after obtaining an Intel NUC 11 and having good luck with it running StellarMate X OS.
The thing that I found attractive about this unit was it also allowed me to install a 2.5" SSD in it in addition to the 500GB storage.
I placed a 1TB Samsung 980 SSD into the system, mounted in a
Odds are, you can get by just fine with the 8GB/256GB units. I just wanted the additional memory because I like my computers to have a minimum of 16GB RAM. With the ability to add a regular SSD to this unit, the smaller 256GB drive used for the OS is not that big of a drawback.
Overall, the performance of this unit is somewhat similar to the Intel NUC 11, with the NUC11 being slightly faster to me at times, but that is because the NUC 11 uses NVMe and this unit uses M2 2280 SATA 3 drive for storage.
After fully setting up Windows (with all updates on it) I then did a recovery image for Windows prior to installing StellarMate X OS (in case I want to play with N.I.N.A. on it later). After installing StellarMate X OS I noticed that I did not have any WiFi available, but the hard wired ETH connection was working fine. I was able to use a USB WiFi adapter to finally get a WiFi signal. I'll discuss the WiFi issues on another page of this article.
Of course, anyone familiar with Linux knows that newer hardware is slow to be taken up (especially when dealing with WiFi/network devices) in Linux when compared to the Windows world (where most of society lives).
Once I was able to get the unit up and running with valid WiFi (even if it was via a USB adapter) it seems to be a decent rig.
There is a problem in the default install with flickering of the screen when accessing via
The thing that I found attractive about this unit was it also allowed me to install a 2.5" SSD in it in addition to the 500GB storage.
I placed a 1TB Samsung 980 SSD into the system, mounted in a
Captures directoy and plan on using it strictly for the capture storage since you can tell SM where to place the captures easily.Odds are, you can get by just fine with the 8GB/256GB units. I just wanted the additional memory because I like my computers to have a minimum of 16GB RAM. With the ability to add a regular SSD to this unit, the smaller 256GB drive used for the OS is not that big of a drawback.
Overall, the performance of this unit is somewhat similar to the Intel NUC 11, with the NUC11 being slightly faster to me at times, but that is because the NUC 11 uses NVMe and this unit uses M2 2280 SATA 3 drive for storage.
After fully setting up Windows (with all updates on it) I then did a recovery image for Windows prior to installing StellarMate X OS (in case I want to play with N.I.N.A. on it later). After installing StellarMate X OS I noticed that I did not have any WiFi available, but the hard wired ETH connection was working fine. I was able to use a USB WiFi adapter to finally get a WiFi signal. I'll discuss the WiFi issues on another page of this article.
Of course, anyone familiar with Linux knows that newer hardware is slow to be taken up (especially when dealing with WiFi/network devices) in Linux when compared to the Windows world (where most of society lives).
Once I was able to get the unit up and running with valid WiFi (even if it was via a USB adapter) it seems to be a decent rig.
There is a problem in the default install with flickering of the screen when accessing via
VNC, but I also describe what I did later in this article that seems to have resolved it for me (albeit with slower screen draws).- Next page: It arrives!
