Rest_Assured

Does the compute unit require power from the PCIe slot or does the entire thing run off the 8pin connector?

Will said. It doesn't take away from the fact that the nucs have been growing in size generation after generation.

I'm not saying that small PCs can't be gaming oriented. I'm just saying that the NUC has too little performance to compete with computers of similar size. They are competing in a market that is already out performing it. If it had been 30% smaller, it would have knocked it out of the park IMO.

Obviously, they are different markets. The zotac z-box isn't that much bigger than the NUC and has a full gtx 1060. And way cheaper. The NUC shouldn't be for gaming. It's a small PC.

Everyone is ooing and aweing at the performance built into the tiny chassis of the new NUC, but it has gotten too large. The platform no longer makes sense as a platform as there are other machines that offer MORE performance in the same or smaller area. Don't believe me? Lenovo made the P320 tiny that has a desktop CPU and a Quadro in as small of an area. https://www3.lenovo.com/us/en/workstations-thinkstation-p-series/thinkstation-p-series-tiny-/ThinkStation-P320-Tiny/p/33TS3TP320T When the NUC was the size of a hockey puck, it totally made sense. You could throw them around and use them as a low powered device, but now with the size and performance they are encroaching on, they are making themselves unimportant. Sorry if this came across as ragey. I just got sick of watching reviews saying "This size to performance has never happened before!"

I started running into issues in freenas on this card about 24 hours after installing it and setting up a pool and a couple VMs. Freenas completely locked up and the console threw several errors. I rebooted and the LSI card stated the it was unable to load. I went online and found there may have been an issue with older firmware and went to update. I made an EFI bootable usb that took me to the EFI shell and ran "sas3flash.efi -c 0 -b mpt3x64.rom from the SAS3_UEFI_BSD_P14" package. But, this too threw an error. I then tried flashing both IT and IR firmware from 9311_8i_Package_P15_IR_IT_FW_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows. via sas3flash.efi -o -f SAS9300_8i_IT.bin but get an error as well. I think i'm stuck with a DOA card, or me fiddling around flashing the card wiped it irreversibly. Anyone with experience able to jump in on this? Thanks!