Intel Skull Canyon NUC6i7KYK in the current age? Are they still active and not suffering from hardware failure?

Sirgeorge · August 29, 2023

I'm in need of some fairly cheap expansion of processing power for a dev environment I'm running. We've officially expanded beyond our set of 2015 Raspberry pi 3s, so after much consideration, I see that the most obvious next choice is to get one or more of the Intel Skull Canyon NUCs from a refurbishing eBay store and rock-n-roll with them for a while. Are these units starting to fail or are they still going strong? I'd like to get at least a year of service out of them and 2-3 would be preferable before I have to go running for their replacement. Help?

BlueChinchillaEatingDorito · August 29, 2023

1 minute ago, Sirgeorge said:

I'm in need of some fairly cheap expansion of processing power for a dev environment I'm running. We've officially expanded beyond our set of 2015 Raspberry pi 3s, so after much consideration, I see that the most obvious next choice is to get one or more of the Intel Skull Canyon NUCs from a refurbishing eBay store and rock-n-roll with them for a while. Are these units starting to fail or are they still going strong? I'd like to get at least a year of service out of them and 2-3 would be preferable before I have to go running for their replacement. Help?

Or you could look at HP EliteDesk mini systems. HP's Elite line of devices pretty much have bulletproof reliability so that's another option.

Sirgeorge · August 29, 2023

7 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

Or you could look at HP EliteDesk mini systems. HP's Elite line of devices pretty much have bulletproof reliability so that's another option.

hmm, those hp EliteDesk 800 G4 mini and G3 mini computers do look tantalizing, and they seem to cost less by a bit. Do they last 7+ years?

BlueChinchillaEatingDorito · August 29, 2023

41 minutes ago, Sirgeorge said:

hmm, those hp EliteDesk 800 G4 mini and G3 mini computers do look tantalizing, and they seem to cost less by a bit. Do they last 7+ years?

There's honestly very little in them to fail. The most common failure items in computers such as the SSD and PSU are easy to replace. Drives are your standard 2.5" SATA SSDs/HDDs and M.2 drives are either SATA or NVMe. The external power brick is shared with the EliteBook/ProBook line of the same vintage so replacements are plentiful and third-party ones are widely available.

These business/enterprise devices are much better built than your HP Consumer stuff. I've yet to see a board die on its own accord. The ones I've seen fail are because someone spilled coffee on it or asphyxiated it.