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Shuttle XPC Nano Barebone NC01U Review

Others/All-in-one PC by stefan @ 2015-10-20

With the Celeron 3205U at its heart, the NC01U Nano Barebone can be used for office tasks, browsing and thanks to its very small footprint it is barely noticeable on the table; of course it can be also installed to the back side of the display thanks to the included VESA mount, which will also permit a cleaner cable management. The central processing unit is actively cooled by a blower-type ADDA fan while the fan profiles can be always adjusted from inside the BIOS. This is not all: besides the 7mm HDD/SSD we can mount on one of the PCB sides we also have the option to expand the storage via the available M.2 2242 slot. Shuttle has great plans for this little box since besides the fact that it is available with multiple CPUs (NC01U3 with Intel Core i3-5005U; NC01U5 with Intel Core i5-5200U; NC01U7 with Intel Core i7-5500U), it will provide expansion boxes for it which will fit inside the special connector on the back of the NUC (XVB01, XLB01 or XCB01).

Packaging, A Closer Look Part I

We have been reviewing Shuttle barebones for quite some time now and observed their tendency of sticking with their own, proven designs. With the latest XPC Nano Barebones they are trying something new which implies a chassis with less than 600ml in volume, while including enough expansion possibilities and also a good selection of pre-installed CPUs. The model we are going to look at is the NC01U which houses the Celeron 3205U (ULV) processor from Intel. The packaging style for this series has not been modified, but since the product is much smaller than its predecessors, the box has been minimized too:

On one of the sides, we will get to see a sticker which presents us with some of the technical characteristics of the product:

The box is also provided with a plastic handle, for easy manipulation:

Inside the box we will get to see the main product which sits fully protected thanks to the thick foam material, but also its accessory box:

Besides the plain cardboard accessory box, we will also receive a separate re-sealable plastic bag, which contains the documentation along with the installation disk:

The documentation is well organized and explains us step-by-step how to remove the bottom panel in order to install the rest of the necessary components:

Besides the foam material, the manufacturer has also wrapped the product inside a transparent plastic back and we will see why right away:

Unlike the other models, this NUC-like mini-PC comes with a gloss black plastic chassis which minimizes its weight considerably:

After removing the protective tapes, we will get to see that in the frontal area of the unit we have two USB 3.0 ports, one card reader but also the Power button; the activity LEDs for the HDD and Power are embedded into this button:

The left side of the unit houses a Serial RS232 COM port along with a ventilation grill:

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