We had a previous discussion about this, and for its price ($675 with no RAM or SSD?) you can build a really nice mini-ITX system that uses a full size PCI-Express 3.0 video card. The mini-itx system will run circles around this with its laptop CPU. With the right mini-itx case it will still fit nicely into a home theatre setup or in relatively small spaces.
I'm shopping for a laptop lately, and you can actually get a pretty decent midrange laptop for that price (with a discrete GTX 940M or 950M GPU) and a 1080P display. It won't have an i7 in that price range, but with a better GPU you'd be able to play games more effectively, and an i5 is fine for everything I ever do. So, yeah, I agree...this is pricey for what it is.
I've also been surprised to find that laptops are now about the same price as similar specs in a desktop or small form factor mini PC.
For example: Acer Aspire V Nitro was onsale from Newegg for $650 recently. 15", i7-4720HQ, 1080P, 960M, 8GB ram /w one slot open. Haswell era but that just makes me want to see a comparison all the more.
The really nice thing about this unit is that it has dual M.2 slots (for if you want to throw absurd NVMe at it) and it has the new Thunderbolt (so you can plug an expensive external GPU enclosure on it). Either one of these paths will cost you that $650 purchase price again! But there's nothing else out there with this kind of performance density, carry-ability really. (Perhaps until the xb1s?)
Sure, the laptop comparison is interesting. But the real point of this i7 is that it's quad core (there're mobile i7 processors, especially in the U line, which are dual core), and that usually pushes up the price quite a bit. But as a portable desktop/development machine, I think the idea is quite interesting, maybe one of the most interesting that came out lately.
I can see how it would have its place in some circumstances, but they seem to be targeting a gaming/entertainment market segment, which is problematic with Intel integrated graphics (which have improved remarkably over the years, but still trail the leading edge of nVidia and ATI GPUs by several years). And, lately, I think the folks doing heavy computation are looking to GPUs for the thinky parts; certainly scientific computing is happening more and more on GPUs rather than CPUs. So, even in those cases, I might prefer a fast GPU to a slightly faster CPU.
Anyway, the price is a little high, though I'm sure the quality is good; Intel's servers have always been excellent.
I'm thinking about doing a similar setup and I like the smaller form factor because I can attach it to the back of a monitor and not even have to look at it.
Take a look at the Antec ISK-110. Not as small as the NUCs, but lets you build your own machine on the cheap, and still designed to be attached to the back of a monitor.
(Won't fit a standalone GPU, but I don't think anything that can be attached to a monitor can)
I've found the Zotac NEN (branded as a Steam Machine, but obviously perfectly capable with any other linux / Windows OS) to be another great solution to the problem of getting a very compact machine with capable hardware.
It uses a soldered GPU roughly comparable to an NVIDIA GTX 960, so it does 4K@60hz over HDMI 2.0, and has some really killer IO options. Dual gigabit ethernet, Intel wifi chipset, M.2 PCIe and SATA, USB-C 3.0, etc, etc... Upgradable desktop-class CPU, upgradable RAM, and often runs totally silent.
I spent a long time evaluating various mITX builds (I've been in the DIY enthusiast PC game for years and years), but eventually had to bite the bullet and realize that I couldn't build anything this small and this powerful for comparable cost.
Any advice for someone interested purely in CPU cores/speed, power consumption, large amounts of ECC memory, silence and some storage options (like 2.5" SSD fitting the box) but not at all in GPU power, when it comes to such small systems?
It will be difficult to find anything with a mini-itx motherboard (170x170mm size, standard ATX type rear I/O plate) or smaller that supports ECC RAM.
There's lots of ways to put a nearly silent water cooling system on a 65W TDP CPU, have an awesome GPU in it and keep it fairly small, but the ECC RAM part will require you to use a workstation/server class motherboard.
Depending upon how long the full-size graphics card is, the Dan A4-SFX [1][2], NCase M1 [3][4], and NFC Systems S4 Mini [5][6] mITX cases might be worth a look.
