Intel NUC Kit NUC5i5RYK Review – Broadwell Comes to NUC!

By Nathan Kirsch

Inside The Intel NUC NUC5i5RYK

Intel nuc5i5ryb

With the bottom cover removed from the Intel NUC NUC5i5RYK you can quickly see there are two DDR3L SO-DIMM slots and a M.2 slot for your PCIe SSD. The blue SATA III header in the middle of the board and front case panel connectors won’t be used unless you plan on putting this board in another chassis for a totally custom build. The yellow jumper is for the BIOS security pins that allow you to run the BIOS in normal, lockdown and reset modes. The little white and black thingy majiggy below the yellow jumper is the Near Field Communications (NFC) Vertical Flexible Printed Circuit Connector (0.5mm pitch).

Intel Wireless-AC 7265 Soldered-Down

The Intel Wireless-AC 7265 wireless card is soldered down to the board with the wireless antennas already attached and routed. This 802.11ac Wi-Fi card is actually located under the M.2 PCIe slot, so it just goes to show how thin this solution is. In this picture you can also see two white headers. The white header on the left is a SATA power connector (1.25mm pitch) and the one below the black M.2 slot is the front panel dual-port USB 2.0 header (1.25mm pitch).

m2-slot-under

Above the wireless card you’ll see the standoff for the M.2 PCIe SSD. Intel has these three holes to support 42, 60 or 80mm long M.2 SSD cards. You can also make out the SWAP NS892402 Ethernet Transformer Module and a 4-pin auxiliary power connector.

nuc5i5ryb motherboard

On the top side of the motherboard youll find the CPU Cooler, which consists of a notebook style fan and heatsink that help keep the Intel Core i5-5250U processor nice and cool. Intel went with a SUNON MagLev GB0555PDV1-A 1.1W 4-pin blower style fan to keep temperatures at bay. Intel has used this cooler on the previous generation NUC and is said to be a low-acoustics active cooling design. The system battery can just be seen just to the left of the blower. It should be noted that this board does not have a HDMI Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) header on it.

nuc5i5ryk-heatsink

This angle shows just a sliver of the Copper heatsink base plate that Intel is using on the processor as well as the USB 2.0 header along the edge of the board that adds a pair of USB 2.0 ports if needed.

asm1442k

One of the largest chips on the board is the ASMedia ASM1442K high speed TMDS level shift IC. This level shifter is for the HDMI and DisplayPort outputs to ensure 4K video output is nice and smooth.

Intel nuc5i5ryk Inside

Here is a shot of the board outside of the case. Note the case has a thermal pad installed on the bottom plate to improve the thermal performance of M.2 devices since they operate at fairly high temperatures.

Let’s install the memory and storage drive into the NUC5i5RYK.