Akasa Turing, Intel 8th Gen NUC (Bean Canyon), PC Fanless Cooling Case, Intel NUC 8 Aluminum Chassis, IR, Heatsink, Antenna Hole, 2.5" SSD HDD, Vertical/Horizontal Computer Case, A-NUC45-M1B

I have the NUC85iBEH model. It has been a faithful performer, but it could heat a small house under heavy load, and the fan noise was starting to bother me. The design of the NUC made it impossible to get to the fan without removing the entire motherboard, so I saw the Akasa Plato X8 as an opportunity to permenantly resolve my heat and fan issues by eliminating the fan altogether. You remove the motherboard from the original case, and place it in the Plato X8.First of all, the pictures of the Akasa should tell you that your resulting case is going to take up significantly more space in your rack or cabinet. You are replacing the small NUC case with a hunk of aluminum that is a giant heat sink which will absorb and spread the heat from your CPU to obviate the need for a fan and the noise that comes with it.In my eyes, this hefty aluminum hunk of heat sink is beautiful, and it abolutely works. All of the front and rear jacks on your original NUC case are duplicated. In fact, the rear panel has two extra openings for Wifi antennas, which are not included with the case. And the wifi antennas which would work with this case are the kind that use two of the vertical black sticks which have wires that plug into the Wifi card on your computer. The original NUC case uses wires that run along the inside of the box. That arrangement does not work with the replacement solid aluminium Plato X8. The aluminum case would block the wifi signal from a wire antenna inside the enclosure. The antenna kits are readily available on Amazon. For my NUC85iBEH, the wifi card required an antenna array with MHF4 connections. Connecting and disconnecting the tiny antenna leads was the most challenging part of the assembly.For all the rest of the connections, the Plato X8 kit supplied the cables to connect to the motherboard. The instructions are not verbose and use diagrams to describe the various parts and how to install them. When you get the motherboard out of the original case, You have to remove the thermal compound underneath the CPU and wipe the exposed area with alcohol gently to fully clean it. You use the supplied thermal compound to fully coat the bottom of the CPU which touches an aluminum block underneath it in the new case. Once you have screwed the motherboard down, connect the cables, and you are ready to power up. I was slow and cautious, and it took me about an hour to remove the motherboard from the original case, clean the CPU contact points, screw the motherboard down, and connect all the cables.With my NUC85iBEH, I lost none of the controls or connections on the front and back panels of the original case. My original case did have a micro SD card slot on the side of the case, so that is lost with the new case, but it is the only feature lost for me. That did not bother me, as I had never used it.When I pressed the front button to boot up, the comptuter booted up in total silence. There is no fan noise, ever. I have had the computer on for two solid days, and the top of the alumimum case is a little warm - nothing more. Using the CAM software to monitor CPU temperature after running for two days, I show a temperature of 37 degrees Celcius. Of course, this computer is used as an HTPC to listen to music and watch videos, so it is really never fully taxed in my usage. Nonethess, the fan used to come on all the time, and was distracting in a small room. And if I ever waited too long to clean the fan, the computer could get hot enough to occasionally have a thermal shutdown. Now there is no more fan to clean, and the motherboard assembly is in a fully enclosed case which should make it invulnerable to dust.I have attached a picture of the finished case in operation as well as my old NUC case and fan in its disassembled state. I did not take a picture of the motherboard installed in either case, but now that the project is finished, I did not want to open the new case back up.The Akasa Plato X8 is beautiful and practical, and I love it.

I bought the original Intel NUC8i7BEH because it has a powerful CPU in a small package. The GPU of the i7 8559U is Iris Pro 655, which is also currently the most powerful Intel GPU. It's an ideal computer for playing UHD bluray discs using PowerDVD. It's also equipped with a Thunderbolt 3 port for external GPU expansion. I was able to develop VR programs and play VR games using the NUC plus an nVidia external GPU. However, the fan sound has been clicking from the purchase. More recently, after an extended period of VR programs, the fan started to make more violent noises. I was initially thinking of having Intel fix the issue until I found the Akasa Turing case. In fact, another importance use of the NUC for me is for music. I connect it to a Sony TA-ZH1ES headphone amplifier for SACD playback or a Sony MDR-HW700DS for multichannel music. When I use the analog amplifier, I also use a pair of Audeze LCD-MX4s. The fact that these are open headphones make the computer fan noise very obvious. Therefore, I decided to go fanless by purchasing the Turing case.The installation was relatively trouble free. I hope Akasa could have included instructions on how to take the NUC motherboard out. To figure it out myself, I found that it's important to remove those static foams first, which were tape-glued to the inside walls of the NUC case. Then, take only those two black screws, turn over the NUC, and pull the motherboard out. Also notice that, you need to keep the microphone array assembly. This is illustrated on the instructions. After taking the NUC apart, I found the original heatsink and fans were too tiny to be thermal effective, even smaller than a typical laptop heatsink and fan. No wonder that the NUC often reached 100C not even underload. Additionally, the original NUC case had a thick thermal pad for the M.2 SSD module while the Turing case just leaves the SSD breathing on its own. I purchased an M.2 heatsink to be installed on the SSD.If you want to keep Wifi and Bluetooth, separate antennas need to be purchased. Be very careful about the antenna connector size. The Intel Nuc uses Intel 9560 wireless card. Antennas need to be made to support this model. I found the most common antennas on Amazon usually have a larger and incompatible connector size. Additionally, in order to get reliable Wifi and Bluetooth signal within room range, a pair of decent antennas are needed. I actually bought two pairs, one of rod-like shape, and another flat. I found the rod-shaped antennas had much better range. This is especially true for the Bluetooth signals.The finished build is 3-4 times the size of the original NUC case. The Turing case can stand upright. Therefore the occupied area on a desk is actually smaller. The reduction on CPU temperature and fan noise is incredible. So far, it normally runs at about 40C when all cores are at 4.5GHz. Under the heaviest load I could give, it never goes over 80C. Of course there in no fan sound at all. But I start hearing coil whine from the NUC board. Well, that probably means quiet for a computer.The case has many sharp edges and corners. And it's heavy. Considering its benefits, the design drawbacks are negligible. I think Intel indeed cut corners on its NUC in order to deliver a tiny package. To get the full potential of the i7 8559U, the Akasa Turing is a well-balanced choice.

My NUC10 was thermal throttling under virtually no load -- simply booting to Windows was enough -- in the original case. This caused the fan to spin up to a very loud level, and got super annoying while using it as an HTPC to watch videos. The Akasa Turing FX completely fixed that -- the NUC is now utterly silent and no longer thermal throttles no matter what video I play.I only have a few complaints, but they're both pretty minor hence the four star rating.The first is the instructions. They're really not clear. There's virtually no text to tell you what to do -- just a series of pictures. In one of them, they showed the installation of a part that didn't seem to be included with the case. Eventually I realized that part came from the original NUC case, but they could have easily added a small note to make that more clear. Once you realize what they want you to do, it's not that difficult to build... But deciphering the instructions was a bit of a pain.The second has to do with the 2.5" SSD mount. I don't really have any use for the 2.5" SSD at the moment, so I wanted to install it and just leave it in there for the future. However, this would leave a part flopping around on the inside of the case, where it could end up hitting the motherboard and damaging it. Ultimately, since I wasn't going to use a 2.5" SSD I simply left this out of the case entirely. It would have been great to see something set up where the connector could have been installed and tucked away for future use.