Assembly

You will first have to place the heat-transfer block on the NUC board's two large ICs. The blocks use the cooling fan's mounting holes, so installation is a breeze. Contact between the block and onboard components is also great, so you won't have to worry about high temperatures due to bad transfer rates.


Line the block with some thermal paste once it is in place, flip it over, and screw the board down onto the biggest piece of the chassis, which also acts as a passive cooling block. It can dissipate 20W of heat, which should be more than enough. Contact here is not quite as good, although I could not tell you why. The motherboard is straight, not warped, nor does it look as though pressure is unevenly spread throughout. It simply looks as though this particular spot requires a little bit more force. Streacom could make the block slightly thicker. As we will see later on, however, the chassis does an excellent job in terms of thermals anyways, so you have nothing to worry about.


Once the NUC board is in place, simply slap the front, side, and rear on. Both the front and rear are attached to the top cover / heatsink via screws. At this point, everything should stay in place nicely. Now, put the bottom panel back onto the chassis and the screws back into place. That is it—you are done.

Finished Looks

Turn the NUC without any moving parts on and it will produce absolutely no noise. The NUC board's USB port fits into its respective front-panel opening perfectly, and every connector in the back lines up with its appropriate cutouts flawlessly. Take a look through the bottom and you can clearly see the NUC PCB trough the air vents. To make sure temperature is never an issue, it would not be advisable to place the NUC on a carpet, for example.


As the Streacom NC1 does not offer its own power LED, you have to peek past the fins to see if any lights are on. Do so and you can see both the board's and HDD's LED.