I have long had a Boxee box as my main HTPC. It has never really been able to do everything I wanted and was never able to properly deal with my media library. I thus decided to get a Intel NUC to run OpenElec with XBMC on it, the parts I got were:

• Intel NUC D54250WYK - I5-4250U
• Intel 525 series 60GB SSD mSATA
• Crucial Ballistix Sport 4GB PC12800/1600MHz CL9

Fan noise

The first thing I noticed after setting it up was that it was quite noisy. The cooling section in the UEFI BIOS told me the fan was running at slightly over 3000 rpm when idle, which seemed slightly high. My solution was to simply change the Minimum Duty Cycle (%) from 40 to 0. This reduced the fan speed drastically. At times (mostly right after boot) the fan was completely turned of, however most often when the system is idling the fan speed is between 1500 and 2300 rpm.

Shutdown issue

I’m also having problems with turning off the device. Turning the device off via the UI or poweroff simply reboots it (it goes through BIOS, so it is not simply reloading XBMC as others have had issues with). Running halt makes the UI hang but does not power off the device.

However, if I have a keyboard plugged in, it works as expected, the device shuts off and stays off. The same is however not true for USB-keys (the only other USB-device I have tried), as that also makes the device reboot instead of shutting down.

Solution

I found a discussion around the issue on intels forums where a Intel employee posted a beta version of the BIOS (based on version 4024) that seems to resolve the issue.