The Tech Report writes Intel attempts to fix the overheating issues of its NUC via a new BIOS update that sets a default minimum fan speed of 30 percent. The reporter says the NUC is now perceptibly noisier, but still barely audible from two feet away.
I should note that the overheating problem we encountered involved not just the heat from the Wi-Fi card but also its effect on the closely situated mSATA SSD, which in our review system was a pre-release version of the Intel 525 Series SSD, a product formally released just yesterday. We learned in a conversation with some Intel reps at CES that the NUC lockups were in fact the result of two problems coming together: too much heat in the NUC chassis and a defective thermal throttling mechanism in pre-production Intel 525 SSDs. Intel tells us the throttling mechanism has been corrected in production drives, so in the future, any overheating should merely cause the drive to slow down, not to lock up and become completely unresponsive until the system's power plug has been pulled.
