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Hands on: MSI Cubi NUC 1M review

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This review first appeared in issue 361 of PC Pro.

Last year, Intel stopped developing its popular NUC mini PCs, signing an agreement with Asus that it would “manufacture, sell and support the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) 10th to 13th generation systems product line, and to develop future NUC systems designs”. I assumed that meant Asus would have the monopoly on the NUC name, but not so: MSI has entered the fray with its Cubi NUC line, and assures me that more will follow in the coming months.

You can buy the Cubi NUC 1M as a barebones system, with the Core 3 100U version costing £349 inc VAT. Core 5 120U and Core 7 150U versions are available for £449 and £519 respectively (prices from scan.co.uk). Or you can buy Cubi NUCs as complete systems, supplied with RAM, SSDs and Windows 11 Pro. Here, I test the top-end version, with a Core 7 150U, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD.

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The Cubi NUC 1M is a great mini PC provided that all-out power isn’t a priority (Image credit: Future)

Arguably, this is a 14th gen NUC as Intel released the 150U earlier this year. However, Intel seems intent on adopting more confusing names for its chips with every release, and the 150U actually has much more in common with the 13th generation Core i5-1335U than the new Core Ultra line. It still uses the Raptor Lake architecture, includes two P-cores and eight E-cores, and there’s no NPU for local AI tasks.


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