Having owned an Intel i5 NUC since 2015, I was looking for an i7 model to attach to the back of a monitor in my office. At first I considered only small-form-factor (SFF) computers with discrete graphics cards: Intel's Hades and Diablo Canyon NUCs, PCs from Shuttle, Zotac, etc. Ultimately, the issue came down to whether it was worth an additional $1000 to have a discrete graphics card on a VESA-mounted-to-the-monitor PC.The cost of a small-form-factor PC with a discrete GPU is high. You'll spend $2000-plus for a moderately powerful PC . So do you need a discrete graphics card? If so, and cost is no object, consider Intel's Hades Canyon or one of the lesser-known manufacturers. For most gamers a smaller gaming desktop will serve better at much lower cost.If you're looking for a tiny PC to run as a home media server, this could be your machine. There is a bit of intermittent fan noise, but it's almost unnoticeable.Initially, I wanted a PC with discrete GPU for photo editing. Photoshop is one of the few non-gaming applications to benefit from fast graphics. But the cost of a small-form-factor PC with a discrete graphics card finally turned me to this little machine, and I'm happy with the purchase.When I bought this, Amazon had it on sale for $360. In addition to the NUC, I bought a 1TB M.2 SSD for one slot, a second 1TB SATA SSD for the second larger enclosure, two 16GB sticks of RAM (for 32GB total ) and Windows 10 Pro from an online source. Total cost was under $900. I attached the NUC to my monitor via a VESA mounting bracket (included in the package from Intel).It's a fast little machine--seemingly as fast with Photoshop as my SurfaceBook with discrete GPU. The m.2 drive blazes, and because there's a Thunderbolt 3 port, I was able to transfer files with blazing speed.Honestly, at the price I'm not sure I could have done much better in a desktop with equivalent specs.One final note: I considered the Apple Mini, but it's not in the same ballpark as this cost-wise. A Mac Mini i5 with 8Gb of RAM and a 256GB SSD is $1099. That's a lesser processor, one-quarter the RAM and one-eighth the storage for $300 more. Add the options necessary to make the Mac Mini equal to the machine I put together (8th gen i7, 32GB RAM, 2TB SSD) and the price on the Apple Store is $3299! Don't believe me? Check it out yourself--and that's a Mac Mini with Intel's UHD630 graphics rather than this computer's Iris Plus Graphics 655.