The NUC 8 i5 is a great midtier NUC. It offers decent performance for web browsing, home office tasks, and software development of small projects. However, do not expect to seriously game on it. Importantly, it has similar single core performance to the NUC 10 i5 but +30% better multithreaded performance (compare the i5-8259U to the i5-10210U). The fan is audible in normal circumstances, but loud when there's 100% load on all cores. For midtier NUCs, the 8 is great!