Education clients value the powerful performance and space-savings of the Intel NUC Mini PC and ByteSpeed’s stellar service…
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ByteSpeed was founded in 1999 with a vision to manufacture high quality computers and offer superior customer service. Kyle Beckius, Purchasing Manager at ByteSpeed, works with a range of clients across industries, including medical, financial, and education, providing PC hardware and network solutions that enable their businesses. He says, “We really function as our clients’ tech department because we are building and troubleshooting
their hardware. We want a long partnership with our customers, serving more like a trusted advisor than a vendor.” The team at ByteSpeed has built and deployed, as well as provided on-going services for the Intel® NUC Mini PCs for schools and classrooms across the United States, including the Channelview Independent School District, a 9,500 student district located on the outskirts of Houston, Texas. “If there’s one thing we hear again and again, it’s that there are more students and less room. The small size of the Intel NUC allows us to deploy more systems into the same size computer lab and service all the students appropriately,” says Beckius.
Darrell Cheney, Director of Technology for Channelview ISD says, “We made the switch from Dell systems to Intel NUC Mini PCs built and serviced by ByteSpeed a few years ago and haven’t looked back since. The NUCs provide surprisingly robust performance at a great price, and with ByteSpeed’s 5-year warranty, it was an easy switch to make. Since then, we have been able to put replacement plans into place for all our machines. It has really helped teacher morale and helps our technology department by reducing the number of tickets for aging and ancient computers.”
The performance of a full-sized PC in 4-inches square
But just because the NUC is tiny doesn’t mean that it underperforms. “The NUC is absolutely a computer replacement,” says Beckius. “You have the full power of a desktop in a small form factor PC. The failure rate is very low and the systems have a nice cost to performance ratio. With more uptime, both teachers and students are able to accomplish more without interruptions in workflows.”
With the performance of an 8th generation Intel® Core™ processor, 8 GB of RAM, and a 256 GB SSD, the Intel NUC Mini PCs that ByteSpeed builds and services for schools have the power to run STEM software, such as robotics programs required for core curriculum. “The NUCs we have purchased have helped to pave the way for regular replacement of machines. It has allowed campuses to purchase more machines at the same cost which benefits our students and teachers alike. The NUCs themselves are the perfect, compact, robust, and reliable solution we were looking for. We have also responded to other districts when they ask about the NUCs and can honestly and easily recommend them, and ByteSpeed very highly,” says Channelview’s Cheney. “We don’t run into a lot of obstacles that the NUC can’t handle performance-wise. We can hit most of our customer’s needs with a NUC, including esports gaming for education. The NUC is great for this,” says Beckius from ByteSpeed.
A path to upgrades and system refresh
ByteSpeed has been a long-term Intel partner. “We began building with Intel motherboards and processors. When the company got out of the motherboard business and started making the Intel NUC, we ran proofs-of-concepts for various verticals, and when we were satisfied, we began building and deploying. Over the years, as we switched our customers to NUC Mini PCs, they’d refresh to new ones when it was time,” says Beckius
“We’ve encouraged our clients to choose an Intel NUC Mini PC with the Intel® Core™ i5 processor inside,” says Beckius. The midrange PC has the performance to handle specialty software as well as common productivity software and, “lasts the five years most companies and institutions wait to refresh. If we build and deploy a NUC built with an Intel® Core™ i5 processor, it’s a safe bet it will still be running five years later and will be able to upgrade—whether memory or storage,” says Beckius.
Copyright Intel Corporation 2019