Righto. The RAM arrived a good two weeks late, but it's here now so I've proceeded to assemble and set the unit up.
Some more (though probably simple) questions:
1). Ran HWMonitor and under SYSTIN it's reporting a temperature of 123'C? I'm assuming this is just a false reading? The NUC doesn't feel hot at idle, not even warm for that matter.
2). Serious issues with my Intel 7260AC (Dual-Band). Signal drops consistently and for the life of me I can't get it to keep said signal. I've been able to activate Windows 7 but that's it. Can't even get it to run Windows Update. Any tips? Looking online this seems to be a common issue? Have tried changing power settings etc to no avail. And I've installed both the latest BT and Wireless drivers from Intel (the latest as of this writing). The antenna themselves seem fine, as well as the card itself. At times it's doing a good 2MB/sec over wireless, then that slows all the way down to 40KB/sec (until it disconnects then reconnects, which is does far too frequently).
3). The Intel splash screen on cold-boot. That seems to flick by VERY quickly before the unit moves onto boot the OS. That splash screen lasts maybe a good fifth of a second. Is this normal? BIOS 0021 as far as I recall (I updated to 0026 immediately) did not have this 'issue' if you could call it that.
4). Is there some sort of Powermizer-like feature with the graphics? I noticed that sometimes after being left to idle, doing some graphics intensive sees the graphics lagging for a little while before getting back up-to-speed (starts laggy, then goes fluid). A quick test with Windows Key + TAB best demonstrates this.
5). Any tips for disabling Superfetch / Prefetch? There are all sorts of random guides online and most are quite contradictory (apparently some Intel drives need these turned on to prevent performance issues with data flushing). Using a 240GB Intel 730. And, how to disable the two features safely?
EDIT - Read around and the the Wifi issue is quite widespread for those NOT using Windows 8. If anything, I've managed to get the card going (somewhat) with HT Mode DISABLED. But throughput (speeds) vary widely from 1Mbps all the way to 54Mbps (won't go higher with HT Mode disabled). This seems to have been an issue for over six months now; can an Admin please explain as to what other things I could try to maximise performance on this card? I'm on Windows 7 Pro x64, and just managed to get the NUC to download 500MB worth of updates (in less than 10 minutes actually, with HT Mode disabled, though with some random packet disrupts along the way).
EDIT 2 - Uninstalled 17.0.3 and installed 17.0.0 (restarting each time, after the uninstall and install of the 17.0.0). Works now flawlessly. No changes made to card configuration page, no changes in BIOS. Looks like the driver bundled in 17.0.3 is bad. Ping testing shows it at 1ms, the slowest at around 16ms. Can also see ASPM working (enabled via BIOS; one of the recommendations of fixing the wireless issue was disabling it; I've left this enabled after downgrading the driver).
Now, end of the day I'm happy. It works, and I can finally start migrating my data over from my old machine. My other 4 questions remain though ^_^ Thanks~