The combination of NUC and Akasa should bring peace of mind because they are quite dilligent in ensuring their products can keep your NUC cool enough. If it can’t they say so.
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Yes I believe Akasa conducted an adequate heat transfer analysis. My question was about how hot 50-60C is by touch. Will I be able to hold on to it for a long time, or should I feel hot after a few seconds? I just want to have a rough idea of using my hand as a thermometer. Also, since I leave the unit on all the time, is 50-60C safe for long term durability? I suppose it only heats up while it is working, so it’s actually a few hours a day at higher temperature.
For those who might care to know, I borrowed a portable infrared thermometer and took the measurement on the surface of my Akasa case. It measures around 41C while I’m actively playing music. Even considering that the CPU chip temperature is a bit higher, it seems safe to keep it that way. It was rather surprising though how warm an aluminum plate at 40C feels.
In comparison, my First Watt J2 in steady operation gets significantly hotter, close to 50C. At this temperature I can only put my hand on the top plate for 5-6 seconds. This is exactly as described in the manual.
Maybe hou have a very sensitive skin? 
As sensitive as Nelson Pass. Read above. 
Seriously, it makes me wonder what people are thinking when they run a CPU at 80C…
When it had an opposite effect my cpu temperatures wouldn’t be that low.
Huge amount is a layer of 1,5 mm. That’s huge comparing to the amount of thermal paste I’d used with my selfbuild pc’s.
Not that this is terribly valuable, but this is related to thermal conductivity, not just temperature. If there was a piece of plastic that was 41°C and your Akasa chassis that was also exactly 41°C, the aluminum chassis would subjectively feel quite a bit hotter and more difficult to hold onto vs. the plastic. And that’s because the material more effectively transfers it’s temperature from itself to whatever it’s touching/you.
So unless you’ve got a lot of experience touching metals/aluminum at different temperatures, then doing what you did first would “feel” hotter than you’d expect and might lead you to wonder about it.
I’ll put my NUC7i7DNHE into an Akasa Plato X7D case in about 2 weeks. Thanks to ma boy LinusTechTips, I bought a couple graphite thermal sheets to put in place of the thermal paste for the contact enhancer. We’ll see how it goes and how Room & Akasa deal with having 4 physical cores hopping off at up to 4.2GHz.
And what are your findings regarding the temperatures using the graphite sheets?
To be more scientifically accurate, it’s heat that is transferred, not temperature. The actual temperature the surface gets upon touch is called the contact temperature, which is a function of the conductivity (of both metal and the skin). This way, a higher conductivity material loses more heat to the surroundings at the same temperature. So for the same internal heat source, a plastic case not only “feels” cooler than aluminum but it is actually cooler on touch.
Not sure about the conductivity of graphite plates vs. the paste, but for the layers of graphite you also need to consider the contact thermal resistance between the layers, so they may not be as conductive as you might think.
I know that this is an old thread but in case anyone ever wants to know, the Intel i5-7260 processor, which is used in the NUC7i5BNH has a specified max junction (per Intel, on the die) temp of 100 deg. C. I believe that the bios cpu temp reads out the on chip (junction) temp.