I don’t think it would have been in my case. The NUC is in the living room where the main HiFi and home cinema system live. Until last year my fanless NUC had an internal HDD for local music storage, and I never was bothered by noise from that. I’ve since swapped it out for an SSD to get more capacity, not because an SSD is silent.
- but then again, unlike @Michael_Harris, I don’t do any upscaling, just have some DSP on the Quads.