Looks like you can even get Compute Sticks with an M5 processor these days (for about the price of a NUC...) And you can get a full size tower with a real i5 Skylake in it for the same price as well.
Wonder why you were getting banding? Seems all that data should be cached in the camera. USB is ECC so data out should equal data in! Maybe cheap shielding internal to the device causing random noise?
Jared