Asus’ latest ROG NUC crams an RTX 5080 right into a mini PC kind issue
Followers of teeny-tiny gaming mini PCs have been considerably underserved since Intel retired its NUC Excessive line, which had room for a full-sized desktop GPU along with the most recent laptop computer processors. Asus has since taken up the NUC mantle, however sadly has but to ship one thing fairly the identical. That mentioned, the most recent ROG NUC mini PC provides you the most recent gaming laptop computer guts, together with an RTX 5080.
The 2025 ROG NUC seems to be broadly just like final yr’s mannequin, with specs that listing an Intel Core Extremely 9 Arrow Lake processor, GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card (the laptop computer model with 16GB of GDDR7 RAM), DDR5 6400 reminiscence with “as much as” 96GB of capability, and assist for PCIe Gen4 SSDs as much as 2TB in measurement. Exact specs are tougher to nail down, however with the promo web page claiming “8 efficiency and 16 effectivity cores” with a 5.5GHz high velocity, the first processor is probably going an Extremely 9 285 or 285T.
Different highlights embrace a devoted SSD heatsink and HPU cooling fan, two extra followers and two vapor chambers, which function with “outstanding silence even underneath stress.” (I’m going to imagine that “silence” is somewhat beneficiant.) The desktop is somewhat larger than most mini PCs to suit all these guts, measuring 11.1 inches broad, 7.4 deep, and a couple of.2 excessive (that’s 282.4 x 187.7 x 56.5 millimeters, for these of you in civilized international locations).
That places its quantity at simply shy of three liters, in comparison with 10.4 liters for a Mini-ITX case just like the Fractal Design Terra. Loads of exterior ports make up for it, with 4 USB-A ports, USB-C, double HDMI, double DisplayPort, and a couple of.5 Gigabit Ethernet on the rear, plus one other USB-C and two USB-A ports on the entrance. Entry to the inside for upgrading the SO-DIMM RAM or SSD is granted with a single thumbscrew, no instruments wanted.
How a lot is all that energy and suppleness going to value you? Quite a bit, it appears. VideoCardz.com experiences the value as 24,399 RMB in China (~$3,340 USD) for the bottom mannequin with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Double the storage and it hops as much as simply shy of 25,000 RMB (~$3,425 USD). That’s greater than sufficient to get a robust gaming laptop computer, if not one geared up with these exact elements. And the way a lot will it value if/when it heads to different territories? Effectively, that depends upon a variety of various factors in the mean time.
