Asus’ newest ROG NUC crams an RTX 5080 into a mini PC form factor
Fans of teeny-tiny gaming mini PCs have been somewhat underserved since Intel retired its NUC Extreme line, which had room for a full-sized desktop GPU in addition to the latest laptop processors. Asus has since taken up the NUC mantle, but unfortunately has yet to deliver something quite the same. That said, the newest ROG NUC mini PC gives you the latest gaming laptop guts, including an RTX 5080.
The 2025 ROG NUC looks broadly similar to last year’s model, with specs that list an Intel Core Ultra 9 Arrow Lake processor, GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card (the laptop version with 16GB of GDDR7 RAM), DDR5 6400 memory with “up to” 96GB of capacity, and support for PCIe Gen4 SSDs up to 2TB in size. Precise specs are harder to nail down, but with the promo page claiming “8 performance and 16 efficiency cores” with a 5.5GHz top speed, the primary processor is likely an Ultra 9 285 or 285T.
Other highlights include a dedicated SSD heatsink and HPU cooling fan, two more fans and two vapor chambers, which operate with “remarkable silence even under stress.” (I’m going to assume that “silence” is a little generous.) The desktop is a little bigger than most mini PCs to fit all those guts, measuring 11.1 inches wide, 7.4 deep, and 2.2 high (that’s 282.4 x 187.7 x 56.5 millimeters, for those of you in civilized countries).
That puts its volume at just shy of three liters, compared to 10.4 liters for a Mini-ITX case like the Fractal Design Terra. Plenty of exterior ports make up for it, with four USB-A ports, USB-C, double HDMI, double DisplayPort, and 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet on the rear, plus another USB-C and two USB-A ports on the front. Access to the interior for upgrading the SO-DIMM RAM or SSD is granted with a single thumbscrew, no tools needed.
How much is all that power and flexibility going to cost you? Quite a lot, it seems. VideoCardz.com reports the price as 24,399 RMB in China (~$3,340 USD) for the base model with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. Double the storage and it hops up to just shy of 25,000 RMB (~$3,425 USD). That’s more than enough to get a powerful gaming laptop, if not one equipped with those precise parts. And how much will it cost if/when it heads to other territories? Well, that depends on a lot of different factors at the moment.
