Asus has just proved that you don’t need a massive monolith of a rig to get great gaming performance, with the tech conglomerate releasing two tiny mini gaming PCs containing the latest Intel and Nvidia silicon. These new Asus ROG NUC machines pick up from where Intel left off when it canned its Next Unit of Computing (NUC), and they go all out on gaming abilities.
We got our first glimpse of these Asus NUC systems at CES this year, where we were amazed at their small size for the apparent gaming power on offer. These mini Asus rigs use the latest Intel Meteor Lake CPU architecture, which you can’t even get on a standard desktop PC, but they also use the latest Nvidia GPUs. That means they support DLSS 3 frame generation, and should have solid ray tracing performance.
With the official release, we now know the prices of these mini gaming monsters and the storage available on both. Unsurprisingly, they’re not cheap, but with a chassis volume of just 2.5 liters, they’re supremely portable – you could just put one in your backpack to take to a friend’s house or LAN event.
Two models are available, and the entry-level Asus ROG NUC price is $1,629 for the RNUC14SRKU7168AUI version. This gives you an Intel Core 7 155H CPU, with six P-Cores, eight E-Cores, two low-power E-Cores, and a 4.8GHz maximum turbo clock speed. You also get a discrete Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 laptop GPU and 16GB of DDR5 memory. The downside is that you only get a 512GB SSD, although it’s at least a fast PCIe 4.0 NVMe model.
There’s a big step up to the other RNUC14SRKU9189AUI model, which has a price of $2,199, but that gets you a 1TB SSD, 32GB of DDR5 memory, a GeForce RTX 4070 laptop GPU, and a Core Ultra 9 185H CPU. The latter costs $640, so it’s no surprise the price is so high. This Meteor Lake CPU has the same core configuration as the Core 7 155H but has a higher turbo clock speed of 5.1GHz.
You can think of these NUC machines as being like high-end gaming laptops, but without the screens, batteries, and expectations that they’ll work on the move. The big disadvantage compared to a normal desktop, of course, is that you can’t upgrade the GPU at a later date, but they’re amazingly small and portable for the amount of gaming power apparently on offer. If you don’t have much room on your desk, they could be a godsend.
Both Asus ROG NUCs come with a stand so you can mount your mini machine vertically on your desk and save even more space, and they also come with 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet and Killer Wi-Fi 6E network connections as standard. Meanwhile, sound comes from a Realtek ALC256 audio codec, and the RGB lighting is fully customizable with Asus’ Aurora software. We hope to test these models for our best mini PC gaming guide soon.
If you like a bit more flexibility with your system, read our full guide on how to build a gaming PC, where we guide you through the whole process of building a full-size PC step by step.