The 2025 Asus ROG NUC looks epic and has some mighty specs but a desktop gaming PC will probably be far better value for money

pcgamer.com:

When it comes to the tiniest of PC form factors, the NUC is hard to beat but the compact dimensions usually mean you don't get the best of hardware inside. The 2025 version of the Asus ROG NUC, though, boasts some of the very best new parts on the market. The only problem is that the price might be so high that you could well be better off just getting a desktop PC or laptop.

For those unfamiliar with the term NUC, it stems from an innovation drive by Intel around 12 years ago. The Next Unit of Computing was supposed to bring powerful yet tiny computers to homes and offices around the world but despite being relatively popular in business and education, it never really caught on with general consumers. In 2013, Intel pulled the plug on its NUCs and handed the baton over to Asus, which has been 'gamifying' the NUC since then.

Essentially nothing more than the innards of a gaming laptop stuffed into a tiny box, the ROG NUC eschews the traditional dull design for something considerably more bling. However, two things have stood in their way of becoming an outright triumph: one, the choice of hardware, and two, the very high price tag.

In the case of the former, the 2025 version of the ROG NUC looks set to address those concerns on all fronts. CPU-wise you get the choice of a Core Ultra 9 or 7 Series 2 ARL-HX, aka laptop versions of Intel's Arrow Lake chips. While the desktop versions aren't amazing for gaming, their low power consumption is likely to be a boon in this format.

For the moment, there's only one choice of GPU and that's the new GeForce RTX 5080 Mobile. The Blackwell architecture is all about AI wizardry for gaming but outside of that scope, you're still getting 7,680 CUDA cores and 16 GB of GDDR7 VRAM.

It's not clear at this stage what power limit Asus will use with the chip but I suspect neither the CPU nor GPU will be able to reach their full capacity, as it would mean a combined TDP of 310 W and that's too much for a NUC to deal with.

Asus says the