- Asus is launching the ROG NUC 2025 this year using Nvidia’s RTX 5080 notebook GPU
- Its laptop GPU will use 16GB of GDDR7 VRAM
- It is expected to have a high price compared to the current ROG NUC 970
Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series of graphics cards was officially unveiled at CES 2025 earlier this month, and while we don’t yet know when the RTX 5080 portable GPU will start showing up in gaming laptops, Asus has confirmed one of its next-generation mini- the gaming PC will be powered by Team Green’s new hardware.
As reported by Edge Up Asus, the Asus ROG NUC 2025 mini gaming PC will use Nvidia’s RTX 5080 notebook GPU along with the Intel Core Ultra 9 (Series 2) ARL-HX processor with 24 cores and 24 threads. This is a build for a top-tier mini gaming PC, which should surpass the likes of Apple’s M4 Mac mini when it comes to gaming, but probably at a high price.
The current ROG NUC comes packed with RTX 4000 series GPUs, and this year’s model will push performance to a new level – we’ll see benchmarks for the desktop RTX 5080 and 5090 series GPUs later this month , with the laptop GPUs likely to arrive shortly after.
What can we expect in terms of its pricing?
I’ve never been a betting man, but I’m pretty sure the new Asus ROG NUC will be an expensive proposition with configurations now offering up to RTX 5080 and 64GB of DDR5 RAM – 2023’s NUC 970 uses the RTX 4070 with a $1,399 / £1,629 starting price, so expect this year’s model to be around the same figure… or even much higher.
Compared to the M4 Mac mini, the ROG NUC 2025 will excel in terms of performance, but that doesn’t mean it’s an outright knock-out for the NUC. It will be the M4 Mac mini without a doubt very cheaper as it starts at $599 / £599 / AU$999 and the performance it offers at that price is hard to beat.
A more realistic comparison between Apple’s Mac devices compared to the upcoming ROG NUC is the M4 MacBook Pro, especially the model that comes with the M4 Pro chip with a 14-core CPU and 20-core GPU, along with 24 GB of unified memory, but of course it’s not a mini PC. Even with this, it would still lose out as Asus’ system runs Windows 11 while the MacBook uses macOS, and Apple still has some way to go with gaming on its OS in terms of optimizations (especially at higher resolutions).
The ROG NUC will also benefit from Nvidia’s new DLSS 4 Multi-Frame Generation, which will improve performance drastically across multiple games, on top of the GPU’s raw performance alone – so while it will be an expensive mini PC, it will likely still be a better choice for gaming than the M4 Mac mini and MacBook Pro.
Should you buy it though? I’d say no, as it would probably be way too expensive compared to much cheaper standard sized gaming PCs that are powerful enough for smooth performance.
