ASUS to launch ROG NUC, the company’s first ultra-compact gaming PC in the NUC family
A spiritual successor to NUC 12 Enthusiast.
A few months back, it was disclosed that ASUS is actively engaged in the development of a gaming NUC. It’s worth recalling that Intel had previously declared the halt of investment in its NUC product line, and all assets related to it were being transferred to ASUS.
Consequently, ASUS has taken on the responsibility of maintaining current systems and spearheading the development of next-generation NUC products. Among the upcoming releases, there are speculations that one of the products will be incorporated into the ROG family. ASUS has now confirmed this information by teasing its new ROG NUC, the company’s first endeavor into such a product category.
ROG NUC teaser, Source: ASUS
The ROG NUC system will not compete with existing prebuilt designs like the ROG C22H. Unlike NUC, that system is a full-fledged desktop PC in a smaller form factor, competing, or in this case, replacing NUC 13 Extreme. The C22H features a Core i9-14900KF processor and RTX 4070 desktop GPU. It even shipped with a built-in liquid cooling.
ROG C22H, Source: ASUS
The NUC version is an entirely different form factor of smaller gaming PCs. This market has seen a massive competition over the past few years, primarily thanks to powerful integrated graphics and more efficient discrete graphics architectures.
Various companies have explored this idea by adding powerful graphics into their Mini-PCs. The most recent being Chinese Peladn, who will be incorporating discrete Radeon RX 7000M and GeForce RTX 40 Laptop graphics into their systems. There is also a new system coming from Geekom, who announced its first Ryzen 8040 based Mini-PC that will pack Radeon RX 7600M XT graphics.
Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast “Serpent Canyon”, Source: Intel
The teaser suggests a resemblance to Intel’s NUC 12 Enthusiast design, codenamed Serpent Canyon. This particular product incorporates the 12th Gen Core Alder Lake mobile CPU and Intel’s Arc A770M graphics. It’s noteworthy that ASUS hasn’t introduced any product featuring Arc graphics so far. Therefore, it remains uncertain whether the upcoming ROG NUC could potentially be the first from ASUS to do so.
In any case, ASUS is expected to reveal their gaming NUC in the coming week, and it is hoped that they will provide a full disclosure of the specifications. We will provide an update once that information becomes available.
Source: ASUS ROG
