I’m patiently waiting for Apple to turn the Mac mini into a gaming console – could this Nvidia RTX 5080-powered Asus ROG NUC mini PC be the answer?
- Asus launches ROG NUC 2025 this year, using Nvidia’s RTX 5080 laptop GPU
- The laptop GPU uses 16GB of GDDR7 VRAM
- This is expected to have a high cost compared to the current ROG NUC 970
Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series graphics cards were officially unveiled at CES 2025 earlier this month, and while we don’t yet know when the RTX 5080 laptop GPU will appear in gaming laptops, Asus has one of its next-generation mini -gaming laptops attached. The PC is 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 laptop GPU alongside the Intel Core Ultra 9 (Series 2) ARL-HX processor with 24 cores and 24 threads. This is a top-tier mini gaming PC build, which should surpass the likes of Apple’s M4 Mac mini when it comes to gaming, but likely at a high cost.
The current ROG NUC comes with RTX 4000 series GPUs, and this year’s model will take performance to a new level – we’ll see benchmarks of the RTX 5080 and 5090 desktop GPUs at the end of this month series, the laptop GPUs will probably come a short time later.
What can we expect in terms of pricing?
I’ve never been a gambler, but I’m pretty sure the new Asus ROG NUC will be an expensive offering with configurations now offering up to the RTX 5080 and 64GB of DDR5 RAM – the 2023 NUC 970 uses the RTX 4070 with a The starting price of $1,399 / £1,629, 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 this doesn’t mean it’s an outright knockout for the NUC. The M4 Mac mini will undoubtedly be a lot of cheaper because it starts at $599 / £599 / AU$999, and the performance it offers for 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 unified memory, but It is of course not a mini PC. Even with this, it would still lose out, as Asus’ system runs Windows 11, while the MacBook runs macOS, and Apple still has a long way to go with games 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 dramatically improve performance in multiple games, in addition to the raw performance of the GPU alone – so while it will be an expensive mini PC, it will likely still always be better. choice for gaming via the M4 Mac mini and the MacBook Pro.
Should you buy it anyway? I’d say no, as it will likely be way too expensive compared to much cheaper full-size gaming PCs that are powerful enough for smooth performance.