Mini PCs aren’t the first thing most people come up with when thinking about gaming desktops. Those tiny enclosures aren’t built to hold a full-size, triple-fan RTX 5090, after all. However, the rise of mobile desktop GPUs have made them a viable option for more demanding tasks, delivering performance that comes close enough to desktop setups at a much smaller size. That impressive combination of power and size is exactly what the Asus ROG NUC (2025) brings to the table.
Billed as a “compact powerhouse,” the mini PC packs serious CPU and GPU muscle, all while supporting up to 96GB of RAM and up to five 4K displays. That’s right, you can connect five 4K monitors to this tiny rig, making it a very capable desktop machine, whether for gaming, video editing, or any other demanding task.
The Asus ROG NUC (2025) has a compact housing that measures just 11.1 x 7.4 x 2.2 inches (height x depth x width), making it small enough to place anywhere on your gaming desk. Heck, you can hide it behind the monitor without much trouble. Inside, it houses an Intel Core Ultra 9 Series 2 CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 mobile GPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM (expandable up to 96GB), and 2TB of SSD storage. As you can imagine, that’s enough muscle for most any modern task, allowing you to get a proper workhorse PC while using up very little room.
The system comes with a preloaded software for overclocking and comprehensive BIOS tuning, making it easier to squeeze as much performance as you can from the installed hardware. It supports real-time performance monitoring, too, so you can keep an eye on how hard all the components are working, with built-in presets to optimize specific gaming titles.
The Asus ROG NUC (2025) comes with Wi-Fi 7 for wireless connection speeds up to 46Gbps, while offering two HDMI ports, two DisplayPort 2.1 slots, and a USB-C Thunderbolt 4 slot for hooking up all the gaming monitors your attention span can handle. It also gets six USB 3.2 slots, an audio jack, and an Ethernet port for hooking up a full slate of PC accessories. Despite the small size, it has a thoughtful thermal design that includes a dedicated CPU fan on one side, a pair of larger fans on the other side, a dedicated SSD heatsink, and dual vapor chambers, all while working in relative silence.
It has an angular PC case that looks like a miniature version of the gaming towers from back in the day, with a build that the outfit claims has been tested tough to ensure long-term performance. We like the addition of the ROG logo on one side with integrated RGB lighting, as well as the ROG perforations on the other side serving as ventilation ports. The case is designed to be opened without any tools, by the way, requiring you to simply remove a single thumbscrew to slide one panel out, making it easy to do RAM and SSD upgrades any time you want.
The Asus ROG NUC (2025) is available now.
