News Asus launches the first-ever ROG NUC with up to Core Ultra 9 and RTX 4070, prices start at $1,629

[Admin]

The Asus ROG NUC with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H/RTX 4060 or Intel Core Ultra 9 185H/RTX 4070 is now available from $1,629 to $2,199.

Asus launches the first-ever ROG NUC with up to Core Ultra 9 and RTX 4070, prices start at $1,629 : Read more

 

[TechyIT223]

Damn expensive tho

 

[Notton]

I checked amazon US, where it's in stock, but from a 3rd party seller and not Asus themselves.

Amazon.com

I find it odd that Asus doesn't have the product listed themselves. They are all over that sort of stuff on amazon.
Bestbuy doesn't have a listing, which I think is more telling.

 

[ThomasKinsley]

North American brands are missing the mark with NUCs. They sell them at a premium in small enclosures that end up throttling performance, so you wind up with a more expensive product and less performance than if you bought them in a normal sized tower. Chinese manufacturers have the right idea: performant laptop SoCs with liberal amounts of RAM and storage for a cheaper price than a laptop. The enclosure is more than able to handle the heat and you get more value than if you purchased a PC or a laptop. The problem is Chinese manufacturers ship with a modified BIOS/custom Windows preloaded with one manufacturer shipping with a keylogger preinstalled. Disastrous.

Why can't a proper name brand figure this out? Intel was forced to sell the entire NUC business. Now ASUS is making the same mistake.

 

[Notton]

North American brands are missing the mark with NUCs. They sell them at a premium in small enclosures that end up throttling performance, so you wind up with a more expensive product and less performance than if you bought them in a normal sized tower. Chinese manufacturers have the right idea: performant laptop SoCs with liberal amounts of RAM and storage for a cheaper price than a laptop. The enclosure is more than able to handle the heat and you get more value than if you purchased a PC or a laptop. The problem is Chinese manufacturers ship with a modified BIOS/custom Windows preloaded with one manufacturer shipping with a keylogger preinstalled. Disastrous.

Why can't a proper name brand figure this out? Intel was forced to sell the entire NUC business. Now ASUS is making the same mistake.

The only NA brand formerly selling NUCs (because they invented it) was Intel
All other brands selling NUC-likes are Taiwan or Hong Kong based.
Taiwan: Asus, Asrock, Geekom
HK: Zotac, minisforum
China: AZW (Beelink, Kamrui, Acemagik, Trigkey, etc.)

Downsides of the AZW OEM rebranded mini-PCs is BIOS support. It'll likely get none, so don't expect any hardware level security flaws to be patched.

 

[Morbius2007]

Here is another take, while this is a nice package, its super limited long term. A better Option would be the Minisforum AtomMan X7 TI, same CPU, cool form factor, Onboard 4 Inch Touch Screen "yes gimmicky, but still fun" External GPU dock so you can run basically Any card you want, and complete with windows 11 Pro for $899.00, its going to be an interesting summer. While I have had past experiences with Minis forum hardware, some good some less so, this new system shows that Asus missed the mark with the new Enthusiast NUC.

They needed to provide something that allowed both upgrades and kept the ability to add your own onboard full size GPU as an upgrade. The INTEL NUC Enthusiast 12th Gen systems were fantastic, until then killed them off in favor of that Xe based mess, the 13th generation got too big and became a mini tower, nothing original there.

The largest these things should have gotten is about the same size as the dragon canyon systems that are shoebox size.

IMO anyway.

 

[ThomasKinsley]

The only NA brand formerly selling NUCs (because they invented it) was Intel
All other brands selling NUC-likes are Taiwan or Hong Kong based.
Taiwan: Asus, Asrock, Geekom
HK: Zotac, minisforum
China: AZW (Beelink, Kamrui, Acemagik, Trigkey, etc.)

Downsides of the AZW OEM rebranded mini-PCs is BIOS support. It'll likely get none, so don't expect any hardware level security flaws to be patched.

I meant brands with an established following in North America. My error. Intel made a license agreement with ASUS to produce NUCs, so they are passing the legacy on, but their business model (and Asrock's model) is still like Intel's - overpriced. The rest of the list appears to be from China, including Geekom. While their website claims they have a research and development team in Taiwan, their parent company, Shenzhen Jiteng Network Technology Co., Ltd., is based in China.

 

[thestryker]

I've always felt like there should be a happy medium between no support mini PCs from China and Intel's premium priced models. Every once in a while there are some decent deals, but it's typically in the lower-mid range or when they're on clearance.

The biggest price issue I have is that you can buy a laptop with identical specifications for the same or lower price. If you look for equivalent, but not identical, specifications you can often find them for less money.

 

[dwd999]

I would like to see some real world tests of these units to see how much heat they can dissipate. I use a full sized HTPC with an 11900K, Z590, no gpu and a Noctua NH-D12L double fan cooler in a Silverstone GD11 case and it can barely handle the heat produced by 4K UHD movies. If these nucs can play 80 Mb/s UHD movies without excessive fan noise and throttling then I can see using one in a home theater setup.

 

[thestryker]

I would like to see some real world tests of these units to see how much heat they can dissipate. I use a full sized HTPC with an 11900K, Z590, no gpu and a Noctua NH-D12L double fan cooler in a Silverstone GD11 case and it can barely handle the heat produced by 4K UHD movies. If these nucs can play 80 Mb/s UHD movies without excessive fan noise and throttling then I can see using one in a home theater setup.

Why isn't your system using hardware acceleration for decode?

Generally speaking you want to leverage hardware decode for the twin reasons of much lower power consumption and you don't need a powerful CPU. This is what I'm referring to with regards to HTPC: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21409/geekom-a7-minipc-review/7

 

[dwd999]

Why isn't your system using hardware acceleration for decode?

Generally speaking you want to leverage hardware decode for the twin reasons of much lower power consumption and you don't need a powerful CPU. This is what I'm referring to with regards to HTPC: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21409/geekom-a7-minipc-review/7

Most the time I'm using Media Player Classic - Home Cinema which now has MPC Video Renderer built in or occasionally VLC. I don't think either one supports that type of hardware acceleration or maybe its built in and I don't know it.

 

[thestryker]

Most the time I'm using Media Player Classic - Home Cinema which now has MPC Video Renderer built in or occasionally VLC. I don't think either one supports that type of hardware acceleration or maybe its built in and I don't know it.

MPC/MPC-HC has always had hardware acceleration, and while I don't use it I can't imagine VLC doesn't, so if it's not using it then you should be able to configure it to do so. I opened up a 10-bit HEVC UHD file in MPC-HC and CPU usage was under half a percent (using the decoder on my video card, but Intel's IGP have the same thing baked in).

 

[dwd999]

MPC/MPC-HC has always had hardware acceleration, and while I don't use it I can't imagine VLC doesn't, so if it's not using it then you should be able to configure it to do so. I opened up a 10-bit HEVC UHD file in MPC-HC and CPU usage was under half a percent (using the decoder on my video card, but Intel's IGP have the same thing baked in).

IDK I opened Zack Synder's Dawn of the Dead Unrated Director's Cut 4K HEVC UHD HDR 84.2 Mb/s and my 13900K says CPU max usage 14 percent and Intel UHD Graphics 770 max usage 21 percent. Since its just for watching movies and Noctua's coolers have been sufficient to deal with the heat I'm not going to bother with a GPU. But it will be interesting to see how these NUCs deal with the heat from the same type of load.

 

[thestryker]

IDK I opened Zack Synder's Dawn of the Dead Unrated Director's Cut 4K HEVC UHD HDR 84.2 Mb/s and my 13900K says CPU max usage 14 percent and Intel UHD Graphics 770 max usage 21 percent. Since its just for watching movies and Noctua's coolers have been sufficient to deal with the heat I'm not going to bother with a GPU.

Task Manager while playing exactly the same thing on my system (I skipped around the video and the highest CPU usage was 0.6% and GPU was 10%):

CPU usage, Memory usage, Disk Usage (it's playing off network), Network Usage, GPU Usage

But it will be interesting to see how these NUCs deal with the heat from the same type of load.

The point I'm making is that there won't be any on a properly setup system and especially these ones as they're designed around having a discrete laptop GPU so the maybe 15W they put out will be very easy to cool.