Asus has rescued Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC) series of tiny desktops from the grave, and the gaming-branded ROG NUC caught some serious eyeballs at CES back in January. But Asus isn’t a charity and based on the first retail listings of the Intel- and Nvidia-powered machine spotted in Europe, it’s going to demand a high price.
Listings for the “Asus Nuc 14 ROG” on the ProShop retailer in and price the machine at 2,499 Euro while the of the same shop have it at a roughly equivalent 18,659 Kroner. At today’s exchange rate, that’s equal to approximately $2,700 USD. The listings were spotted by .
While gamers might be willing to pay top dollar (or whatever) for a 14th-gen Core Ultra 9, even the 16-core 185H laptop chip inside the shrunken-down package, they’ll probably be less impressed with the mid-range Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage. For $2,700, you could get a high-end gaming laptop with those specs and probably better.
The ROG NUC might be a bit cheaper when it comes to the US, as the American market doesn’t have to deal with the same kind of import and value-added taxes as Europe. And other, less powerful versions might be cheaper. Even so, it seems like Asus is adding quite a bit of a sticker premium over previous generations of the gamer-focused NUC Extreme, even accounting for the differences in DIY prices.
Gaming Desktop PCs