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 Germany and Finland price the machine at 2,499 Euro while the Danish version 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 NotebookCheck.
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.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.