2025 ASUS ROG NUC Unveiled With Arrow Lake-HX And RTX 5080 Firepower
ASUS is rolling out a new high-powered ROG NUC for 2025. Unveiled during a special event in China—the same one in which ASUS teased a Super TN gaming monitor with a blistering 610Hz refresh rate—the newest ROG NUC pairs up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor based on Arrow Lake-HX with up to a mobile NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 GPU.
Now, it's not specified which of Intel's top Core Ultra 9 Series 2 chips are available, but there are two Core Ultra 9 SKUs that comprise the Arrow Lake-HX family. The flagship model is the Core Ultra 9 285HX, which is a 24-core/24-thread part made up of 8 performance cores clocked at 2.8GHz (base) to 5.5GHz (max turbo) and 16 efficient cores clocked at 2.1GHz to 4.6GHz, along with 40MB of L2 cache and 36MB of L3 cache.
Sitting just a notch below is the Core Ultra 9 275HX with the same core, thread, and cache makeup, but with the performance cores running 100MHz slower at 2.7GHz to 5.4GHz. The efficient cores have the same clocks as the higher end SKU.
Either one would make a potent selection for a NUC. Same goes for the mobile GeForce RTX 5080, the second-fastest laptop (and mini PC) gaming GPU based on NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture. Other specs include 16GB of DDR5-6400 RAM (expandable to 96GB), a 1TB M.2 PCIe 4.0 solid state drive (expandable to 2TB), and built-in Wi-Fi 7 connectivity.
Ports on the front include a USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C port and two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports. Around back, users will find the following I/O options...
- 1x Thunderbolt 4 Type-C w/ DisplayPort 2.1
- 4x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A
- 2x HDMI 2.1 FRL (fixed rate link)
- 2x DisplayPort 2.1
- 1x RJ45 LAN
- 1x DC-in
- 1x Kensington Lock slot
It's a solid selection of hardware and features, the latter of which also includes a BIOS that is tuned for end-user overclocking. You probably won't want to nuts twisting the dials and knobs, given that this is a mini PC form factor with limited cooling potential compared to a full blown desktop, but it's nice that overclocking options exist. ASUS is also touting tuned presets for specific games.
On the top of cooling, ASUS claims an "advanced thermal design" that includes a dedicated heatsink for the SSD, another fan specific for the CPU (good for up to 135W), a third fan for the chassis, a dual vapor chamber setup for what ASUS says results in "remarkable silence even under stress."
As spotted by Videocardz, pricing for the 2025 ASUS ROG NUC (NUC15JNK) will start at 24,399 Chinese Yuan (around $ in US currency) for a setup with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage.
