Asus reveals global pricing for new gaming mini-PC with Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5080 GPUs

[Redaktion]

Asus has revealed pricing information for its new gaming mini-PC in more countries. At the same time, the company has confirmed that the ROG NUC 16 will be available with Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti or RTX 5080 laptop GPUs globally alongside Intel's Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-reveals-global-pricing-for-new-gaming-mini-PC-with-Nvidia-GeForce-RTX-5070-Ti-and-RTX-5080-GPUs.1312185.0.html

[citral]

Jesus fucking christ...

[Julian M]

What's up with those prices? Yeah memory and storage chip shortage, yeah prices are insane, but why bother launching these under these conditions?

[jojoba]

I guess if you know you will sell much less because of ram/ssd prices, you have to make up for it in price, so you boost it even more. There will be couple of people who buy this (people who don't care) and Asus survives for some more time. But yeah, this whole situation is bad and people come last, because it's about money and companies don't care when it's about money...

[Zan]

My comparison point is a bit different because I bought my NUC 12 + desktop RTX 4070 Ti second-hand in 2026 for A$2,000, which is about US$1,437. So when I see the ASUS RTX 5080 mini-PC at US$3,800, I'm not comparing it to nothing — I'm comparing it to a setup that already does strong 4K AAA raster gaming for less than half the money.

The big catch is that this ASUS box is using a laptop RTX 5080, not a desktop RTX 5080. In real 4K raster terms, I'd expect something like Cyberpunk Ultra going from ~55–65 fps on my 4070 Ti to ~75–90 fps, Starfield Ultra from ~45–55 to ~60–75, Forza Horizon 5 Extreme from ~95–115 to ~125–150, and Black Myth: Wukong Cinematic from ~35–45 to ~50–65. That's a useful uplift, but it's not "throw away a good 4070 Ti setup" territory.

The power/thermal side matters more than the name. My 4070 Ti is a desktop card with roughly 285W-class GPU power, while the ASUS 5080 is more like a high-end laptop GPU in a mini-PC shell, probably around the 150–175W class. So yes, it gets newer architecture, more VRAM, and DLSS 4 / Multi Frame Gen features, but it's still not behaving like a full desktop RTX 5080. A proper desktop 5080 build would be a different comparison.

So for me the ASUS is cool, but the value is rough. If someone wants the smallest neatest premium gaming box, fair enough. But purely for 4K raster FPS, paying US$3,800 / about A$5.3k before AU markup to get maybe 25–40% more real frames over my A$2k / US$1.44k second-hand setup doesn't feel compelling. It's a luxury mini-PC upgrade, not a sensible performance-per-dollar upgrade.