Asus crammed an RTX 5080 into a 3-litre box. It costs $4,400 and the performance gain is 2.3%.

Asus has launched the 2026 ROG NUC 16 in China, pairing Intel’s Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 laptop GPU inside a 3-litre chassis that weighs 3.12 kilograms. The black version starts at CNY 29,999 (approximately $4,400). A Moonlight White edition costs CNY 31,999 (approximately $4,700). Global pricing has not been confirmed, but a US launch near $4,000 is expected, likely after a wider reveal at Computex in June.

The specification sheet is formidable for a box this size. The Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus brings 24 cores (8 Performance, 16 Efficient) with 40MB of L2 cache. The RTX 5080 laptop GPU, based on Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture, supports DLSS 4.5 with Multi Frame Generation and delivers up to 1,334 AI TOPS across CPU, GPU, and NPU workloads. The system supports up to 128GB of ...