ASUS ROG NUC 16 Debuts: 3-Liter AI Powerhouse With RTX 5080 and Intel Arrow Lake

It's been three years since Intel essentially handed the keys to the Next Unit of Computing (NUC) kingdom to ASUS via a licensing deal, and the company continues to crank out new models. Its newest variant is the ROG NUC 16, a compact system that pairs up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 GPU Intel's Arrow Lake-HX platform.

More specifically, the ROG NUC 16 is built around an Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor, which is the top SKU in Intel's recent Arrow Lake Refresh. The 290HX Plus wields 24 total cores consisting of 8 performance cores clocked at 2.7GHz to 5.5GHz and 16 efficient cores clocked at 1.8GHz to 4.7GHz. It also boasts 40MB of L2 cache and 36MB of L3 cache, and an onboard NPU capable of up to 13 TOPS.

Naturally, ASUS is playing into the AI angle.

"Compact ...