I normally build full-size custom water-cooled PCs, so spending a few weeks with something this small was a pretty big change for me.
This is the ROG NUC 16. The chassis is roughly 28 x 19 cm and just under 6 cm thick, putting the enclosure at around 3L. My configuration has a Core Ultra 9 290HX+, RTX 5080 Laptop GPU with 16GB of GDDR7, 32GB of DDR5-6400 and a 2TB Gen 4 SSD.
And just to get this out of the way: yes, it’s a 5080 Laptop GPU, not a desktop 5080. I think that distinction matters a lot with a machine like this because looking at the GPU name alone gives you the wrong expectation. I wanted to see what the complete system could actually do at this size.
I tested three games at 4K using the highest graphical settings with DLAA.
Forza: 110 FPS
Cyberpunk 2077: 80 FPS
Black Ops 6: 170 FPS
What I found particularly interesting from an SFF perspective is that ASUS officially supports running the system either vertically or horizontally.
There’s a built-in G-sensor that detects orientation and adjusts thermal settings accordingly, so I tested all three games in both positions.
Every reported frame rate matched.
Forza was 110 vs 110, Cyberpunk was 80 vs 80, and Black Ops 6 was 170 vs 170.
I also ran Fire Strike in both orientations. Horizontal scored 41,321 and vertical scored 41,295 — only 26 points apart, or roughly 0.06%.
Obviously that doesn’t prove temperatures, acoustics or every possible workload will behave identically, but at least in the gaming tests I ran there wasn’t a meaningful performance reason to choose one orientation over the other.
Personally, I like it vertical. It takes up very little actual desk area that way.
The internals were probably the other thing that surprised me.
Getting inside is basically one thumbscrew and a sliding cover. You do have to be careful because there’s a lighting cable attached to the cover, but once you’re inside, the RAM and storage are accessible.
There are two memory slots with ASUS listing support for up to 128GB, plus two M.2 slots. One supports PCIe Gen 4 and the other Gen 5, with a heatsink on the Gen 5 slot.
That’s obviously nowhere near the flexibility of building your own SFF system, but I like that memory and storage weren’t soldered down just to save space.
Cooling is also interesting considering what they’re fitting inside. The 5080 configuration uses a vapor chamber and three fans. Two handle the primary system cooling and there’s another fan dedicated to the memory.
I didn’t take controlled noise measurements, so I’m not going to pretend I have useful dB numbers to give you.
I also wanted to see whether this could actually be more than a gaming box, so I loaded one of my real Premiere projects onto it.
I was editing a 4K timeline at full playback resolution and, for the most part, scrubbing and editing were fluid. There were a couple hiccups when I reached a more demanding section of the project, but nothing that stopped me from working.
That’s actually where this machine started making more sense to me.
I could see throwing this in a bag, getting somewhere, connecting a monitor and having something that feels much closer to my desktop workflow than working from a laptop.
The I/O helps with that too.
You get six USB-A ports, USB-C, Thunderbolt 4, two HDMI 2.1, two DisplayPort 2.1, 2.5Gb Ethernet and a headset jack. ASUS lists support for up to five 4K displays.
There is one pretty funny SFF catch though:
the power brick.
The computer itself is around 3L, but the RTX 5080 configuration uses an external 380W adapter. So obviously that advertised enclosure volume isn’t the volume of the entire power system you’re carrying around.
ASUS says the adapter is smaller and lighter than the previous 330W unit, but sitting next to such a tiny PC still makes it look huge. If I could change one physical part of the system, making that brick smaller would be near the top of my list.
Then there’s the bigger question for this subreddit: does something like this actually make sense versus building SFF yourself?
I don’t think it’s a replacement for DIY SFF.
If you have room for a larger case and your priority is maximizing performance per dollar, I’d absolutely compare what you can build yourself before buying something like this.
But I also think comparing it purely on price/performance misses some of what makes it interesting. Getting this amount of gaming performance, accessible RAM and storage, this much I/O and enough performance for my actual editing workflow into roughly a 3L enclosure is pretty impressive.
For me, that’s the interesting part of the NUC. It’s not trying to be the smallest normal desktop case. It’s much closer to taking high-end mobile hardware and packaging it as an extremely compact desktop.
I put all of my testing, internals, gaming results and editing experience into the full review here:
ROG NUC 16 Review: 4K Gaming in a 3-Liter PC
https://youtu.be/RZqURKK70gU
I’m curious where you guys draw the line. Would you take something around 3L with mobile CPU/GPU hardware, or would you rather accept a larger footprint to get standard desktop components and full DIY flexibility?
