ASUS ROG NUC 970 Review – A Gaming Console With PC’s DNA

Intel’s NUC lives on under its new home, ASUS, and the Taiwanese PC maker has since released several NUCs for different markets. Intel used to produce a series of gaming NUCs and they all come with various shapes and forms – some even feature a PCIe slot to fit full-size desktop GPUs. How would ASUS’s gaming NUC, the ROG NUC 970, perform? Read on.

Unboxing

For the price you will be paying for one of these ROG NUCs (we’ll get to the pricing later on), ASUS has gave the ROG NUC 970 its price-appropriate presentation with a magnetically attached box that you can open to reveal the main unit. To visualize its size, think of it as a desktop GPU with a whole PC strapped on it.

Inside, you get these items:

– AC cord (Type G, C13)
– 330W DC power supply
– Regulatory documents
– Warranty document
– Safety information document
– 2x RGB lighting stencils
– Vertical stand
– ASUS ROG NUC 970 main unit

The ROG NUC 970 isn’t particularly power hungry compared to equivalent gaming laptops, but it comes with a gigantic 330W power supply and already weighs quite a bit on its own. The power supply cable is extremely thick as it needs to deliver a whopping 17 amps to the main unit, and interestingly, the AC cable is considerably shorter than what you get from laptop AC cables.

Besides that, you also get a vertical stand that allows you to mount the NUC sideways, and two pieces of plastic that likely has to do with RGB. How so? During our disassembly of the device, we spotted one such plastic that acts as a stencil to display the RGB ROG logo pre-installed, so it’s safe to say these are some kind of spare units for when you decide to let your creativity take over.

Walkaround

The strength of NUCs usually comes down to its I/O: unlike laptops that have space constraints, in this ROG NUC you can find up to 6 USB-A ports, a Thunderbolt 4 port, two DisplayPorts, one HDMI output, a 2.5GbE LAN port, plus a headphone jack and an SD card slot. There’s also a Kensington lock located at the lower-right edge of the unit’s rear side, which also reveals a full-length heatsink that takes care of the RTX 4070 and Core Ultra 9 chips that puts out 140W TGP and 65W TDP respectively (though the CPU power draw is a lot higher in practice).

To keep the machine cool, there are plenty of vents around the ROG NUCs, some of them specifically designed to work when the device is mounted vertically via the included stand. The underside reveals two exhaust fans, which spins at lower speeds compared to laptops due to its larger size (which generates more airflow).

As mentioned, the vertical stand is included in the box, and there are no special mechanism involved when installing the ROG NUC sideways. It’s held by a layer of rubber, and you can simply slide it in or out as needed.

Opening the ROG NUC requires undoing one captive screw below the rear I/O, and pulling the latch located above the Thunderbolt connector. Pulling the top cover reveals the first part of the internals, which is the RGB lighting circuity and stencils that form the ROG logo when you power it on.

Removing that section further reveals the internal components, which includes two SO-DIMM slots, three M.2 SSD slots (one pre-installed), and a Wi-Fi card situated right under the NVMe_3 SSD slot. All three SSD slots feature quick release mechanisms that allows tool-less installation, with the benefit that you won’t have to worry about dropping a screw into the chassis and never to be found again.

As mentioned above, the ROG logo is actually hidden under the top panel with a stencil that forms the shape of the logo. In theory, this gives you free reign to put whatever artwork you wish (but you’ll need a vinyl cutter or tools of that sort). This is likely a nod to Intel NUCs that featured similar designs, including this one from three generations ago.

Specifications

ASUS ROG NUC 970 (RNUC14SRKU9189A3I)

Full specifications available on the product website. 

CPU	Intel Core Ultra 9 185H (6P+8E+2LPE – 16 cores, 22 threads)
RAM	32GB (2x16GB) DDR5-5600 (SO-DIMM)
GPU	Integrated: Intel Arc Graphics (8 Xe Cores) Discrete: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU (140W)
NPU	Intel AI Boost NPU
Storage	Samsung PM9A1a SSD (MZVL21T0HDLU-00BT7 – PCIe 4.0, M.2 2280) Two additional M.2 2280 slots available
Display	None
Audio	3.5mm combo jack Realtek ALC256 Codec
Webcam	None
I/O	Front: 1x UHS-I SD card reader 2x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A (10Gbps) 1x 3.5mm combo jack Rear: 1x Thunderbolt 4 2x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A (10Gbps) 2x USB 2.0 Type-A 1x HDMI 2.1 2x DisplayPort 1.4 1x RJ-45 LAN 1x DC-in 1x Kensington Lock
Connectivity	Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 (Intel Killer AX1690i) Intel I226-V 2.5GbE LAN
Battery	None
Power Supply	330W, DC barrel jack
Operating System	Windows 11 Home
Dimensions	270 x 180 x 60 mm
Weight	2.6 kg

Performance

Storage

The ROG NUC 970 packs an SSD that we’re fairly familiar with, which is the 1TB Samsung PM9A1a SSD designed for OEM systems. Its performance are respectable, putting 7GB/s on sequential read and 4.9GB/s on sequential write. Note that there are two additional SSD slots available on this machine as well, which gives you better flexibility to upgrade down the line.

CPU

Generally, the performance of the ROG NUC is not that much different than a gaming laptop, despite the fact that it has a form factor that, in theory, allows higher TDP to be extracted from a more efficient cooling layout. All three performance modes shows very little difference against each other, and based on the sensor readings, it’s only about 2-3W apart for each power profile you use. Hence, this mostly affects your fan profile – and we think you’re fine sticking with Silent anyway.

GPU

The GPU performance is also oddly too similar to each other, and we tried to verify this by checking the power draw of each power profile via Furmark. We did get different numbers: Silent uses 115W, Performance draws 130W, while Turbo raises that limit to 140W. Despite that, there is no discernible performance difference in practice, as evidenced by all the charts shown in this section.

Since we’ve tested several gaming laptops with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU at this point, it’s only appropriate for us to put all of them together for this matchup. It turns out that Razer Blade 14, which is about as small as a regular gaming laptop gets, managed to keep up with the ROG NUC 970, and sometimes surpassing it. (The Razer Blade’s RTX 4070 features the same TGP as the ROG NUC, at 140 watts. However, the numbers shown here is under Balanced Mode, which uses slightly less power.)

System

In Novabench, it looks like the Samsung PM9A1a SSD didn’t work too well for this particular benchmark, which drags down the overall scores of all three power modes. Take storage scores out of the equation and the ROG NUC 970 will be more competitive, right behind Razer Blade 14 once again. On the CPU side, the Core Ultra 9 185H in the ROG NUC does outperform the same chip found inside the Acer Predator Triton Neo 16, thanks to its more lenient power limits.

For PCMark 10 Modern Office benchmark, the ROG NUC 970 is at the top half of the chart, losing out to the Predator Triton Neo 16 instead. Silent mode brought the Productivity score by a fair margin, whereas Performance and Turbo registered scores close enough to the Predator laptop.

Gaming

Given that ROG NUC is a desktop more than a laptop, it doesn’t come with the screen – so for gaming tests we pick the standard resolution that we use for GPU tests. It’s certainly good enough for 1080p, and 1440p is fairly decent if you want high refresh rates (you can turn on DLSS if you need a speed boost). For 4K, you can still get 60FPS if your graphics settings are taken down a few notches, though newer games like the newly-released Black Myth: Wukong will seriously punish your GPU if you choose to run it at native resolutions.

The Good

The beauty of NUCs lies in their serviceability, and in the case of ROG NUC 970, there is a healthy amount of upgrade path available. It’s not as modular as a fully-fledged desktop PC, but it offers SO-DIMM slots and several SSD slots that, in the case of conventional gaming laptops, are not always upgradable or comes with as many slots.

Given that ASUS has stuck to conventional internals, this means you won’t have to deal with quirks that may come from past designs like Ghost Canyon that featured “compute element” in the form of PCIe modules, or the chassis getting too big in the case of Beast Canyon and Dragon Canyon to fit full-size desktop GPUs. Essentially, it’s a gaming laptop that is housed inside a reasonably small and portable chassis, and that’s kind of the point of NUCs, isn’t it?

Still, you can find a wide range of I/O that no laptop can compete against. If you have lots of peripherals or displays to connect to, you won’t have to worry about adapters or dongles at all. On that note, the included stand also provides the flexibility of horizontal or vertical installation, the latter of which takes up very little desk space compared to desktop PCs, or even laptops.

Speaking of which, another advantage it has over gaming laptops is fan noise – thicker, larger fans pretty much means lower fan speed required to deliver the same amount of airflow, and in practice we find very little noise from the pair of blower fans located under the device. Put it into Silent mode and you likely won’t hear the fan spin unless you room’s noise floor is very low to begin with.

The Bad

Now, I’ve made plenty of comparisons against gaming laptops at this point, and there’s a reason for it. For one, the CPU and GPU found in the ROG NUC 970 are laptop parts: the Core Ultra 9 185H is based on Meteor Lake, and the NVIDIA RTX 4070, as confusing as Team Green’s naming conventions get, is also listed as a laptop GPU. For the sum of its parts, the entire unit (at 2.6kg) is also heavier than an equivalent laptop, and that becomes worse when you consider the extra weight of the huge 330W adapter that you must carry along.

Now, laptop parts inside a NUC is fine on its own – the concerns I have against it comes down to the fact that ROG NUC doesn’t seem to maximize its strengths as a “desktop” mini-PC. For its less restrictive cooling layout, I would’ve expected ASUS to spawn another version with RTX 4080 with full-fat 175W of TGP; alternatively, the desktop RTX 4070 with its 200W TGP is only slightly more than the 175W TGP most desktop-replacement gaming laptops can handle, and that doesn’t seem too unreasonable to fit inside this chassis.

Another downside comes from the built-in power profiles, which doesn’t do a whole lot in practice. Regardless of which power profile you’re on, the performance and framerates are pretty much dead even. I’m inclined to believe that this is somewhat intertwined with the TGP limitation of the RTX 4070 laptop GPU, and I’m fairly certain that the Turbo mode is capable of dealing with more power-hungry GPUs than this one – which will give power profiles a bigger purpose to the users.

Verdict

At RM11,199, the ROG NUC 970 is comparatively more expensive than equivalent gaming laptops with the same hardware, but here are some considerations: to get the ROG NUC to work, you need a separate purchase for a monitor and peripherals, and that’s the extra “hidden cost” that you have to take into account to evaluate its value. That said, if you appreciate more I/O from the get go, the ROG NUC fits that bill perfectly.

This form factor has its potential to fill in the small niche that is powerful “desktop replacement” mini-PCs, but in its current form, I do think there is some wasted potential for this form factor. In my view, in order for gaming-focused mini PCs like this one to stand out, one must bridge the gap between full-size tower PCs and the desktop-replacement gaming laptops – and I think this is where ASUS should be going for in the next iteration of its gaming NUCs.

Special thanks to ASUS Malaysia for providing the ROG NUC 970 for this review.