Earlier this year, ASUS brought the refreshed version of ROG NUC mini-PC with the typical yearly upgrades, although it being an NUC pretty much stipulates that it has an Intel processor inside. Now, the company has announced ROG GR70 mini-PC, which is basically a carbon-copy of ROG NUC except there’s an AMD processor inside.
ASUS ROG GR70
You might wonder, why take all the effort to rename if it’s just the same thing but different chip underneath? While no official reason has been given, it most likely has to do with the NUC branding itself. You see, before this whole mini-PC market took off, Intel pioneered the idea of Next Unit of Computing, which is the concept of palm-sized PCs easy to carry around.
Many years later, Intel let go of its NUC business and got ASUS to take over its operating under a non-exclusive agreement; it’s very likely that while the chipmaker no longer produces these systems themselves, they still have a say on what goes into the stuffs that bears its branding (which probably means no AMD). Hence, a new name was warranted to release an AMD version of the ROG NUC, which features up to Ryzen 9 9955HX3D as the processor (the fastest one on the market at that), paired with either NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 or RTX 5060 Laptop GPUs.
Annoyingly, the top-end configuration of the similarly-built ROG NUC actually allows up to RTX 5080 Laptop GPU, so having the fastest processor on the market is still not entirely useful if it’s not allowed to properly stretch its legs with an appropriately-powerful GPU to match. That aside, the ROG GR70 also features up to 32GB of DDR5-5600 RAM by default (expandable to 96GB), up to 2TB PCIe 5.0 SSD, along with Wi-Fi 7 and support for five display outputs.
Since this has just been announced globally by ASUS, no local availability information has been provided just yet (or if they’ll be available here). Expect updates in the coming days regarding availability, however.
Pokdepinion: The fact that this doesn’t have RTX 5080/5090 option is just annoying.
