About a week ago, Intel announced that it was exiting the NUC (Next Unit of Computing) business. I was disappointed to hear that, as I have long had a fondness for small form factor PCs. I was fortunate enough to spend time with several Steam Machines in 2016. They had their faults, but they demonstrated that you can pack a powerful gaming PC into a shoebox-sized form factor.

Since then, Intel has shown what's possible with its NUC Extreme mini-PCs, including this one with an i9 13900K and RTX 3080 Ti. Several companies jumped on the NUC bandwagon, but for a variety of reasons, they were never marketed to enthusiasts the way laptops and gaming PCs were.

But there is good news! The NUC is not dead yet. Intel announced in a press release that Intel and Asus have agreed to terms whereby Asus will sell and support the 10th through 13th generation NUC product lines while granting Asus a non-exclusive license to design future NUC systems. Asus will establish a new business unit called the Asus NUC BU.

This is great news. There will always be a market for mini-PCs. I can think of a dozen use cases: POS, digital signage, cryptocurrency nodes, office machines, etc. But what really excites me is what Asus can do with their gaming NUCs. After all, Asus knows how to make small form factor PCs. It's all about you, ROG Ally.

Gaming and NUCs are like oil and water. The TDP and cooling requirements of powerful GPUs mean that they are not suitable for inclusion in a truly small PC; a system with a 13900K and RTX 4090 looks good, but keeping the temperature below 100°C is another matter.

But we are talking about Asus, and Asus knows a thing or two about PC components; what if Asus were to develop a custom-built graphics card, say an RTX 4070 Ti with a TDP of around 285W? Not a lot, but not a lot by modern standards, and Asus has the technical expertise to produce such a card with a completely anomalous PCB and cooler. I am thinking something like a tower cooler, perhaps combined with a CPU cooler and a 14cm fan on the side of the PC.

It could be marketed as a kind of Asus ROG NUC gaming PC. And if they marketed it, it would boom! It would compete with consoles and have a million or two million potential buyers lined up. Maybe I'm just imagining things, but the possibilities are truly fascinating.

With companies like Asus behind them, the NUC line should be in good shape for years to come. Remember, all the existing NUC use cases are still there, and there are gamers who want NUCs.

Good luck to Asus.