ASUS NUC 14 Pro Black

The ASUS NUC 14 Pro packs a 16-core Intel Ultra 7 chip, 32GB of RAM, and an absurd number of ports into a 0.62kg box you can mount behind a monitor. It's a productivity beast for developers and office power users, but the integrated graphics mean gaming is basically off the table. At around $1,500, you're paying for the tiny form factor and connectivity, not raw performance. If you need a nearly invisible workstation with Thunderbolt 4 and dual HDMI, this is your machine. If you need a GPU, keep walking.

The Core Ultra 7 155H is a 16-core chip with a mix of performance, efficiency, and low-power cores, and it handles everyday multitasking without breaking a sweat. In our CPU benchmarks, it lands around the 60th percentile, which puts it solidly in the middle of the pack compared to all desktops. That might sound underwhelming, but remember we're comparing it against full tower PCs with dedicated cooling and way higher power limits. For a box that sips power through a 120W brick, the fact that it keeps up with many larger desktops is genuinely impressive. Compiling code, running Docker containers, or juggling dozens of browser tabs feels snappy and responsive.

The integrated Arc Graphics are where things get interesting, and not always in a good way. The GPU score sits at the 53rd percentile, which is about average overall but well below what you'd get from even a budget dedicated card. For desktop work, media playback, and driving multiple high-res displays, it's more than capable. Intel's media engine handles AV1 decode in hardware, so streaming and light video editing are smooth. But the moment you ask it to do anything 3D intensive, the shared memory architecture and limited shader cores show their limits. This is a productivity GPU, not a gaming one, and the benchmarks make that crystal clear.

Stacked against something like the Dell Tower Plus EBT2250, the NUC 14 Pro looks like it's from a different planet. The Dell is a traditional tower with room for a dedicated GPU and way more thermal headroom, so it'll crush the NUC in any sustained workload or gaming scenario. But it's also huge, loud, and pulls way more power. The trade-off is clear: do you want expandability and raw power, or do you want something that fits in a backpack and sips electricity?

The Lenovo Legion 34IAS10 and HP Omen GT22 are gaming-focused machines that completely outclass the NUC in graphics performance. If you have any interest in gaming, even casually, those are the obvious choices. The MSI EdgeXpert sits somewhere in between, offering more GPU power in a compact chassis, but it still can't match the NUC's port selection or diminutive size. For pure productivity in the smallest possible footprint, the NUC 14 Pro is in a league of its own among these competitors.

Pricing on this config is a bit of a moving target, but we're seeing it land between $1,520 and $1,550 across vendors. That's not cheap for a mini PC, and it puts the NUC 14 Pro in a tricky spot. You're paying a premium for the form factor and the engineering that went into shrinking everything down. For the same money, you could build or buy a traditional desktop with a dedicated GPU that would run circles around this thing in any graphics workload.

But that's not really the point. If you need a tiny, quiet, power-efficient machine with a ton of connectivity and enough CPU grunt for serious work, the value proposition starts to make sense. The 32GB of RAM and 1TB SSD are generous for the price, and you're not going to find many competitors that match the port selection at this size. Just know that you're paying for the engineering, not raw performance per dollar.

The ASUS NUC 14 Pro is one of those machines that makes you do a double take when you pick it up. At just over half a kilogram, this thing is genuinely tiny, yet it's packing a full Intel Core Ultra 7 155H with 16 cores, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and a 1TB NVMe SSD. It's the kind of mini PC you can Velcro to the back of a monitor and forget exists, which is exactly the point. ASUS took over the NUC line from Intel and, honestly, they've kept the spirit alive: maximum compute in minimum space.

This particular config is aimed squarely at developers, office power users, and anyone running a home lab who wants something quiet and out of the way. The port selection is frankly ridiculous for a box this size. You get dual HDMI 2.1, three USB-C ports including Thunderbolt 4, four USB-A ports, 2.5G Ethernet, and even a DisplayPort. In our database, the connectivity lands in the 88th percentile, which is outstanding for a mini PC. You can drive four displays and still have ports left over for your peripherals.

But let's be real about what this isn't. The integrated Intel Arc Graphics share system memory and the gaming score sits at a painful 14.7 out of 100. This is not a machine for playing anything more demanding than Solitaire or maybe some light indie titles. If you need GPU horsepower, you're looking in the wrong aisle. The NUC 14 Pro is a productivity workhorse that happens to fit in the palm of your hand, and for the right person, that's perfect.

Gamers should absolutely skip this machine. The gaming score of 14.7 out of 100 tells you everything you need to know. Even a budget gaming laptop with a dedicated GTX 1650 will run circles around the integrated Arc Graphics here. If you want to play anything from the last five years, look at a small form factor desktop with a dedicated GPU, or check out the HP Omen GT22 which is one of this unit's direct competitors and actually built for gaming.

Content creators working with 3D rendering, heavy video editing, or GPU-accelerated workloads should also look elsewhere. The integrated graphics will bottleneck any workflow that relies on CUDA or OpenCL acceleration. For the same money, you can get a desktop with a dedicated NVIDIA card that will dramatically speed up render times. The NUC 14 Pro is a CPU workhorse, not a GPU one, and if your software leans on the graphics chip, you'll be frustrated by the performance.

For developers and IT pros who want a powerful, quiet machine that can drive a multi-monitor setup and disappear behind a desk, the NUC 14 Pro is a fantastic choice. The port selection alone makes it a standout for anyone running a complex workstation with lots of peripherals. The 32GB of RAM means you can run VMs and containers without constantly watching your memory usage, and the 1TB SSD gives you plenty of room for projects and tools.

But if your workflow includes any kind of 3D rendering, video editing with heavy effects, or gaming, you should look elsewhere. The integrated graphics are a hard limit that no amount of CPU performance can overcome. And the below-average reliability scores in our database give us some hesitation about recommending this for mission-critical deployments without a backup plan. For the right niche, it's brilliant. For everyone else, it's a compromise that probably doesn't make sense.