ASUS NUC 13 Pro NUC13L3HV7 2023, Core i7-1370P

The ASUS NUC 13 Pro Tall is a compact barebone kit with a solid 13th Gen i7 and great connectivity, but you'll need to add your own RAM and storage. Gaming is a non-starter at 8.7 out of 100. Worth it for business users who don't mind a little DIY.

The i7-1370P is a solid mid-pack performer in our database, landing around the 51st percentile for CPU. That's fine for spreadsheets, browser tabs, and light creative work. The Iris Xe integrated graphics sit right around average too, at the 49th percentile. But here's the catch: the RAM and storage scores are rough. RAM comes in at the 9th percentile and storage at the 2nd. That's because this is a barebone kit with zero RAM and zero storage out of the box. You're starting from scratch, and that drags the overall score down hard. Once you add your own DDR4 and an M.2 drive, it'll feel much better, but out of the box it's a paperweight.

Stacked against something like the Apple Mac Studio M3 Ultra, this NUC gets absolutely demolished on raw performance, but that's a $4,000 workstation and this is a $747 barebone. Different universe. Against the Lenovo Legion or HP OMEN towers, the NUC loses on gaming and upgrade headroom but wins on desk space. The Dell Desktop ECT1250 is probably the closest real-world competitor for office use, and the NUC's Thunderbolt 4 and dual HDMI 2.1 give it a connectivity edge. The MSI Aegis is a gaming rig, so no real overlap there.

At $747 USD for the barebone kit, you're paying for the CPU, chassis, and connectivity. Add a decent 16GB DDR4 kit and a 512GB NVMe drive and you're probably looking at another $100 to $150. That puts the real cost closer to $850 to $900 for a usable machine. For a compact business desktop with Thunderbolt 4 and vPro, that's not outrageous. But it's also not a screaming deal. You're paying a premium for the small form factor and the Intel NUC pedigree.

The ASUS NUC 13 Pro Tall is a barebone kit, so you're getting the brains and the chassis but not the RAM, storage, or OS. That's the deal here. You supply the parts, it supplies a 13th Gen Core i7-1370P with 14 cores and Iris Xe graphics in a box that weighs about as much as a burrito. It's aimed squarely at productivity and business use, not gaming. Our database puts its compact score at 41.9 out of 100, which tells you it's decent at being small but not exactly a category leader.

Skip this if you want a gaming PC or any kind of GPU-heavy workload. The integrated graphics are a dead end for that. Also skip it if you're not comfortable installing RAM and storage yourself, because you'll be doing that before you can even install an OS. And if reliability is your top concern, the 37th percentile score should give you pause.

This is for IT departments and home office users who want a small, quiet, vPro-capable machine and don't mind sourcing their own RAM and storage. If you're comfortable opening a case and installing parts, you'll end up with a tidy little workhorse. If you want something that works the second you plug it in, buy a prebuilt instead.