Saturday, January 20th 2024
ASUS Kills Off NUC Extreme Range
ASUS finalized its adoption of the Intel Next Unit of Computing (NUC) product lines at a special autumn 2023 handover event. A post-ceremony statement outlined the company's vision going forward: "ASUS kicked-off its NUC business and started to take orders for NUC 10th to 13th generation systems on September 1. The new business is generating a wide variety of exciting opportunities for the company and the transition has progressed smoothly for NUC customers. The vision of the newly established ASUS NUC BU is to provide the most impactive edge computing with comprehensive commercial and AIoT solutions that can sustain the industry and businesses." Just over a week ago, TechPowerUp was granted access to next generation NUC devices at CES 2024—including ROG NUC, as well as NUC 14 Pro and NUC 14 Pro+ models. Many folks in attendance noticed a complete absence of NUC Extreme products at the ASUS Las Vegas showroom.
Online publication, Fudzilla, has investigated this matter—Fuad Abazovic (Editor-in-Chief) managed to chase down an ASUS spokesperson. It seems that the Taiwanese manufacturer is integrating some if its best known branding into the NUC ecosystem, and Team Blue nomenclature is on the chopping block: "the company won't have an update to the NUC Extreme 7.5 liter device. The Raptor Canyon remains the last NUC of its kind, as ASUS has ROG Strix systems in the same ballpark. Fudzilla already covered the announcement of the NUC and NUC pro, and the ROG NUC. We were assured that the 2.5L ROG NUC will remain the fastest gaming-oriented device and that, at this plan, the company doesn't plan to develop the successor of NUC Extreme 7.5 liter. ASUS has announced ROG Strix G16CHR, its 7.5-liter desktop that comes with an air and water cooler and hosts up to Intel Core i7-14700KF Processor 3.4 GHz (33M Cache, up to 5.5 GHz, 20 cores), NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB GDDR6X 3x DP, 2x HDMI, and up to 64 GB RAM in 4x DDR5 U-DIMM slots."Abazovic continued his analysis of behind-the-scenes decision making: "In order to update the NUC Extreme, one needs to swap the compute card, and there is no card based on the Raptor Lake refresh Core i9 14900K processor. It would make little sense to update as the performance delta would be minimal. Updating GPU always brings more speed to the game, and getting one of the 4070 or 4070 SUPER cards sounds like a decent update, considering that one had 3000 RTX series inside. The next generation Arrow Lake desktop CPU is most likely sitting in a new socket, making updates for NUC Extreme owners unlikely without getting the board or a compute element that would fit the design."
Sources:
Fudzilla, PC World, VideoCardz
Online publication, Fudzilla, has investigated this matter—Fuad Abazovic (Editor-in-Chief) managed to chase down an ASUS spokesperson. It seems that the Taiwanese manufacturer is integrating some if its best known branding into the NUC ecosystem, and Team Blue nomenclature is on the chopping block: "the company won't have an update to the NUC Extreme 7.5 liter device. The Raptor Canyon remains the last NUC of its kind, as ASUS has ROG Strix systems in the same ballpark. Fudzilla already covered the announcement of the NUC and NUC pro, and the ROG NUC. We were assured that the 2.5L ROG NUC will remain the fastest gaming-oriented device and that, at this plan, the company doesn't plan to develop the successor of NUC Extreme 7.5 liter. ASUS has announced ROG Strix G16CHR, its 7.5-liter desktop that comes with an air and water cooler and hosts up to Intel Core i7-14700KF Processor 3.4 GHz (33M Cache, up to 5.5 GHz, 20 cores), NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB GDDR6X 3x DP, 2x HDMI, and up to 64 GB RAM in 4x DDR5 U-DIMM slots."Abazovic continued his analysis of behind-the-scenes decision making: "In order to update the NUC Extreme, one needs to swap the compute card, and there is no card based on the Raptor Lake refresh Core i9 14900K processor. It would make little sense to update as the performance delta would be minimal. Updating GPU always brings more speed to the game, and getting one of the 4070 or 4070 SUPER cards sounds like a decent update, considering that one had 3000 RTX series inside. The next generation Arrow Lake desktop CPU is most likely sitting in a new socket, making updates for NUC Extreme owners unlikely without getting the board or a compute element that would fit the design."
10 Comments on ASUS Kills Off NUC Extreme Range
I like Lenovo's Tiny series even they do run so-dimm memory but the cpu, ram, storage even a riser card can be added only thing lacking is the possible way to use a proper gpu.
Update: I don't think the CPU is desktop. It sits on a compute card...
It might not be as optimal as a smaller, more compact mini-PC with a soldered CPU, but it's a lot thinner and more upgradeable.
Leave it to AsSus to take something so simple that works so well for alot of people, slap their "ROG" moniker on it and price it so high that it doesn't make sense to buy, and then kill it off because it doesn't make them enough money and/or competes with it's other, pricier product lines.....tsk tsk....