It is not easy to design and manufacture an efficient “mini-PC”, and at least not when this minimalistic, compact machine is designed for gaming. Yes, space saving is important to some, but what enthusiasts are primarily looking for is performance, and it is precisely performance that is theoretically compromised when space is limited.
However, Asus has made several attempts, sometimes with success, with its ROG mini PCs. The latest addition to the family, the ROG GR70, was presented at CES 2026 and is now on its way to stores. Here we see a cabinet of only three liters and with the dimensions 28x18x6 centimetres.
Inside this really small case, which has the same basic shape as a PlayStation 5 but is a third of the size, Asus has found space and cooling capacity for an AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX3D (which offers 16 Zen 5 cores), an RTX 5070 at 115W (in practice the laptop version of the card with 8 GB of GDDR7 VRAM), up to 96 GB of DDR5-5600 RAM (there is a PCIe 5 slot and a PCIe 4 slot on the board), two M.2 2280 slots, which can accommodate as much storage as you want, and a wealth of ports on the back, which mostly correspond to what we normally expect from a semi-serious gaming machine, i.e. two DisplayPort 2.1 ports, six USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports and two HDMI 2.1 ports.
On the inside we find a triple fan system that Asus has called “QuietFlow”, and the idea is quite simply that it takes in cold air from the entire side, to which the warm air is sent backwards. This provides a very smooth airflow, and these three fans also create a very subtle sound profile that, even under pressure, does not give way to the louder, screeching sound that can often be heard when, for example, pushing laptops to the limit.
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The biggest technical gains we can see here are the transition to Zen 5, and we have previous test results from a Ryzen 9 8945HS, which uses the old generation. Here we initially saw a Cinebench R23 multi-core score of 34,856, which is about 20% more than with the previous Ryzen 9 variant, which can be attributed to the transition to Zen 5. Moving on to 3DMark to test this 115W RTX 5070 GPU, it seems to perform very similar to an RTX 4070 desktop variant, with Time Spy results averaging around 18,767 after a few tests. It is a small criticism of the GR70 that the power budget of the portable GPU is somewhat limited, and this is likely to be felt from the start and also over time.
In practical terms, we tested games in 1440p, where, for example, Cyberpunk 2077 with Path Tracing and DLSS 4 activated gave us 85-95 fps. However, it should be noted that DLSS 4’s Multi Frame Generation gave the game a significant boost here, and there are strong opinions about these artificially inserted frames. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 performed 75-80 frames per second in our test.
As mentioned, QuietFlow creates a relatively reliable cooling and noise profile. We measured 45 decibels in Performance Mode, but generally we are around 35 decibels. There’s actually not much to complain about in terms of actual performance, and ROG’s software suite is also flexible enough to allow you to customize individual profiles for whatever tasks you want to throw at the GR70.
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The only minor complaints are the massive external power supply, which Asus couldn’t find room for inside the case itself, and the fact that they could have updated the ROG brand’s overall design profile a bit. But in terms of pure performance, this is very good, and as we approach a Steam Machine launch, it’s great to know that other manufacturers are also thinking about PC performance from a much more space-saving perspective. Asus has this well under control, you can tell.
