Asus ROG GR70

It's not easy to design and manufacture a capable, efficient "mini PC" and certainly not when this minimalist, compact machine is designed for gaming. Yes, space saving matters to some, but what enthusiasts are primarily looking for is performance, and it's precisely performance that is theoretically compromised when space is limited.

However, Asus has made several attempts, sometimes successfully, with their 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 case measuring just three litres and measuring 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 (effectively the laptop version of the card with 8GB GDDR7 VRAM), up to 96GB DDR5-5600 RAM (there is a PCIe 5 slot and a PCIe 4 slot on the board), two M.2 2280 slots, which can hold as much storage as you want, and a wealth of ports on the back, which pretty much matches what we would 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.

Inside, we find a triple fan system that Asus has dubbed "QuietFlow", and the idea is simply that it takes in cold air from the entire side, to which the hot air is sent backwards. This provides a very uniform airflow, and these three fans also create a very subtle sound profile that, even under pressure, does not give way to the higher, whining sound that can often be heard when, for example, pushing laptops to their limits.

The biggest technical gains we can look at 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 appears to perform very similarly to an RTX 4070 desktop variant, with Time Spy results averaging around 18,767 after a few tests. It would be a minor criticism of the GR70 that the laptop GPU's power budget is somewhat limited, and this will probably be noticeable 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 enabled gave us 85-95 fps. However, it should be noted that DLSS 4's Multi Frame Generation gave the game a considerable boost here, and there are strong opinions about these artificially inserted frames. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 performed at 75-80 fps 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 at around 35 decibels. There is actually not much to complain about in terms of actual performance, and ROG's software suite is also flexible enough that you can customise individual profiles for the tasks you want to throw at your GR70.

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 really fine, 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.