We challenge all desktops’ graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds, and the second pair, Steel Nomad’s regular and Light subtests, focus on APIs more commonly used for game development to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. Last, we turn to 3DMark Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance in a synthetic environment.
Our real-world gaming testing is based on the in-game benchmarks of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at full HD (1080p or 1200p), 2K (1440p or 1600p), and 4K (2160p) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively.
We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Extreme graphics preset on desktops. Because the test can produce triple-digit frame rates even on low-end PCs, this approach yields sensible results for evaluating high frame-rate performance. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs to their limit, so we run it on the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 2024, run at Ultra High, measures GPUs’ ability to render high-polygon-count models and densely detailed environments at fast speeds.
Gaming is where the ROG NUC’s mobile RTX 5070 Ti, with 12GB of memory, lags behind its full-bore desktop counterpart in the Alienware Aurora, which features 16GB, producing a pronounced performance gap across all benchmarks. However, the NUC was much less behind the Legion Tower’s desktop RTX 5070 card, and it surpassed the TUF Gaming T500’s RTX 5060 Ti (16GB). This is a better outcome than expected, considering the RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU has less VRAM (12GB) compared with the T500’s RTX 5060 Ti.
Regardless, the ROG NUC posted impressive performance numbers at 1080p and 1440p resolutions, particularly in F1 24 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Cyberpunk 2077’s Ray-Tracing Overdrive preset is a stress test even for RTX 5080 and 5090 desktop rigs, so it wasn’t much of a surprise to see the game become a slideshow when running that benchmark at any resolution above 1080p (at which it was just barely playable). However, lowering the graphics preset to the more stable Ray-Tracing Ultra or Ray-Tracing Medium setting enables a significantly smoother gaming experience, especially at 1440p or lower, which isn’t too shabby for such a compact PC. This is before even considering frame-rate boosts via Nvidia’s DLSS 4 tech within its RTX 50-series GPUs.
