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Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 Notebook Review: Multitasking monster with AMD Zen4, RTX 4090 & Mini-LED

Debut for the AMD Zen4 Ryzen 9 7945HX. Asus refreshes its ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 and uses the best components you can currently get. The new GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop is supported by AMD’s Ryzen 9 7945HX, the fastest mobile CPU right now. The manufacturer also replaces the 4K screen with a new WQHD Mini-LED panel with 240 Hz, which is supported by a secondary 4K screen. Update: sRGB profile is included

Asus continues the concept of the ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 with its two screens in 2023 and uses the best technologies you can currently get for laptops. In addition to the brand-new mobile graphics cards from Nvidia, the GeForce RTX 4080 Laptop and GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop, Asus once again uses HX processor from AMD. It is actually one of the first laptops in our editorial office with the new AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX, which offers 16 Zen4 cores against Intel’s Raptor Lake HX CPUs. Asus also upgraded the display: The resolution drops from 4K to WQHD, but it is a matte Mini-LED panel with a refresh rate of 240 Hz and fast response times.

Intel NUC 12 Pro Kit (Core i5-1240P) mini PC review: Snappy with great connectivity

Thunderbolt 4 in a tiny bottle. The Intel NUC 12 Pro Kit is a tiny but powerful mini PC. Its powerful 12th-Gen Alder Lake Core i5-1240P offers great computing power, although graphics performance is lacking. Like it's bigger brother, perhaps its greatest strength is its excellent port selection, which includes two Thunderbolt 4 ports.

Intel's NUC lineup continues to be a leader in the mini-PC market, and the latest Wall Street Canyon NUCs are no exception. With powerful and efficient 12th-Gen Alder Lake CPUs and Intel's Iris Xe Graphics, the Wall Street Canyon NUCs should make short work of most home and office computing work. We recently reviewed the NUC 12 with an Intel Core i7-1260P and found a lot to like about the tiny desktop. Today, we'll look at it's little brother, the NUC 12 with an Intel Core i5-1240P. Specifically, we will look at a NUC 12 Pro Kit, which includes 16 GB of RAM and a 512 GB NVMe SSD.

Since our NUC 12 review unit is built in a similar case as the NUC 12 in our prior review, we will focus only on the differences in performance. The key difference in build is that our review unit today is slightly higher than the Core i7-1260P Wall Street Canyon NUC (45.6 mm vs 37 mm) to accommodate a 2.5-inch SATA drive in the base of the case. Otherwise, the port selection, build quality, and all other physical factors are the same between the devices. For details on these items, please refer to our review of the Intel Core i7-1260P Wall Street Canyon NUC.

ASRock cuts prices of its Intel Arc graphics cards so low you may actually want one

There are no bad products, just incorrectly priced products. So, the saying goes and if it's right, Intel's Arc graphics may have just come good thanks to a major price cut from ASRock.

As spotted by TechPowerUp, You can now have ASRock's 8GB version of the top Intel Arc A770 chipset for just $270 from Newegg, well down on the $320 it used to sell for. The full 16GB reference A770 from Intel itself remains at $349.

Next up, the ASRock Arc A750 8GB drops from $290 to $240, mirroring the recent price cut of Intel's own reference A750 from $289 to $249. Then there's the ASRock Arc A380, reduced from $150 to just $120.

If a flagship GPU for just $270 in the A770 seems like a steal, the reality is that it's a relatively modest performer. The Intel Arc A770 is probably slightly faster most of the time for plain old raster rendering than an Nvidia RTX 3060, which sells for well over $300.

If that's a comparison that looks good for Intel, the contest with the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT is tougher. It can be had for pretty much the same money as the newly reduced ASRock A770.

Oh, and if you are slightly miffed that it's an 8GB version of the A770 going cheap rather than a 16GB board, well, the A770 is probably best suited for 1080p gaming, for which 8GB should be plenty. Having 16GB would be preferable if 1440p is your target resolution, it's just questionable whether the A770 is a true 1440p-class gaming GPU for the latest and most demanding titles.