ASUS ROG NUC 970 Review

CPU Benchmarks – Cinebench R23/R24 and Dolphin

Cinebench Performance

Here is where we see the downside of having such a compact system. With small PCs, heat and power limits are challenging to overcome. Furtnermore, Intel’s Meteor Lake Core Ultra 185H has a maximum clock speed of 5.1GHz, which isn’t that high if you compare it to Intel’s desktop chips.

While Intel’s CPU delivers respectable levels of single-threaded performance, multi-threaded performance is limited by available power.

We can see similar results from the two versions of Cinebench we tested. Higher-wattage CPUs can use more power to achieve higher performance levels. While this makes the ROG NUC look bad in some regards, it must be remembered that none of the other CPUs here can be used in a system as small as the ROG NUC 970.

Dolphin Emulation Performance

Our Dolphin Wii Emulation benchmark shows some weakness in Intel’s 1st Generation Core Ultra CPU. Regardless, this CPU remains more than fast enough to emulate Wii games.