Asus V500 Mini Tower: Quiet, economical and offers space for a desktop GPU
The Asus V500 Mini Tower, measuring 34.7 x 29.6 x 15.5 centimeters and with a volume of just under 24 liters, is compact, but not nearly as small as a mini PC. All the more surprising then that Asus has installed a laptop-sized processor, up to the Core i7-13620H, which features six performance cores with boost clock speeds of up to 4.9 GHz and six efficiency cores.
The chip is combined with a desktop-sized cooler, allowing it to operate with a power dissipation of 95 watts. According to Asus, using a laptop-sized processor instead of a desktop processor has two advantages. Firstly, power consumption is reportedly reduced by 34%. Secondly, the tower is said to be comparatively quiet, with a fan noise of 38 dB under load. The same should be possible with a power-efficient Intel T-series desktop processor, which is why it is a shame that Asus opted for a notebook chip that makes subsequent upgrades virtually impossible.
One variant of the tower is equipped with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 desktop GPU, which can also be upgraded via PCIe 4.0 x8. The tower comes with a 180-watt power supply. According to Asus, up to 64 GB of RAM and 4 TB of SSD storage is supported. In addition to HDMI and DisplayPort, the tower also features one USB-C (5 Gbps), six USB-A ports, Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4.
Price and availability
The Asus V500 mini tower is already available directly from Asus for $549.99 for the base model. This can be upgraded to the i7-13620H and 16 GB RAM for an additional $230. The variant with GeForce RTX 4060 is not yet available. More detailed information can be found on the official product page.
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