(Credit: John Burek)
TAIPEI—In a press briefing on the ground at Computex 2025, Asus showed us its TUF Gaming T500 gaming desktop, which—in an interesting twist—packs a laptop processor but a full-size graphics card inside.
This compact tower is clearly aiming for a more budget-conscious audience, as you’d expect for the TUF brand, with a $1,299 price in the US for an RTX 5060 Ti model. The mobile-class Intel Core processor (up to the Core i7-13620H) and just-above-entry graphics ceiling were selected to limit the final system costs while delivering mainstream performance.
I took a close look at this uncommon combination at Asus’ headquarters today, with details and photos from our meeting below.
The TUF T500 Design: Compact, Tough, and Clean
The first thing I noticed about the TUF T500 was its size, which looks much closer to a general-use or home-office PC than a traditional gaming tower. It stands 18.9 by 9.5 by 20.1 inches (HWD), notably narrow and not very tall.
(Credit: John Burek)The aesthetic is a bit more gamer-centric, however. If the “TUF GAMING” text along the side panel didn’t give it away, the somewhat aggressive front panel design and chassis lighting would. I wish the front panel was a bit toned down, so this PC could fully pass for a more professional system, though I understand Asus’ desire for flair in a budget gaming desktop. Like its TUF laptop brethren, the T500 meets MIL-STD-810H standards for durability, in case you do need to move or accidentally knock this system.
The left panel features a window to the interior, showing off the compact layout and amber LEDs. It’s a traditionally air-cooled tower with a 90mm cooling fan, and while thermal management and power draw in such a small case may be an issue in many gaming desktops, another advantage of the laptop processors is lower power consumption. The 45-watt Core i5-13420H base configuration requires less cooling than the Core i7 model, which also runs three 6mm heatpipes and a larger heatsink to cool the chip.
(Credit: John Burek)The result of all this is a clean but minimalist interior. It’s just enough that you’ll be glad it’s visible through the side window, but it’s short of being a real showpiece. This is another aspect it has in common with simpler budget general-use towers; the interior is a bit sparse and functional, but the case styling and lighting add enough flair.
Components: A GeForce RTX 5060 Ti and...a Laptop Chip?
The compact design is no doubt a draw, but I found the core-component combination just as interesting. To start, the motherboard is proprietary, designed directly for this case, which might dash some of your eventual DIY hopes, but it is also fairly sensible in an affordable prebuilt. The T500 runs up to a 500-watt power supply.
(Credit: John Burek)The Core i7-13620H is a 13th Generation mobile “Raptor Lake” chip in the higher-performing H class with 10 cores (six Performance cores and four Efficient cores) and 16 threads. With more thermal headroom than a laptop, Asus mentioned that the team was able to push this chip a bit further inside the T500, though I don’t have exact speed differences.
The laptop-grade Core H chip is joined by a full GeForce RTX 5060 Ti card, a half-step above the entry-level option, which should give this tower a bit more juice for 60fps/1080p gaming in modern titles. The T500 can be equipped with up to 64GB of 5,600MHz DDR5 memory and 2TB of PCIe Gen 4 storage (via two 1TB M.2 drives).
(Credit: John Burek)A Price Not So TUF to Swallow?
The $1,299 price for an RTX 5060 Ti makes sense for this tower, about what you'd hope for from a prebuilt with this GPU, and the laptop CPU helps hold it back form going any higher. Asus told me it's eyeing additional configurations with Core i5 chips, as well as RTX 3050 and RTX 4060 graphics, but the prices are not finalized; I only saw the RTX 5060 build for now, but keep an eye out for these (likely even more affordable) configurations in the future.
The laptop processor will, perhaps fairly, cause skepticism among some gamers, but it’s plausible it won’t prove a bottleneck for an RTX 5060 Ti. Asus reps explained that the kinds of games and settings (and the reasonable target resolutions) appropriate for a system of this class are far more likely to be GPU-bound than CPU-bound. On top of that, Nvidia’s DLSS 4 technology can help bridge the gap, allowing higher frame rates than the hardware could render traditionally. It won't beat out powerhouse machines, but I expect this to be a capable mainstream gamer, and even cutting-edge titles can run with the help of DLSS.
I’m mainly curious about how this desktop will perform given its unique CPU/GPU combination, and unfortunately that’s the one answer I won’t have until we get the system in to test it for ourselves. Check back for a full review when units are available, and read the rest of our Computex coverage on PCMag.