Get ready for some serious novelty in the form of the Asus TUF Gaming T500. This compact gaming desktop (starting at $999.99, $1,299.99 as tested) is something of an odd wedding of a machine: It features an Intel Core i7-13620H chip—a laptop CPU—and a GeForce RTX 5060 Ti desktop card. We’ve seen mobile CPUs in desktops before, such as the compact Asus ROG NUC 970, but seldom together with a full-size GPU, or in a mini-tower this size. In short, there's nothing else quite like it out there, and it offers surprisingly good performance to boot. But if you don't need the small footprint, a full-tower gaming PC like the HP Omen 35L will likely be a better value in one of its lower-end configurations. (The Omen starts at $1,099; we tested a storming version closer to $2,500.)

Design and Specs: Spiffy Outside, Constraints Inside

You can get the TUF Gaming T500 with one of two mobile CPU flavors: a 13th Gen Intel Core i5-13420H for $999, or the Core i7-13620H for an extra $300. (The latter is the version we tested for this review.) Both models include 16GB of DDR5 RAM and 1TB of SSD storage. Most important, both configurations sport a desktop-style discrete GeForce RTX 5060 Ti card.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

When you peek inside the T500, you'll find a setup something like the interior of a typical gaming laptop, were you to crack one open, with the placement of heat pipes off an integrated CPU. The RAM is under a lid on the motherboard, in the form of two SO-DIMM laptop-style modules in slots parallel to the board. (The board is upgradable to 64GB via two 32GB modules.) Unlike most prebuilt gaming desktop PCs, you don't get options to swap out most other components, like the motherboard or power supply. Why? Much inside is proprietary to this machine, barring the M.2 SSD, the memory, and the GPU. Even the cooling system for the CPU is an unusual heatsink-and-fan combination mounted in the rear exhaust position on the chassis.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

All that amounts to a design that really limits what you can upgrade with the machine down the road. For one thing, a 500-watt power supply unit (PSU) will limit your upgrade choices for GPUs in the future, and the specialized motherboard connector that the PSU here uses means you can't just plonk in an ordinary socketed Mini-ITX motherboard with a 24-pin power connector later. Because of that and the inability to upgrade the CPU, I worry about the long-term staying power of this system compared with others at around the same $1,300 that offer more traditional desktop builds. At least you can upgrade the memory via the SO-DIMM slots.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

So what about the unusual chip combo? I’m not against the idea of using laptop components in a desktop for efficiency; a desktop case offers better cooling than a laptop, maximizing the performance you can get from the parts. Likewise, performance isn't hindered by the lower power draw from a 500-watt power supply. Don’t expect to game in 4K, but the Asus TUF Gaming T500 runs games at 1080p very well at high settings.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

As for exterior aesthetics, Asus’ TUF Gaming line leans heavily into the serious tacti-cool gamer aesthetic, but there is something about the T500’s compact 18.9-by-9.5-by-20.1-inch case I can’t help but find cute, like a kid wearing a grown-up's clothes. The machine takes up very little space, and the front-panel design and menacing yellow glow from its RGB grew on me (which is changeable via the Asus Armoury Crate app). A recess on the front panel hosts a pair of USB Type-A 5Gbps ports and a single USB-C of the same speed, plus a headphone/mic jack. (I'd have liked to see a 10Gbps USB-C here.)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Around back, you'll find a small spray of USB ports (four USB Type-A, oddly all 2.0, so mostly good just for input gear or printers) and an Ethernet jack. You also get video outputs (HDMI and DisplayPort) for the integrated graphics on the Intel CPU, should you remove the GeForce card. Otherwise, you'd plug your display into the GPU's own outputs.

Our review sample had a 1TB PCI Express SSD in one of the mainboard's two Type-2280 M.2 slots for SSDs. A third M.2 slot houses a Wi-Fi 6/Bluetooth combo card.

Performance Testing: On Point for 1080p Play

Because of its novel processor setup, it's tricky to compare the Asus TUF Gaming T500 equitably to other gaming desktops. So we decided to stack it up against other gaming rigs around its price range and form factor. We chose the impressive HP Omen 35L ($2,449.99 as tested) mentioned earlier and its Nvidia RTX 4080 Super, as well as the budget full-size tower MSI Codex R2 ($979.99 as tested) and a pricier tower, the Lenovo Legion Tower 5i ($1,149.99 as tested). If you're going for a smaller desktop footprint, we've also got the pricier Asus ROG NUC 970 ($1,799 as tested) with an RTX 4070 Laptop GPU.

I’ll admit, I didn’t think the TUF Gaming T500 would put up decent numbers. But it proved me wrong.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput. 

Three more tests we rely on are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution. 

Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in the mega-popular image editor Adobe Photoshop 25.

Unsurprisingly, the mobile CPU didn’t light the world on fire on the productivity tasks, coming last (if not by a lot) in nearly all categories. To the T500’s credit, the gap wasn't huge when it came to the raw numbers. And its scores aren’t bad considering the system's lighter-than-most power draw. The verdict: If your daily life involves more work than play, you can find more affordable options. But this PC will get the job done for most everyday tasks.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

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. The second pair, Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests, focuses 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.

Our real-world gaming testing comprises 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 promotes sensible results to evaluate high frame-rate performance. (Note: We could not generate reliable results from this system in the Call of Duty benchmark, so we have omitted that result chart from below.) Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs to their limit, so we run it on the all-out-harsh Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 2024 represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR on AMD systems) test, demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-rate-boosting and upscaling technologies.

When it comes to gaming, the Asus TUF Gaming T500 started to make a case for itself: Only the HP Omen 35L and its RTX 4080 Super regularly topped the TUF in this group. (Granted, that really isn’t a fair match-up from a GPU standpoint.) The Asus TUF Gaming T500 outpaced—by fairly large margins—the ROG NUC 970 and its RTX 4070 laptop-grade GPU, as well as the RTX 4060 in the MSI Codex R2 and Legion Tower 5i. These systems sometimes beat the T500 at 1080p runs, but the Asus system reported faster numbers at higher resolutions more consistently.

If you’re gaming at 1080p, and in some cases 1440p, the T500 really stands out. Of course, we've only factored in things like DLSS 4 in the F1 24 test (and frame generation that’s only available on RTX 50-series cards), which would give a significant boost in frame rate, allowing an already decent GPU to punch even higher above its weight class.