Asus Vies for Fastest Mini PC Ever With Panther Lake NUC 16 Pro

Asus NUC 16 Pro packs Intel’s Panther Lake and B390 GPU—can it dethrone rivals in the ultra-compact race?
Matilda
Asus Vies for Fastest Mini PC Ever With Panther Lake NUC 16 Pro
Asus NUC 16 Pro Claims Mini PC Speed Crown with Panther Lake Looking for the fastest mini PC of 2026? Asus just threw its hat into the ring with the NUC 16 Pro , a palm-sized powerhouse built on Intel’s brand-new Panther Lake architecture. Unveiled at CES 2026, this 0.7-liter desktop targets creators, AI developers, and light gamers—all without needing a dedicated graphics card. But does it truly outpace competitors like AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ systems or even discrete-GPU mini PCs? Let’s break down what makes this tiny titan tick. Credit: Asus Panther Lake Power Meets Pocket-Sized Design At the heart of the Asus NUC 16 Pro sits the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H , a chip fabricated on Intel’s cutting-edge 18A process node. This isn’t just another incremental upgrade—it’s a generational leap. With up to 180 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of total AI compute across CPU, GPU, and the new NPU 5 , the system delivers serious local AI performance. That’s more than double the AI throughput of current…