ASUS NUC 14 Pro (125H)

What owners say

Two labs had this exact Core Ultra 5 125H kit, both as a barebone, and owners add what happens when it runs as a server. The labs agree on the headline: very low idle power, about 5 W at the wall, and a machine that cannot hold its settings under a long full load. ASUS lets the chip run at 65 W for both limits; one lab saw it touch 111 °C and throttle, the other found repeated runs inconsistent as the cooler ran out of headroom, with parts of the top reaching 55 °C. On noise they split at idle — one could not hear it at all, the other found the fan never stops — but both call it clearly audible at full load, 47.8 dB(A) in one measurement. Building it is easy: the base comes off with a turn of a lock and no tools, thermal pads on the lid cool the SSDs, and both memory slots should be filled, up to 2 × 48 GB. There is no audio jack, only sound over HDMI and DisplayPort. One Proxmox owner's unit freezes an hour or two after booting without a monitor attached, and ASUS's suggested fix is a dummy display plug; another owner found a Debian 12 kernel too old for the graphics.

For whom

An efficient, easily upgraded office PC or home server with two Thunderbolt 4 ports and support for four displays.

Not for

Long rendering, photo or video jobs, games beyond light titles, and headless servers until the monitor-less freezes are resolved.

Our own summary of 4 published sources, reviewed Sep 23, 2026. We have not tested this Mini PC ourselves; the sources are listed under About this data.