ASRock Industrial has launched one of the first Meteor Lake NUCs with its NUC Ultra 100 (via LinuxGizmos). The NUC comes with up to a Core Ultra 7 155H, and users may optionally add up to 96GB of RAM and two SSDs. Although oriented towards business, professional, and industrial use cases, the NUC Ultra 100 is presumably just as good at gaming as we've seen with mobile Meteor Lake chips.
The NUC Ultra 100 can be configured with a Core Ultra 5 125H or a Core Ultra 7 155H. Since the 125H has just four P-cores to the 155's six, we can probably expect the 155H to have significantly more raw horsepower in multi-threaded workloads. That will especially be true for a NUC since there's more than enough power and cooling to go around.
Despite its small form factor, there's a considerable amount of configurability for the NUC Ultra 100. Users can add up to two PCIe 4.0 SSDs (provided they have the right size) and 96GB of DDR5 RAM clocked at 5,600MHz.
Speaking of graphics, the NUC Ultra 100 has no shortage of display options thanks to its two HDMI 2.0b ports and its DisplayPort-capable USB4 and USB 3.2 Type-C ports. These displays can drive a 4K monitor at 60Hz, though 1440p at 144Hz and 1080p at 240Hz should also be possible per HDMI 2.0b's official specs.
Regarding networking, there are two 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports, but no Wi-Fi card is included. Though, considering the target audience for this NUC, that makes sense. There is an M.2 slot inside where a Wi-Fi card can be installed, though ASRock doesn't make any claims about compatibility with the latest Wi-Fi 7 standard.
Currently, there's no price tag attached to the NUC Ultra 100, as ASRock Industrial has buyers send in a product inquiry to ask for pricing, which is standard for business-to-business dealings. It's unlikely this NUC will ever hit store shelves, but if you're craving Intel's latest chip inside a mini PC, there will be other options. Asus is apparently launching its own Meteor Lake NUC, and a Chinese-exclusive NUC is confirmed to launch on January 11.
