During CES 2026, ASUS announced the TUF Gaming TM500 Gaming PC, which in and of itself isn't a big deal and in fact, the TPU team on site grabbed a couple of quick snaps of it, without realising what sets it apart from your typical gaming PC. The TUF Gaming TM500 appears to be using leftover bits at ASUS, since it will be powered by either an AMD Ryzen 5 220 or a Ryzen 7 260, both of which are mobile CPUs based on AMD's Zen 4 processor architecture. These are obviously budget notebook chips with either six or eight cores, a Radeon 760M or 780M GPU and a total of 20 usable PCIe 4.0 lanes. ASUS decided that as this is a mobile CPU, the TM500 should use SO-DIMM memory. We're looking at a pair of DDR5 slots that support up to 64 GB of 5600 MT/s memory.

The motherboard itself appears to be microATX, but it has a custom layout and ASUS has even implemented a special heatpipe cooler that attaches to the rear of the chassis where the fan is located. As the TM500 is being sold as a gaming PC, it also comes with a choice of an AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT or an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card. The motherboard also has room for a pair of SATA ports and a pair of PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSDs in the standard 2280 form factor. Connectivity wise, ASUS didn't seem to even have bothered, as the board only has a HDMI 2.1 port, one DP 1.4, one USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) Type-A port, two USB 2.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port and three audio jacks around the back. The front of the chassis is home to a further two USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) Type-A ports and one Type-C port and a 3.5 mm combo headset jack. Considering the CPUs used have native USB4 support, as well as support for USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps), this just feels cheap from ASUS. A Wi-Fi 6 module with Bluetooth 5.4 support and a 330 W PSU rounds off the package. There was no word on pricing, but it seems like there are competing mobile on desktop type systems out there that offer more features than the TUF Gaming TM500.