Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Asus V700 Mini desktop serves a wood-grain finish and it’s a design trend that must stay

Asus’ V700 Mini Tower wraps AI PC hardware in a wood-grain design made for actual living rooms.

Add as a preferred source on Google
Computer Hardware, Electronics, Hardware
Asus
Nvidia CEO showing the RTX 4060 Ti at Computex 2023.
This story is part of our coverage of Computex, the world's biggest computing conference.

Asus’ V700 Mini Tower, announced at Computex 2026 gives the home desktop a rare design win. The new mini desktop keeps the practical shape of a tower PC, but swaps the usual cold box look for clean lines, soft contours, and a wood-grain finish meant to sit where people can actually see it.

That visual shift does real work. A mini desktop doesn’t have to be hidden under a desk, tucked behind a monitor, or parked beside a router because it looks too harsh for the room. Asus introduced the V700 Mini Tower as part of its Computex 2026 AI PC lineup, and the warmer design is the detail that gives it a sharper identity.

Recommended Videos

Price, release date, and regional availability weren’t listed for the V700 Mini Tower.

Why should power look this sterile

Asus didn’t use the warmer shell as an excuse to go basic. The V700 Mini Tower can be configured with up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor, DDR5 memory, and up to 2TB of PCIe 4.0 SSD storage.

Optional Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics give it more reach than a simple household PC. Asus frames the machine for productivity, entertainment, and creative workloads, which helps the wood-grain design feel less like decoration and more like a serious desktop with better manners.

How does wood grain change the room

The finish changes where this PC can reasonably live. It looks better suited to a media console, shared desk, or open home office than a conventional tower covered in vents, gloss plastic, or office-gray panels.

That’s where the trend gets interesting. Speakers, consoles, routers, and smart displays have already moved toward softer, more decor-friendly designs. Desktop PCs have been slower to catch up, even as more people use them in visible spaces that double as work zones, family rooms, and entertainment setups.

What would prove this trend is real

The V700 Mini Tower needs more than a good Computex showing to make the design stick. Asus has to ship it broadly, price it sensibly, and avoid treating the wood-grain finish like a one-off flourish for a single model.

The next step is straightforward. Make warmer desktop finishes normal options across more PCs, not limited-edition styling experiments. If desktops are going to stay in the home, they should stop forcing the home to work around them.

Paulo Vargas
Paulo Vargas is an English major turned reporter turned technical writer, with a career that has always circled back to…
Qualcomm is set to ratchet up chip prices in September, and your next gadget upgrade could bear the brunt
The price hike could touch every Snapdragon-powered device category.
The new Qualcomm Snadragon 8 Elite Gen 5

I want you to sit with this for a second. Qualcomm, the company whose Snapdragon chips sit inside your Android phone and tablet, your Windows laptop, your Meta smart glasses, your Galaxy Watch, and your wireless earbuds, reportedly sent a letter to every major customer telling them prices are going up by double digits. 

The price hike will be in effect from September 1, 2026, a recent Bloomberg report claims. Essentially, all the companies placing their chip orders after that will pay a higher price. 

Read more
Stop fighting with your roomie over outlets and get one of these multi-port chargers before you head back to school
One plug, zero drama, all your devices charged by morning.
Satechi ChargeView

Your room has one wall outlet, and you have multiple devices that need power by morning. Phone, laptop, tablet, earbuds, they're all vying for the same socket, and the bricks you own are single-port relics that hog it for just one gadget. You could throw a power strip at the problem, but then you're staring at a tangle of multiple bricks and cables that's enough to give you the sweats. A good multi-port charger cuts all that mess, and could be the only thing standing between you and a dead phone or laptop before your morning classes.

Back-to-school season is a smart time to buy one. You're already thinking about what'll go on your desk or in your bag, so it's the natural point to replace a pile of single-port bricks with one charger that does it all. I dug through the current crop of multi-port chargers so you don't have to, and here are five worth your money.

Read more
OpenAI’s rogue AI hack was just the beginning, Hugging Face warns
OpenAI’s rogue AI has come back to bite it
OpenAI logo on Microsoft surface

Hugging Face already knows what it is like to be attacked by an autonomous AI agent. If one of its co-founders is right, plenty of other companies are going to find out soon. Thomas Wolf, co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face, has called the recent cyberattack carried out by OpenAI models a “wake-up call” for the technology industry.

Speaking to the BBC, Wolf warned that AI-driven intrusions could become one of the most common forms of cyberattack and said many companies have yet to realize how dramatically the threat has changed. This arrives after OpenAI disclosed that its models escaped a restricted cybersecurity evaluation environment and compromised Hugging Face while trying to obtain answers for the ExploitGym benchmark. So Wolf’s comments now give us a better idea of what the attack looked like from the other side.

Read more