ASUS RoG GX700
Is there such a thing as too much gaming cred?
The GX700 is a bloody ridiculous laptop. ASUS says it’s a product that “raises portable gaming to new heights”, and while that’s true in a sense, it’s also a stark reminder that the term ‘portable’ is relative.
The GX700 is so big and heavy that it ships in its own wheeled-and-well-padded suitcase, and while its specifications are sky-high, they’re matched by an equally ridiculous $7,500 pricetag. This, clearly, is a product for gamers who also happen to be in the 1%.
It’s a product in two parts. The first is a beefy 3.9kg 17.3-inch gaming laptop powered by a 6th-gen Intel Core i7 CPU and a desktopclass Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 graphics chip. The second is that big crab-like box around the back, which is actually a special dock that ASUS has dubbed the Hydro Overclocking Station or HOS. Drop the laptop onto the front of the dock and then push down on that big silvery lever on the back and the HOS sockets watercooling hoses right into the back of the GX700, adding to the laptop’s own internal coolers with a whopping liquid-cooled external one.
The ‘overclocking’ in the name isn’t just there for a laugh either: you actually can overclock this beast when it’s docked, which is done via ASUS’s built-in RoG Gaming Center utility. The latter lets you tweak GPU speeds on the fly and it is relatively easy to use, with just a couple of presets for the CPU (5% and 10%) and two sliders for the GPU to adjust to increase speed. Voltage tuning and other esoteric settings are all taken care of automatically.
That said, we did manage to lock the system up by pushing it too hard when overclocking — we managed to get it stable at around 8–10% faster than stock, providing an equal increase in gaming framerates.
There are actually two versions of the GX700: we tested the ‘entry-level’ version, which includes a 512GB SSD (actually a pair of PCIe NVMe drives in RAID), plus 32GB of RAM and a 1080p G-Sync display. There’s also a higher-end edition that doubles the SSDs to 1TB total and RAM to 64GB (our test unit actually had the latter) and bumps the display up to 4K and still has G-Sync.
Gaming is a dream — framerates on most of our test games were above 100fps and, with G-Sync visuals, were buttery smooth. The full-size keyboard feels great and is matched by a huge trackpad — although you’re going to be using a mouse with this one most of the time, and one is included (an ASUS RoG Sica). The display doesn’t have the best viewing angles, however, and we felt its contrast could have been a little wider: some detail was lost in very dark scenes in games and movies. On the plus side, fan noise is fairly minimal.
Battery life on the GX700 isn’t great, although to its credit, our test unit did manage to eek out 2:08 hours in our tough PCMark 8 Home test. (Many competitors struggle to hit even 1:45 hours.)
As with most laptops, there’s not much in the way of upgradability. While you can get to the M.2 storage and memory slots on the underside, doing so will void your warranty. You won’t be able to swap the GPU out for a new one, although the system as a whole will support plugging in upcoming Thunderbolt-connected external GPUs.
This is a neat showcase of what laptop gaming tech can do. But would we buy one? Hmm...