ASUS RoG GX800VH
$9,949 | WWW.ASUS.COM/AU One laptop, two power bricks? That’ll be ASUS’s new gaming monster.
With the RoG GX800VH, ASUS is positively spurning portability. This is possibly the least portable laptop ever. It’s a monumental 18-inch beast. In fact, even the 18-inch metric doesn’t do it justice. Thanks to generous bezels around the screen, it could easily accommodate a 19-inch panel. But that’s just the beginning.
Not only does it come with two enormous 330W power bricks, both of which must be used to achieve full performance, there’s also a meaty docking station, which houses liquid cooling for the two Nvidia graphics chips inside the laptop itself. Total mass comes in at approximately 10.4kg.
The GPUs are a pair of desktop-spec Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080s, and the 18-inch display is a full 4K item, with IPS technology, and Nvidia G-Sync support. Next up is 64GB of RAM and a trio of 512GB Toshiba NVMe SSDs. The only relative disappointment is the Intel Core i7-6820HK. It’s not bad per se, but if there’s room for a pair of desktop GPUs with liquid cooling, you might think ASUS could have found a way to squeeze in a full-on LGA2011 CPU.
That water-cooling dock is there for the GPUs primarily, but also cools the CPU and even the RAM. You simply drop the rear of the laptop on to the dock, courtesy of the guide pins, and use the metal clasp to secure the self-sealing valves for the liquid-cooling array. It sounds like an accident waiting to happen, but it works well.
ASUS provides a handy desktop software tool that delivers easy access to global settings, and handtuning for expert overclocking. It’s clever enough to detect when both power supplies are connected, and jump to a higher performing mode.
With a single PSU attached, the CPU clock is capped at 3.6GHz, and the GPUs run at 1,190MHz. Add the second PSU, and those numbers jump to 4.2GHz and 1,771MHz. In theory. If there’s a problem with this, it’s the complexity. The configuration options are borderline baffling. You can run connected to the dock with one or two power supplies, or run the laptop by itself on purely air cooling and a single power supply. Of course, there’s the SLI graphics, which make getting consistent performance out of any machine more complicated.
To cut a long story short, we tried the GX800VH in every imaginable configuration, and ran most of our benchmarks in each configuration to investigate the impact of adding the second PSU, and running with and without the liquid cooling. The results were always fast but also consistently inconsistent. Depending on the test in question, it wouldn’t always run faster with the second power supply plugged in. Some games ran faster in some configurations at 4K than 1080p. The numbers were all over the place.
In mitigation, even at its worst, the GX800VH is one hell of a fast laptop. Games look fantastic and run pretty well at 4K. Our review sample was also pre-production, with some features — including G-Sync support — missing. ASUS is working on final refinements for retail models.
This is a very complex machine, and there’s no doubt that a conventional desktop is the better route to a high-performance PC that does its thing with consistency. It really is that simple.