TechPr0n: ROG Mothership
We’ve never seen anything like this. The ROG Mothership stands tall, resembling the result of an unholy union between the Microsoft Surface tablet and a hefty gaming laptop. Functionally, it sits firmly in the latter camp; with a ninth-gen Intel Core i9 processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 GPU, and 64GB of DDR4-2666 memory, the Mothership is ready to handle just about any triple-A game.
The keyboard can either be aligned like an ordinary laptop or detached and folded in two for more casual control. The screen (and the computer itself) is held upright by a metal fin that extends from the rear, enabling you to adjust the angle at which the screen sits, and improving airflow to keep the GPU cool. It’s a heavy unit, with two big power adapters for maximum overclocking potential.
A desktop replacement for the 4K age, it’s equipped to handle gaming, video editing, and much more. Its sides bristle with ports: two USB-C, four USB, an SD card reader, and an HDMI out. It’s got audio handled, too: The upright form factor allows for four speakers along the front, blasting highquality sound directly at you for an immersive experience. CHRISTIAN GUYTON
1 FOUR KARAT
Despite the Mothership’s bulky tablet-esque appearance, this isn’t a touchscreen; it’s a 4K 144Hz panel with Nvidia G-Sync support, and it looks absolutely stunning in operation. Colors are vibrant, and open environments in games look gorgeous, the Mothership’s powerhouse hardware having little difficulty running most games at 4K.
2 NUMBER ONE
The number pad is concealed beneath the vertical trackpad on the keyboard. With the click of a button, the red number pad matrix illuminates, and overrides the trackpad functions. That’s OK—as with any high-power laptop, most users will plug in a mouse for regular use, leaving the trackpad as the perfect place for number input.
3 STORAGE WARS
While PCIe 4.0 might not be available for Intel systems yet, the Mothership has an inventive solution: three PCIe 3.0 M.2 drives, linked together in RAID 0. This makes for effective read speeds of over 8GB/s, more than the theoretical maximum of PCIe 4.0.