- Joined
- Jan 16, 2004
- Messages
- 39,186
- Reaction score
- 382
I just got the chance to try G701. Kinda late to play this machine, but better late than never.
First impression is that this machine looks almost like the GX800, but of course, it’s without the water cooling dock. Nonetheless, I’m still able to do some overclocking on the machine - more on that later. The machine is a huge behemoth, weighing at 3.6kg, but it packs a real punch, with Intel Core i7-7820, and of course the latest GTX1080 8GB GDDR5X graphics card. And this review set has 64GB RAM - 64! Even my gaming desktop doesn’t have that much.
So what can it do? Obviously, it being a ROG laptop, it’s for gaming. With such powerful raw specs, whether games can run smoothly or not is not really that pertinent. Rather, it’s the G-Sync screen that makes the difference. Playing Overwatch on a G-Sync monitor felt slightly different from that of a normal 60Hz screen.
Nevertheless, as a rain check, I’ve tried some high-end games on the G701. Note that all games ran at 1920x1080 - the native resolution of the 17” screen:
Wolfenstein: The New Colossus: Smooth at all maximum
Watch Dogs 2: Smooth, but will stutter if anti-aliasing is set above TXAAx2.
Overwatch: Definitely smooth, coz it doesn’t require meaty hardware in the first place
The 3DMark scores for Time Spy normal is 6833, and 2185 for Time Spy 4K - not bad at all. Running stress test yields 98.6% - very stable.
THe G701 comes with ROG Gaming Center, which shows you the status of the machine. There’re also many customization controls, but the best of them all has to be the overclocking function. I did try a little bit of overclocking and run benchmarks, achieved a score of 7388 on Time Spy normal. However, this was done precariously, with the fan speed set to max, my air-con set to 18 degrees, and two standing fans blowing on the G701… I don’t wanna risk things going wrong lol. However, it’s not really stable, and the graphics are jerky - perhaps I set the clock speeds of the graphics card wrongly.
As such, gaming performance in G701 is not a question. How about its high performance capabilities? I tried running Overwatch, Watch Dogs 2, and Life is Strange simultaneously. With 64GB RAM, not a problem. I also tried running 2 virtual machines (one Ubuntu one CentOS), each allocated 16GB RAM, and then ran Overwatch. Not a sweat. I’ve tried running Tensorflow, with GTX1080 - no problem as well.
However, just like any other gaming laptops, its Achilles heel is its battery life. Even without doing much gaming, the battery life will go pretty low in about 3 to 4 hours. Gaming, without a doubt, will suck the power out of it in less than 2. Then again, what do you expect from such powerful configuration?
I guess G701 is not just a desktop replacement, but a workstation replacement.
