Asus ROG GX700 Review

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I had the good fortune of trying out GX700, the mother of gaming laptops from Asus!

Actually, saying that it is a gaming laptop may be insufficient; a more accurate description will be: it is a helluva “portable” gaming machine. Normally, when one buys a laptop, the packaging usually is a box. However, for GX700, the packaging is not a box, but a suitcase. Yes… a suitcase.

Why a suitcase? The GX700 is not just a gaming laptop, it also comes with a liquid-cooling docking station. Yes you read it right. GX700 is probably the world’s first and currently the only liquid cooled gaming laptop in the world. A box is not enough to contain the 17” laptop, the huge docking station, and two big power bricks.

Actually having the suitcase is kind of cool. Imagine going to a BYOC party. Just lug the luggage in like a boss. Beyond that however, there’s really little use for the luggage. Overseas travel? Sure, but only if you insure damages against check-in luggage. Carry-on is impossible as the luggage size already exceeds allowance.

Going back to the machine. What makes the GX700 way different from other gaming machines? Let us look at the context of the machine specs. It has a 17.3” Nvidia G-sync monitor, powered by Intel Core i7-6820HK 2.7 GHz @ 4 GHz with whooping 64GB of RAM. YES 64GB! On the graphics side, it has a Nvidia Geforce GTX980 card. Note that there is no ‘M’ appended to the model. That’s right, inside the GX700 is a full-fledged desktop-class graphics card, not a nerfed mobile gfx. Lugging the GX700 is not just lugging a heavy laptop; it’s literally lugging a high-performance workstation around.

Of course, I didn’t dare to try to bring it for gaming without power, though I’ve used it for normal use, and it took about between 1 and 2 hours to reach roughly half capacity. It is indeed a heavy battery drinker. Yet again, what do you expect from a super-powered gaming laptop?

 

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Next, the dock. Why liquid cooling? Turns out that the GX700 is designed to be very much overclockable. And just like desktops, safe overclocking requires cooling. A cooling fan base would not be sufficient for the GX700. Henceforth, the liquid cooling solution. And no other gaming laptops have such capability to overclock that much

The machine can be docked just by ‘snapping’ the GX700 laptop onto the dock. Basically, there are nozzles in the dock that connects to the inlet of the laptop. Special liquid (green in colour) is then circulated into the coolant of the laptop, and the dock’s ‘exhaust fans’ dissipates the heat.

Undocking requires the laptop to be on sleep, or shutdown - it’s designed this way. To undock, you must close the lid, wait for a “beep” sound, before pulling the lever. This is to allow the dock to stop pumping liquid into the laptop.

To overclock, there’s the Asus Gaming Center in which you can tweak the settings, such as CPU and GFX speed, as well as fan power. Do note that each tweak (other than fan speed) requires a system restart. Also, overclocking won’t work if your machine is not docked, probably due to safety reasons.

Some may ask: will the green liquid spill? From what I experienced so far, hardly, unless you forcibly attempt to undock it.

Gaming

Gaming on the GX700 is simply like gaming on a desktop. For GTA V, even with all settings maxed out, the fps still hits close to 60.

With the G-Sync monitor, it eliminates screen tearing should the frame rate be too high, hence ensuring very smooth graphical gameplay.

Due to time constraints, I was only able to benchmark 3DMark. Firestrike score comes to 9374.

Workstation
Of course, other than just gaming, one can use it as a very powerful workstation. Have yet to see if there’s any way to overclock in Linux-based operating systems due to time constraints.

Price
With all these specs, one will like to know how much it costs. Its SRP is $6198, though not sure about the street price nowadays. It can be bought in major electronics stores, such as Challenger or Best Denki.

Conclusion
It is indeed a very powerful gaming laptop/ portable gaming machine. So far, no other laptop can match it. However, with such a price high tag, it may not be able to attract gaming DIY enthusiasts, who’d rather DIY a rig for around half the SRP. Instead, what I see is probably niche interest from enterprises that requires a powerful workstation, yet requires their employee to be mobile across multiple sites.

Again, it’s a great gaming laptop, at the top of all other gaming laptops. Only issue is the price.