ASUS ROG GX800 First Impressions

Sacrificing portability for raw power, the ASUS ROG GX800 is one behemoth of a laptop. Can we still even call it a laptop? One thing’s for certain though, this thing is crazy. It’s rocking an 18.4-inch UHD G-Sync display, an unlocked Intel Core i7-7820HK, two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080’s in SLI, 64GB of DDR4 RAM, and three PCIe SSD’s in RAID0. Additionally, to maximize the power potential of the machine, it even comes with a separate liquid cooling dock to get a higher thermal headroom for overclocking. That said, here are our first impressions.

Without a doubt, this machine is heavy. The 18.4-inch screen speaks clear for that fact. The display has a UHD resolution and is NVIDIA G-Sync capable, therefore maximizing the dual GTX 1080 SLI setup.

With this size, the laptop is also fully capable of accommodating an RGB mechanical keyboard with a pretty full layout that even includes macro keys. The travel distance on the keys is pretty comfortable for both typing and gaming. The mechanical switches under the keys are linear with a slight tactile bump and feel very nice.

Moving on to the I/O, on the left side, we have the huge power input, an ethernet port, HDMI, mini DisplayPort, USB 3.1 Type-C, Thunderbolt 3 Type-C, USB 3.0 Type A, and dedicated audio jacks for microphone and headphones.  The opposite side houses another couple of USB 3.0 Type-A ports, an SD card reader, and wireless antenna.

When you have to lug around a full-on suitcase just to transport your gaming laptop setup, you know you’ve gone over the top.

Opening it up reveals the accessories that will unlock the full potential of the GX800. One side houses the liquid-cooling dock, while the other side keeps the matching power brick, and there is also an included ASUS Cerberus gaming mouse.

Before we get to the good stuff, let’s check out the mouse first. It’s an ASUS Gladius unit that has gamer-centric features such as the ergonomic design which caters left-handed and right-handed users, a separate left and right button, with swap switch sockets, rubber side grips, additional customizable buttons, and a 2000Hz USB polling rate.

The liquid cooling unit is quite as massive as the laptop itself and attaches around the back of the system, which connects the two via some pins. Docking the laptop here takes a bunch of heat away from it, allowing you to get a lot more thermal headroom when overclocking the i7 CPU and/or the GTX 1080’s.

When fully kitted out with the liquid cooling dock and both power bricks, the entire GX800 setup takes a bunch of table space at the location of use. While twice, or even thrice as big as a traditional laptop gaming setup, it’s easily forgiven when you do note that it packs two flagship NVIDIA GPU’s and liquid cooling. That’s still less of a net footprint than a full-on desktop setup.

As the GX800 has a huge footprint, as well as a price tag of almost a third of a million pesos, it definitely caters to a very niche market populated by the top one percent of the top one percent of gamers. Its specs, that beat even most desktop PC’s, make it probably the most powerful laptop we’ve ever taken a look at.

The ASUS ROG GX800 is priced at Php369,995USD 6,305INR 534,495EUR 6,005CNY 45,916 and is available at ROG Concept Stores around the country.

ASUS ROG GX800 key specs:
18.4-inch UHD display @ 3840 x 2160 pixels w/ G-Sync
2.7GHz Intel Core i7-7820HK processor (8M cache, up to 3.6GHz)
Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 SLI w/ 16GB GDDR5X VRAM
64GB DDR4 RAM
3x 512GB PCIE Gen3 x4 SSD (RAID0)
Windows 10