Asus ROG GX700 Preview – Fast gaming laptop with water cooling
An Asus press conference at a major tech fair always guarantees surprises. Such a surprise often falls into the category of ‘craziness’; products that have been pulled from the r&d labs a day before the presentation to show what kind of experimental things the company is working on. In the past, products such as the PadFone, Tai Chi and a portable all-in-one have been shown to the world in this way.
At IFA, Asus had the same surprise in store during its press conference. In addition to a range of tablets and phones, Asus CEO Jonney Shih also showed a special laptop in the Republic of Gamers series: the GX700. Special about this laptop is that Asus will bundle it with a dock that adds water cooling to the whole. As a result, the laptop can then be overclocked, which of course contributes to the frame rate when you start gaming.
The GFX700 that Asus showed off at IFA wasn’t ready for sale yet and Asus wouldn’t let us play with it. We did, however, receive an extensive demonstration of how the system works and the necessary information about the laptop’s interior.
Laptop with gaming looks
On the surface, the GFX700 is a standard gaming laptop: big, heavy, thick and decked out with lots of sharp lines and lighting. People looking for a subtle laptop are clearly not the target group Asus is aiming for. In addition to a keyboard illuminated with red LEDs and a large touchpad, the GFX700 also has some extra function buttons that you can map to custom actions in games.
The 17″ notebook is equipped with a matte 4k screen, which looks nice and has good viewing angles. A classic disadvantage of ips is that the response time is higher than with tn panels, for example, which avid gamers may notice. Unfortunately, we can’t say yet about the response time of the GX700, because, as said before, we weren’t allowed to play games on it yet.
If we look around, it is striking that Asus can hide a lot of connections thanks to the considerable thickness of the laptop. For example, the GX700 has three full-size USB 3 ports, an Ethernet port, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, and no fewer than two USB-C ports. The latter two also make it future-proof.
Water cooling
The most interesting connections, however, are at the back: that’s where the notebook connects to the water cooling dock. That dock is about twice as thick as the laptop itself and consists of a large housing containing the cooling components and a kind of protruding plate on which the laptop must be placed. Pushing down a lever on the dock slides out the various connectors so that they can make contact with the laptop. The pairing didn’t look too complicated and if a connection was made successfully, a beep sounds from the dock.
Inside the dock is an auxiliary power supply, along with everything needed for water cooling: a radiator, pump and fans. When the laptop is connected, a closed circuit is created via an input and output in the laptop, after which the cooled liquid can be pumped around. This is necessary because the laptop is immediately overclocked. The liquid is only fed past the GPU, for the CPU Asus only uses air cooling.
That CPU is an Intel Core i7 6820HK, Intel’s first mobile CPU with an adjustable multiplier that makes it easy to overclock. This CPU has four cores that can process eight threads together with a base clock speed of 2.7GHz and a turbo to 3.6GHz. According to Asus, the built-in air cooling is powerful enough to cool the CPU properly even in an overclocked position.
Why is so much cooling needed for the GPU, you may ask. Because that’s where the most potential is when it comes to performance. According to the Asus product manager present, mobile GPUs can perform much better than they usually do, but are limited by power consumption and the maximum allowable heat development. The latter limit is stretched considerably with the water cooling and because the dock supplies about 200W of extra power, power consumption is no longer a problem.
Asus claims that the GPU can deliver up to 70 percent more performance when docked than when the laptop is used separately. That is an impressive number, although it is not yet clear what that actually means. We do not know which GPU is in the GX700; it is a chip that has not yet been officially announced by Nvidia and therefore Asus is not allowed to disclose anything about it. If it were a new high-end model and we can indeed add another 70 percent performance, this could easily be the most powerful gaming laptop ever.
Conclusion
It’s nice to see companies experimenting with technology and that’s why we think the GX700 is an interesting laptop. It is not the first notebook with some form of water cooling, but previous attempts seemed less serious than this model from Asus. Cooler manufacturer Asetek already showed a laptop with water cooling in 2012 , but no dock was used in that case. Who designed the water cooling system of the GX700 is not entirely clear. Asus says it is working with several companies, but which one is not known.
Whether the GX700 will eventually become a popular laptop remains to be seen. It will certainly not be cheap because of the extra dock and it is also unclear whether it will be sold in the Benelux. What we can already say is that the construction looks well thought out and seems to work easily. The GX700 will certainly be a niche product, but that niche will have one of the most powerful laptops around.