ASUS ROG GX700 Gaming Notebook - Review 2022

ASUS is no stranger to the gaming; as sponsors to many gaming tournaments throughout the globe, notably Valve's The International, its Democracy of Gamer (ROG) line-up of notebooks is instantly recognisable to many gamers the world over. It's fame isn't without merit either as its flagship G-Series has won praise for being ane of the best over-sized notebooks in the market.

Fifty-fifty its GL serial is oft the go-to budget choice. Nevertheless, just when you thought y'all've seen it all, ASUS drops a bomb of a notebook on the globe.

Blueprint: Sectional Privilege

At start glance, it looks like a simple variation of the manufacturer'south pop ASUS ROG G752 gaming notebook. Have a look behind it though, and you'll notice an equally massive liquid cooling dock. Aye, this is a liquid-cooled notebook. Additionally, with but i unit beingness shipped to reviewers and just a handful of units in the wild, you can be sure that if you bought 1, you'll be in a very sectional gild of owners with a liquid-cooled notebook that has been allegedly assembled entirely by hand.

It also helps that it comes in a wicked cool dedicated suitcase, with ROG styling in the front to bear witness everyone you lot mean business.

Want to know what's inside? Take a gander of the video the PCMag Body of water Caput Honcho put together:

Pairing: Mammoth Combo

Then, what comes packed within the ASUS ROG GX700 Gaming Notebook?

In essence, the notebook portion of the ASUS ROG GX700 is very similar to the ASUS ROG G752 line-upward, with ASUS' new copper-and-metal chassis, combining a light grey brushed aluminium surface and a smooth, black hardened plastics to create a distinctly premium machine.

What's missing nonetheless is a Bluray drive, allowing ASUS to spread out the array of ports much more evenly on both sizes of the chassis compared to the cramped version found on the ASUS ROG G752. The twin air vents on the back are withal present and it's what y'all find in betwixt them that sets the ASUS ROG GX700 apart; a dock connector.

The dock itself matches the notebook in terms of colour schemes, with the aforementioned light greyness and copper styling. It's essentially a large slab of metal with 2 huge fans behind a plastic mesh.

In that location are likewise some LEDs that lite up when the unabridged thing is hooked upwardly, giving this monstrous organization some visual drama.

Setting up the entire she-bang is a existent treat that can only be experienced in person; lining up the arrows on the notebook and the liquid-cooling dock, y'all prepare the notebook down on some prongs, securing the device in identify. To complete the pairing, merely press down on the large metal lever in the middle of the dock. Several connectors will and then fasten themselves into the notebook, comprising an inlet, outlet and a power connector.

The notebook itself has a dedicated power cablevision, but when attached to the dock, only the dock's larger 330W power supply needs to be used as it directly powers the notebook.

A loud beep volition confirm that everything is setup correctly and following several seconds, the display volition come to life. Information technology's all very exciting and foreshadows the gaming goodness that is to come.

Disconnecting the two is a simple procedure of depressing a button in front end of the dock when the notebook is switched off. ASUS noted that there might be some coolant leakage, though beyond dozens of connections and disconnections, information technology never happened to yours truly at all.

Display: Easy on the Eyes

Without mincing words, the GX700'due south brandish is one of the all-time matte displays I take ever tested on a notebook. Information technology supports NVIDIA G-Sync with a native refresh rate of 75Hz, making for some ridiculously polish gameplay. It's matte brandish volition too ensure that there will no reflection bug when using the notebook in a brightly lit surround or when used beside a window. The brightness is also above boilerplate, with excellent dissimilarity relative to the competition.

I critical downside for the ASUS ROG GX700 is how its brandish has some backlight bleed at the edges, a problem that is especially noticeable when watching movies in a dim environment. Even so, the display outputs some brilliant colours and will definitely satisfy most people. If I had to exist more critical, I'd say that, in terms of color accuracy, the hue and saturation balance is average at best and might warrant some professionals to provide some form of colour calibration.

Notably, in that location is no 4K screen choice. This, for nearly, might cause some to balk because the cost, though personally every bit a gaming rig with graphics that are ane generation behind, 1080p AKA Full Hard disk is probably the sweetness spot between clarity and operation.

Audio: Plain on the Ears

Moving away from the visual and into the aural, the ASUS ROG GX700 delivers sound quality that is on par with the ASUS ROG G752, that is to say, it isn't very skilful. While the audio fidelity is balanced betwixt the highs and mids, a lack of a subwoofer is distinctly felt as bass is completely missing from the soundscape.

The four speakers likewise fail to reach a loud plenty level and tin can get easily drowned out when a loud enough ambient noise is present. You'll definitely have to invest in headsets or a set of dedicated speakers, an act that can exist annoying since much has been spent to begin with.

Keyboard: Typing Elation

Every bit for inputs, when it comes to the keyboard, the keycaps are finished in ruby-red colored text and come paired with a red LED backlight. As far as I know, there are no RGB option in sight. While it looks pretty aggressive, in real world usage the red LEDs on cerise keyboard can make information technology difficult to find the keys you need. In terms of programmable macro keys, five sit on the top left side forth with a dedicated XSplit launcher push button, a characteristic that buyers become a life-fourth dimension license to utilise. With its overall usability though, the excellent fundamental travel and actuation brand this keyboard one of the all-time I've used yet on a notebook.

The chiclet style keyboard ensures sufficient infinite between keycaps and I was able to hit over 100 words per infinitesimal in comfort. ASUS' signature detached arrow keys is also handy as information technology prevented accidental presses while typing quickly.

Even the over-sized trackpad had also been a pleasure to use, with good tracking and smoothness, rarely ever skipping across the screen. The dedicated mouse buttons, while cheap sounding to some, offers a user experience that is exceptionally reassuring and uncomplicated to depress, with proficient tactile feedback that didn't make me wish I had a mouse instead.

Performance: Acme of the Range

Looks and visuals aside, what matters most are the specs that are thrumming nether the hood. Equally is, the ASUS ROG GX700 is made to impress: it packs 1 of the fastest notebook CPUs on the marketplace, along with twin 256GB m.ii SSD drives, both done up in RAID manner, and a full spec desktop NVIDIA GeForce GTX980 graphics processor. The SSDs are absolute screamers in this class, with sequential read and write speeds budgeted 2000MB/south, ensuring that anything being washed on this gaming beast feels lightning quick.

Additionally, the fact that both CPU and GPU can be overclocked brings this already potent combination to a whole new level. ASUS provides proprietary ROG software to help users to brand various configurations to their device, principal of which is a performance fashion to toggle the processing speeds equally mentioned above. Available modes consist of four settings to choose from, one of which can only exist used when the cooling dock is connected.

The performance modes in sequential order: 'Standard' is to exist engaged when there is no ability source available; the base processor speed is used while the GPU is tuned down. 'Optimized' is when the notebook charger is available, bringing the GPU back up to standard clockspeed rates. 'Farthermost' is selected to increase CPU, GPU and RAM speed. Finally, with the dock continued, 'Custom' is for situations when users want to manually overclock the CPU and GPU, bringing them up to 4.4GHz and i,400MHz respectively.

Custom will require a organisation reset to actuate as it is initiated at the BIOS level. Benchmarks at Custom settings are particularly impressive, with PCMark 8 numbers of 4732 and 3DMark11 at X5960. If the ASUS ROG GX700 is booted upwards without beingness connected to the dock, the arrangement volition prompt the user to restart in order to tune the settings dorsum downwardly to Extreme.

Testing game with and without the dock reveals a singled-out difference in gaming performance. For instance, running on Optimized, The Witcher 3 managed to hit around 35-40fps with everything dialed to 11 on 1080p, including NVIDIA Hairworks.

With the dock and Custom mode activated, I had been able to achieve an average frame-rate count of around 51fps, a significant improvement of near thirty%. Shadow of Mordor gave improvements of effectually ten% in the aforementioned settings while GTAV gave an phenomenal 50% improvement, going from roughly 54fps to over 80fps. Note that these figures are with NVIDIA G-Sync enabled, a move that further shows how impressive these figures are.

Cooling: Silent Assassin

Even if the criterion figures may be impressive, what's even more incredible is what yous can't hear or experience, specifically the fan dissonance and temperatures. Even when running at total bore, the spinning cooling blades run, pretty much, silently. The distance of the fans from the user also ways that it sounds quieter than usual, negating the need for a headset to dampen the fan noise. Alongside the Functioning modes mentioned above, the ASUS ROG software besides allows the adjustment of the fan racket; this means that if ambient dissonance is soft and you want a quieter experience, you lot can just tune down the fan speed at the expense of component temperatures.

Of course, this works in the opposite way likewise for when yous have a loud speaker system or when using headsets.

As for temperatures, even when overclocked it never went above threescore°C and GPU temperatures peaked but at 67°C. These are outstanding figures in a notebook and demonstrate the kind of advantages liquid-cooling brings to a gaming rig every bit it increases the lifespan of the components in the procedure. While the cooling dock emitted a good deal of rut, important sections such as the keyboard and touchpad remained cool to the touch, making it an fantabulous experience for long gaming sessions.

Final Thoughts: Beyond Expectations

ASUS ready out to blow abroad everyone's minds with the performance of the ASUS ROG GX700; clearly, it has succeeded. With fantabulous components and a surprisingly reliable liquid-cooling dock, this super-sized gaming machine is the rex of the colina when information technology comes to single desktop graphics packed into a notebook form factor.

Then would PCMag SEA recommend information technology? A year agone, I might've said aye— provided I had the dough. Considering that NVIDIA has released the NVIDIA Pascal line-upwardly of one thousand-Series chips, there are at present specimens that will outperform even this monster. Of course, that is really stretching information technology since information technology takes a whole lot to really push button this monster.

Personally, if liquid-cooling is the most desired solution or if having an awesomely designed suitcase to send the gaming rig around is huge bargain, there'south no better option than the ASUS ROG GX700.

Specs

Processor: Intel Skylake i7-6820HK
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX980 8GB GDDR5
Retentivity: 16GB DDR4 2400MHz x2 (Upwards to 64GB)
Storage: 256GB M.ii SSD x2
Display: 17in Full Hd matte panel (1920 10 1080)
Ports: USB 3.1 Type-C x2. USB 3.0 x3, Mini DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, SD Card Reader, RJ45 Ethernet, headphone jack, microphone jack
Bone: Windows ten Dwelling 64-bit

Benchmarks