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ASUS ROG G701 gaming notebook preview: A rip-roaring beast

By Koh Wanzi - 16 Mar 2017

Thinner, lighter, and more powerful

When you put a gaming desktop in a notebook

ASUS ROG G701

The ASUS Republic of Gamers brand is no stranger to extravagance. We’ve covered our share of over-the-top machines from the ROG line before, and this means things like dedicated liquid-cooling docks and dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080s in SLI.

Products with the ROG logo stamped on them generally aren’t interested in appealing to the masses with something as boring as value-for-money specifications. Price-to-performance ratio? That hardly matters when what you want to do is cram in beastly hardware and slap on a premium price tag.

The ROG G701 follows in the tradition of the ROG GX700 and GX800, but it sheds some of the fancy trappings in favor of an immensely more portable design (well, relatively anyway). This means no bulky liquid-cooling dock – instead, this is an air-cooled notebook through and through, albeit one that packs the latest overclockable Intel mobile processor and  the most powerful GPU you can put into a laptop today.   

Here’s a summary of the key specifications:

  • 17.3-inch 3,840 x 2,160-pixel IPS G-Sync display
  • Intel Core i7-7820HK (2.90GHz, 8MB L3 cache)
  • 32GB DDR4 2,400MHz RAM
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
  • 1TB PCIe SSD
  • Windows 10 Home 64-bit

 

ASUS ROG G701

At S$6,198, the ROG G701 isn’t something you run out and buy on a whim, unless maybe you inherited your father’s real-estate empire. This is a carefully considered purchase for a set of very specific needs or a very specific audience.

This machine packs unbridled performance under its hood, and it is designed for those who require exactly that, but in a more mobile form factor. That said, it does still weigh a hefty 3.8kg and is 32.5mm thick, so we’re really talking about portability in relation to a desktop. Compared to the older ROG G752 though, it is still quite a bit thinner and lighter.  It is however, comparable to the GX700 without the cooling dock.

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