Asus’ new gaming laptop has a water-cooling module and a desktop-class GTX 980
The Asus GX700 is, technically, a new Republic of Gamers laptop. It’s also absolutely bananas. It’s the first laptop we’ve seen to come with its own water-cooling module, the Hydro Overclocking System, which is a mighty lump of mesh and metal that connects to the laptop with a row of self-sealing valves and a heavy, reassuring lever.
On the inside is a pair of radiators and fans that chill the CPU and GPU. They vent heat backwards and allow the GX700 to run its high-end hardware at proper desktop speeds and beyond.
The GX700 and the cooling module are huge and imposing. In fact, the machine includes its own wheeled carrying case.
It’s unprecedented cooling hardware for a laptop headed for the production line, but it’s needed to cool the top-end hardware inside. Asus has crammed the 8GB variant of the GTX 980 inside the GX700 – that’s the desktop chip, not the mobile GTX 980M – alongside a Core i7-6820HK. The Hydro Overclocking System isn’t just designed to chill the key components either, but also to eke out more performance from the silicon.
Basically, the Hydro unit enables Asus to run the GX700’s major components at desktop speeds – the Core i7-6820HK can exploit its full Turbo Boost speed of 3.6GHz without fear of overheating, while the GPU happily runs at 1266MHz – a higher frequency than many GTX 980 desktop cards.
That’s enough to ensure that the most demanding games run without a hitch, even with games running at their highest settings, and the 17.3in 1080p display even supports Nvidia’s G-Sync tech to eliminate tearing and stuttering artefacts in games. The specs are good elsewhere too, with two 512GB NVMe SSDs in RAID 0 configuration, and 16GB of DDR4 memory.
It’s possible to go beyond the cooling dock’s automatic overclocking, too. The Asus Gaming Center app can be used to tweak the components for a little extra power. If you’re doing so, our sample’s CPU topped out at 4.1GHz, while the GPU ran at up to 1.4GHz.
The GX700 continues to impress when it’s detached from the Hydro Overclocking System, and the components are clocked down. The laptop itself is surprisingly slim and has no issues when it comes to build quality. It looks the part too – the system is made from a mix of gunmetal aluminium and matt black plastic, with red accents to the logos and keyboard.
It’s no slouch in laptop mode either. When running on the mains and on battery power, our sample’s GPU frequency still peaked at 1228MHz, and the CPU zipped along at 2.7GHz. They’re good speeds, but they’re also subject to change – Asus says the retail model may operate at different clock speeds.
We didn’t encounter frame rate issues on our pre-production sample. Games looked butter-smooth with G-Sync enabled, and the GX700 played Crysis 3, Fallout 4 and The Witcher 3 at each game’s top settings at the screen’s native resolution without breaking a sweat. It also waltzed through PCMark and 3DMark tests with noticeable improvements when the cooling dock was used.
It was quiet too; the low rumble is far more subtle than that of many other gaming laptops.
We have no initial quibbles about this machine’s sheer power, but a couple of issues appeared elsewhere. Ergonomically, our GX700 sample’s touchpad buttons have a spongy action, and the keyboard’s keys aren’t particularly snappy either. We encountered some software gremlins too. Our early sample served up far too many warning messages about clock speeds changing, and sometimes it would reboot on its own. The cursor would also occasionally freeze.
Of course, this is all subject to change, because our sample is a pre-production model, and Asus has assured us that the GX700 is close to being finished, with tweaks to firmware, the BIOS and the storage capacities required before the production lines whirr into action. Oh, and the price? Asus estimates that this luxurious machine will cost a cool £3,500 inc VAT when it arrives in March. Get saving. MIKE JENNINGS