Water-cooled ROG GX800 is Asus’ latest mobile gaming behemoth

MANILA, Philippines – Just as you thought water-cooling in a gaming notebook was overkill with last year’s ROG GX700, Asus has upped the ante once again with its successor, the ROG GX800. Built with the same monstrous cooling system, the latest gaming laptop is now equipped with Intel’s most powerful Core i7 mobile processor and a pair of graphics cards that work together.

Asus hasn’t specified which NVIDIA cards are being offered, but it’s safe to assume they’ll come from the recently launched GeForce GTX 1080 series. With the ability to overclock the notebook’s components using the bundled water-cooling unit, this would make the GX800 the most powerful gaming notebook on the market by several miles.

The Taipei-based company already claims the GX800’s dual-GPU setup is 236 percent more powerful than a single GTX 980 graphics card. We’ll have to see how real-world tests hold up to the benchmarks, but it’ll most likely blow away whatever you’re playing on right now.

What makes the Asus notebook extra tempting – and a lot more expensive – is the inclusion of a full-fledged mechanical keyboard complete with colorful LED lighting. It’s quite a rare feature to have in any kind of laptop, and will provide much more responsive inputs while gaming, bringing the experience closer to an actual PC gaming setup.

Oh, and it comes with two 330W adapters, meaning it’ll draw more power than most desktop computers. Don’t think for a second that such a setup would consume only as much juice as your everyday notebook.

Speaking of dual graphics card setups, Asus also unveiled its latest gaming desktop PC, the ROG G31 Edition 10.

Like the GX800, the 10th-anniversary edition G31 follows up on last year’s similarly compact ROG G20 gaming PC by adding another graphics card to the setup. You now get the newest Intel Core i7 processor and two NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 graphics cards in a space-efficient 20-liter case.

You’ll have to hook up the G31 to a separate keyboard, mouse, and monitor like any other desktop computer, but once everything is in place, you’ll be treated to competitively smooth gaming in resolutions up to 4K.

Full specifications and pricing are still out of reach for both gaming devices. If they’re anything like their predecessors, expect the ROG GX800 to go beyond P250,000 and the G31 Edition 10 to cost way more than the G20’s average price of P65,000.