Either Asus’s Republic of Gamers brand has access to a chip that hasn’t been announced yet or it has some trick up its sleeve. That’s our conclusion following the company’s claims of a gaming notebook that outperforms an Nvidia GTX Titan X.
Oh, and the machine could be 24 inches, too.
ROG hasn’t said whether its unnamed hardware is a production machine, but implied that more will be revealed at the Computex show next week in Taiwan.
“What we can say is that one of the highlights from the lab is an overclockable gaming laptop that will rival even gaming desktops,” the company said in a blog post. “We were told it is a concept machine and thus they are still in the process of making it even more powerful.”
ROG published benchmarks showing off how its new notebook compares to the competition.
To prove it, Asus released 3DMark 11 numbers that include a composite score (CPU plus GPU) of P20811. Asus didn’t disclose what GPU or CPU is running inside its hardware, naturally. Asus claimed that its prototype was “already faster than any laptop on the planet”—but wasn’t overclocked. Yet.
Hot Hardware noticed that the topic tags attached to the blog post include “24-inch laptop,” which, if true, would imply some new, crazy form factor with room for all sorts of overclocking solutions. And yes, the ROG laptop will be overclockable, as “overclocked performance… will all come in due time,” Asus states in the post.
ROG A teaser image of ROG’s new gaming notebook.
Right now, the most obvious graphics chip to leap past the Titan X would be Nvidia’s recently launched GTX 1080—but there’s no mobile version of that chip yet. Right?
It’s worth noting that Asus ROG has a history of outlandish designs. At the IFA show last fall, the brand debuted the Asus ROG GX700 , which boasted an enormous liquid cooler to manage the temps of the laptop’s Intel K-series Skylake chip as well as its Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 desktop graphics card.
Why this matters: Now that 17-inch gaming laptops from Acer and others are taking that category mainstream, a 24-inch form factor can make one heck of a statement. Wouldn’t it be fun, too, if Asus somehow managed to fit a GTX 1080 inside a “luggable” notebook? Looks like we’ll have to wait until Computex to find out.