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Asus’ new ROG GT51CA is a virtual reality rig with a secret

Do you have your eye on a new system to get you VR ready, or capable of playing the latest and greatest games? We’d suggest holding off on that until you’ve finished reading through this piece, as Asus has a monster of a new system to tempt you with. It’s called the GT51CA and it not only offers a unique, tilted chassis design with high powered hardware, but twins it with a wearable to provide hidden, personalised features and storage.

Part of the Republic of Gamers (ROG) branding, the GT51CA is designed to look like a home-modded system, with a unique look, stylish lighting and a high-powered overclock, giving it all the performance you’ll need for the foreseeable future.

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Internally, it sports a choice of Core i5-6600K or Core i7-6700K CPUs, both from the Skylake generation, and both heavily overclocked. That chip is paired up with high-speed DDR4 memory in capacities from 16GB, right through to 64GB, and as for the choice of graphics cards, it starts with the GTX 970, through GTX 980 in single and twin configurations or Titan X cards with 12GB of GDDR5, in single or SLI set up.

Storage wise, you can have up to 3TB of hard drive space, with various size SSDs for faster boot and game-load times, using the M.2 interface – even combining the strengths of several drives in a RAID0 configuration if you want it.

All of this is housed within a unique, bullet-grey chassis, with stylish ROG lighting and a glowing turbo-like front air intake. There’s a side window to show off what you have inside and branded shrouds for directing airflow. The CPU itself is water cooled, and there are additional strengthening brackets to help support the GPUs, to prevent wear on the PCIExpress slots.

The lighting can all be customized too, letting you pick from the whole spectrum.

All of this helped the GT51CA win the 2016 iF Design Award and the 2016 CES Innovation Award. While much of that was likely for the chassis styling, we bet the fact that this system has its own wearable was a big part of that decision. Looking like a fitness band, the ROG bracelet is fitted with an NFC chip, which can be read by the system’s front panel. When passed near it, you unlock the overclocking mode and a hidden hard drive space that is only accessible with this wearable in place.

That way you can keep your most personal files and folders separate from everything else.

No pricing or availability data has yet been announced, but we’ll update this piece when we know more.

Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale is the Evergreen Coordinator for Computing, overseeing a team of writers addressing all the latest how to…
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