Gaming notebooks are going through something of a transformation. It used to be that buying a gaming notebook meant accepting a loud bulky machine if you wanted real gaming chops. That has been changing with thinner and lighter gaming laptops coming to market.
Most of those more Ultrabook-like machines are relatively underpowered, however, making the choice between size and performance a real challenge for gamers. Apparently, the upcoming Asus ROG GX501 could change that, offering the highest-end Nvidia GeForce GPU available in a notebook in a chassis that’s relatively svelte, Laptopmedia reports.
A sliver of information about the ROG GX501 was apparently provided to Laptomedia by the Taiwan Excellence Awards, indicating it will ship with the Nvidia GeFore GTX 1080 GPU in a chassis that’s exceedingly thin at 16.65 mm. That’s just over half an inch thick for a gaming notebook that could compete with larger machines.
This would be a particularly impressive accomplishment, as the newest Nvidia Pascal GPUs are essentially the same between their desktop and mobile versions. The GTX 1070 and 1080 mobile chips run at a slightly lower thermal design power (TDP) rate than the desktop versions, but they otherwise share the same specifications. That kind of power could make the ROG GX501 an incredibly popular machine for mobile gamers, although Asus might need to tweak the GPU to make it fit into the thin chasses.
Other specifications for Asus’s upcoming gaming notebook include a 4K UHD (3,840 × 2,160) 15.6-inch display supporting Nvidia G-Sync. The processor will be from Intel’s Kaby Lake line, possibly a Core i7-7700HQ or Core i7-7820HK. Up to 24 GB of DDR4 RAM will be supported, along with PCIe x4 NVMe SSD storage.
Clearly, Asus is planning to make some noise with the ROG GX501, but we’ll need to wait a little longer to see exactly what it manages to achieve. Perhaps the company will take advantage of CES 2017 to finally unwrap what should prove to be a potent and highly portable gaming machine.
