i'm really excited about this one guys ASUS rog sponsored an exclusive look
behind the scenes at the creation of their most powerful gaming laptop ever
the rog mothership so our tour starts at
the ASUS headquarters tower here in taipei except that it doesn't instead we
took a short walk to a non-descript building that the rog team described as
a kind of secret lab or bat cave they
couldn't show us the whole facility because of the top secret nature of the
work being done here in fact we're only the second non-isu staff to set foot in
here and even within ASUS only the ceo
and design center employees are allowed inside
but to tell the story of ASUS's reimagining of the desktop replacement
form factor we needed to visit rog mothership's birthplace we'll start
upstairs where everything from sketches to material evaluation and even soft
goods creation happens and it's also where we'll see a recreation of the
first airflow experiments that kickstarted the development effort so
what you're looking at here is two identical desktop replacement gaming
laptops with one of them set up the conventional way with a lot of
restriction for the cooling system and a second one propped up like this to give
the intake fans which are here on the bottom a lot more room to breathe
now how much does this kind of configuration affect cooling performance
it turns out quite a lot with no additional tweaks whatsoever this unit
runs seven to eight degrees cooler than the other one and with the design of the
rog mothership which includes more ventilation cutouts and liquid metal
thermal compound they manage to push performance much further to the point
where the machine can be about half the thickness of a traditional ASUS desktop
replacement while both boosting up higher and running quieter
now of course it's really not as simple as just
taking an old laptop design and going like this
done so let's head downstairs to the secret
Labs machine shop our journey begins back in 2016 with the affectionately
nicknamed grandma ship so this is ASUS
first hard model of a standing high performance gaming laptop design with
the keyboard angled up like this now
back then they were studying how to make a laptop perform better and improve its
ergonomics at the same time so they tried this concept out but this one is
uh not very perfect if the keyboard's at an angle like this it's actually fine
for gaming but they found that it wasn't great for typing so when this was first
proposed it was rejected by top management probably for good reason
they still believed in the underlying concept though so the team used foam
rough models to experiment with different form factors so this one here
is actually more like an all-in-one with a kickstand so you can see it even has
some of its i o in the back that's not very laptop-like
now this one is notable though because it was during this stage that they came
up with the idea of making the keyboard detachable i mean
if the whole system is up in the top piece why not with that concept nailed down
they created quite a few rough models experimenting with different form
factors so this one right here
showcases an idea where they were going to have the system kind of pop out at
the back like this and then the screen actually
slide up this didn't end up making it to final
production obviously now this one right here in black foam
now we're fast forwarding to 2017. by now they've moved the keyboard forward
just like the finished one we've got a proper kickstand and all the i o is on
the sides more like a laptop so this is
the first model that contains the main fundamental characteristics of the rog
mothership at this stage the concept was accepted
so they got the time and the budget to build a working prototype
later that year so we're still in 2017 after a lot of hard work they had the
two units that you can see on the table here in front of me this one right here
is actually a working prototype complete
with detachable keyboard they actually had a bit of a different
concept for the detachable keyboard at that time the cord was kind of like a vacuum
cleaner so you kind of pull it out and you press a little button like that
but like the finished product it could also work wirelessly
this one over here is more of a prototype of the industrial
design so you can see here they've got their lighting effects that they
proposed for the speaker the thermal tunnel areas it's really creaky there
you go thermal tunnel areas and inside the kickstand so this is the point in
the process where the designers need to really start thinking about the
longevity and the usability of the product so it's here that they caught
the issue where mounting the motherboard directly behind the display like this
caused long-term damage due to emi and they implemented a shield to protect it
and it's also where they discovered that they needed to completely rethink the
keyboard the thing is that the working prototype
took up a lot of desk space and it wasn't possible to get closer to the
system because the keyboard was simply too big so they had to make it more
portable now the original concept is actually ah
this one right here they were going to make it foldable by simply putting a
soft bridge in between the two halves see that
clearly though this wasn't going to be good enough for
rog so that's where the idea of implementing
a hinge came from the problem though is that's easier said than done
after the first prototype failed ASUS keyboard supplier determined that it was
impossible to build a hinge the way that ASUS wanted with the front surface flush
while the hinge mechanism could be protected while you're folding it
so with that feedback in mind the team here headed back to the model shop and
created not one but two working prototypes to show their
keyboard supplier with these in hand this one was agreed on and the supplier
said that building something like this was in fact possible and also that they
could mass produce it now we're on to the final mock-up so this
right here with the major technology challenges solved it was time for them
to nail down the aesthetic so each surface was sketched in 2d
3d printed to determine how the design would look with depth and then combined
into what you see here now this one doesn't work but it's basically
representative of the look of the finished rog mothership
whoa okay that keyboard is only kind of
sort of attached to itself that wasn't my fault you didn't tell me
it wasn't attached now that's the design story but after i expressed so much
interest in the manufacturing process of the shell of rog mothership when i first
saw it ASUS agreed to walk us through some of that as well so on this table
here we're not looking at every single stage of the manufacturing but these are
the key ones starting with this 9 kilogram
10 us dollar aluminum slab you can see
it only actually has a few basic cutouts and it includes
these fixture points here because it needs to be flipped several times during
the manufacturing process in order to access all the faces at this stage our
bottom panel still weighs more than the finished rog mothership
because we haven't removed the material from the inside yet but you can see that
our sidewalls and our rear grille are looking a lot
more notebook-like and our kickstand cutout is done now
the really cool thing about this stage though is right here
this is where our bottom cover gets put into the injection molding tool to make
room for the plastic pieces that are needed for the four included antennas
now they have to do it this way rather than clipping on a plastic piece at the
end in order to get the absolutely perfectly seamless finish you can
actually see here the plastic bits that are going to get
removed that were part of the injection process cool right our next sample has most of
the internals cut away now which as you can see
makes a pretty big difference to the thickness and the weight of the material
now obviously then seeing seeing this out of
a single piece rather than taking something thinner and bending it up
wastes a lot of material but it has
tangible benefits in terms of structural rigidity and also the finish on the end
product so you can see here that for its thickness this is really smooth and
surprisingly strong
it's like very little flex to it for the next stage we need a much smaller bit to
cut out all the fine details what's cool here is that you can actually really see
the republic of gamer's rog branding
because it stands out more on the raw aluminum then after that
we get into anodization this is what gives us a durable black finish on the
product and as you can see we are
almost done except for one small problem
the plastic doesn't match the color of
the rear grilles this simply won't do so the final step
then is to paint just the rear grille component now
the thing is that paint is not as durable as anodization but hey
now it matches and if it does happen to get scratched a little bit there's still
black underneath so it shouldn't be too noticeable
finally every one of the only
650 machines that ASUS builds is going
to get the finishing touches
now there's too many of these sorts of things for me
to list today but every unit gets a unique serial number engraved and little
accent pieces like these laser-cut mylar
stickers that combined with speaker grilles protect the speakers and give it
a nice premium look now the machines that we're looking at
right now are suitable for prototyping but to achieve the speed and detail
needed for mass production of the final product more sophisticated solutions are
required that is if you can even call 650 units
mass production now i've always said that when the bill of materials cost of
a new device leaks and consumers complain that it's a rip off that there
are many hidden costs that drive up the final sticker price
but even for me seeing this process today along with the qc and validation
lab i gotta say i'm coming away with a new
appreciation for the time and the work that goes into creating something as
specialized as rog mothership so
i want to thank ASUS rog for inviting me here and sponsoring this video and you
guys for watching the whole thing actually as a fun little reward for
making it this far ASUS rog is giving away a strict scar 3 gaming laptop to
one lucky viewer somewhere in the world so guys make sure you check out the link
in the video description and show them some love in the comments
if you guys dislike this video well you know where that button is but if you
liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy
the stuff we featured at the link in the video description sometime in the next
couple months we think also down there is our merch store which
has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you guys should
totally join