A Surface Pro for HARDCORE Gamers - ROG G703 "Mothership" First Look
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,650 words · ~8 min read
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so right here to my left we've got the ASUS rog g703 and this thing it's pretty
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freaking sick like we were able to achieve five gigahertz overclocking all six
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cores concurrently but can you really call it a laptop
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when it doesn't fit on your lap and should we be making the sacrifices
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required to have a clamshell design for a machine like this when quite literally
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everyone is going to be using it on a desk well
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ASUS thought knot and over here at our
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early preview of ces 2019 here in our
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studio because ASUS brought the show to us
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is the rog mothership
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a complete rethinking of the
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desktop rep oh it's still heavy though the desktop replacement category
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private internet access i mean that's basically it that's
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exactly what you get with pia and it's got loads of other features as well
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check it out at the link below okay so
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uh i guess step one is to kind of open the thing
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oof i've been informed there are tabs on the bottom
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don't no no i don't want the answer no
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wait no those are a little like no i don't want the answer
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oh that's weird so here's all these vents on the bottom here with some very
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hefty looking dense copper fit wow all the copper
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everywhere look at this freaking stuff and this ventilated perforated bottom
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here and i was expecting that this thick side was going to contain the laptop and
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then this thin side was going to contain the screen that's like sort of the the
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way that laptops have sort of traditionally worked
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no that's that is in fact the keyboard
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so what the crap so this piece comes down
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here and then this is what speaker grills
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intakes what is this speakers speakers
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hell yeah oh my god it's a surface for gamers how about that
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so instead of having the cooling of the
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CPU the GPU the ssds and all that stuff
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choked out against the desk or your lap or whatever the case may be
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they put them all up here and the results
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well they claim they are pretty darn impressive am i allowed to turn this
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thing on i can turn it on okay oh my god it came
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apart uh you can use it as an aio and you can
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just ditch the keyboard
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and like or you can just use the keyboard as more
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like a traditional keyboard and it's raised so check this shiz out you can
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either just kind of adjust it for a
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different ergonomic feel you got your trackpad on the right you got your keyboard on the left and then you can
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run a type-c wire over to your your actual like aio computer with a screen
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that folds onto the front of it i don't know what to even call this thing anymore or you can just flip over to
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wireless mode here bippity bop and you can like use it from the couch and you
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can have that hooked up to your tv or whatever the case may be i mean it's a pretty common use case actually for a
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laptop i will find the power button at some point this must be it
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there we go all right
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okay this is a prototype it's not working 100 here just going to
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plug in this mouse
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it's having a little little freak out
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okay i'm not saying i broke it i'm just saying it's broken and i'm the
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last person who touched it that's all where was i so the original concept here
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actually came from basically like going
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like this with a g703
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and then measuring how much better the temperatures of all
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those heat generating components are once you're not restricting the airflow
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by having them sitting up against something so
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in actuality this new device even if it did have the same hardware
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wouldn't necessarily run any cooler because they've gone and they've made it
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thinner to eat up that extra sort of thermal budget that they made for
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themselves which isn't to say they skimped on the components because
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what's in here requires some pretty hardcore cooling so it's rocking a six
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core core i9 8950 hk and rtx 2080 that
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they won't let me look at at all like
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not even in task manager they've actually gone and disabled it in the
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BIOS though given that we do know the model number and that is an rtx 2080
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we're expecting full-blown desktop performance
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but computing isn't the only way that the
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rog mothership that's what they're actually calling this thing is insanely
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fast so this will be their first
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mobile machine with greater than one gigabit networking it's actually two and
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a half g which might feel kind of strange given that we went from ten to
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one hundred to one thousand 000 but then now also there's these
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weird in-betweeners but that's still a really nice bump that's about 250
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megabytes per second real world to a server that is enabled for it so i mean
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it's not like you're going to have to do that necessarily because it's got three
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NVMe ssds in raid 0 that also get
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additional cooling by the way due to the upright nature of the device so these
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are so fast that ASUS couldn't put all of them running off of the chipset so
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two of them are directly connected to the CPU for a wild 8.7 gigabytes per
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second of data transfer speeds i mean just like
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you know it's not the most impressive demo but you know just like booting up
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like launching it just like you will definitely feel the difference
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it's faster than i can say shaden freud
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i don't even know what that means what did i just say is this a like german joke i don't get it's taking pleasure in
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someone else's misery got it the only problem though with the display is that
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when you have all of these components right up against the back of it all that
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heat can be a very bad time so to solve
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this problem no wonder this thing is so heavy they created this
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cnc machined heat shield so this right
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here is what actually separates the display
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and all of the heat generating components and guess what
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this takes 20
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hours to machine
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not to mention it costs a freaking lot of money but i guess you know
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the monkey was just out of the bag and the engineers went hog wild with the
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robots because actually pretty much everything about it
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this cnc machine out of solid freaking blocks of aluminum
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so this here is the back panel uh with
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the kickstand there uh where's the kickstand the kickstand ah yes i believe
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this is the kickstand listen to that thing is that not
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beautiful needless to say everything here
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there's a cost to cnc okay both in terms of materials and time but there's a
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benefit even without the actual laptop in it
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this thing is incredibly stiff like this is as much flex as i'd expect from a
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finished device and it's just a back plate so
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that's pretty much all we can say about it for now other than a quick look at i
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o you've got two power inputs so that should give you some idea how power
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hungry it's going to be you got your vr port here sd and HDMI all that good
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stuff other than to guess Thunderbolt 3
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nice that this thing is going to be
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extremely expensive
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so let me know you guys want to see a full review of this thing
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yeah you want to see a full review of this thing you know what alex i'm going to take
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away your desktop oh damn it why
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but i like my desktop right and so you're going to see if you
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can learn to like this
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freshbooks.com tech tips we're going to have that linked below that's
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freshbooks.com tech tips then make sure you enter Linus tech tips in the how did
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you hear about us section so thanks for watching guys don't miss
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any of our ces 2019 content here at the show
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yeah can you believe i missed this part look at this they've got the cooling solution
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here it's like it's massive it's massive like
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this weighs as much as a laptop
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and there's no laptop in it yet
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good heavens