The dawn of VR provides a great excuse to upgrade, but there aren’t many laptops with the power to do so. ROG G701 is ready to handle any game you throw at it and you’ll be ready for find out what all the fuss over VR is about. If you liked the GX700 but you don’t think you need extreme cooling for overclocking, this is what you’re looking for.
To be considered as VR-ready you’ll need a capable processor such as an Intel Core i7-6700HQ or higher – G701 trumps that with an overclockable Intel i7 6820HK processor for desktop-like performance. GeForce GTX 980 graphics power with HDMI out – check. At least 8GB of memory – G701 says how about up to 64GB of DDR4? Finally, three USB 3.0 ports – G701 has all three plus USB 3.1 Type-C and Intel Thunderbolt for up to 40Gbps transfer rate.
This 17.3-inch gaming beast comes in Full-HD (1080P) or Ultra-HD (4K) with G-SYNC and WideView technology. Having a GTX 980 as opposed to a GTX 980M means you get around 20% more performance, and that’s when it’s not overclocked. Yes, you can overclock this using ROG Gaming Center for simple one-click overclocking.
ROG G701 features an ESS Sabre headphone DAC and amplifier for those of you who demand amazing sound not only in games, because you also spend a lot of time listening to music and watching TV shows or movies. The amp really helps to give you that crisp, punchy bass (of course you have to pair it with a nice pair of capable cans). For true 7.1 surround sound you can check out Strix 7.1, or ROG Strix Wirelss if you want to go wireless.
If for whatever reason you and two of your friends play on it at the same time, or if you want to gain every advantage possible by using all your toes, G701 has an anti-ghosting keyboard with 30-key rollover technology so in theory you can.
For storage you can choose from dual 512GB or 256GB PCIe Gen. 3 X4 SSDs in RAID 0 configuration (which means you get up to 2842MB/s for read, and 2,482MB/s for write!), there a SD card slot for convenience and no optical drive to keep a slimmer profile. So all this power is packed into a laptop 1.4 inches (33mm) thin and weighs in at only 3.8kg.
