Laptops

The TITAN: Asus ROG G703GXR In-Depth Review! You can’t go any further than this right now!

I saw this beast for the first time in may and it just remained in my memory. I knew we have to meet it someday. After reviewing ACER Predator Helios 700 space-ship I thought if there’s a laptop that’s gonna beat this monster in 2019, that is the ROG G703GXR, as I can’t see any other competitor in the near future capable of such performance. Every laptop I tested just raises the bar even higher. It’s so nice to see when someone just beats a performance record. Like in sports.

The new king of the gaming laptops.

Performance - 9.8
Build quality and materials - 10
Display Quality - 8.8
Design - 9.2
Keyboard - 9.5
Ergonomics - 7.5
Cooling System - 9.7
Noise - 7
Connectivity - 9
Battery - 7

8.8

A super powerful laptop, practically the new king of gaming laptops that enters our editor den, robust, well-built. I am eagerly waiting to see what the designers will do with the next model, to get rid of the 2017 bezel.

User Rating: 5 ( 1 votes)

Traditional Design

Traditional… design. Sounds almost incredible, when it comes to the design, to see a laptop with a case nearly two years old (ROG Chimera was unveiled at IFA Berlin in September 2017) and still look as good as in its first days.

Yes, time flies but the laptop, or better said, its design, stood young. Only the engine seen significant changes: from the first model, ROG G703VI, sporting the 7th gen Intel CPU and GTX 10 series GPU, there were new models until this last one with 9th gen CPU and NVIDIA RTX 20 series GPU.

Even now, why would you want to change this design? Generous aluminum on the back plate, brushed aluminum lid, and on the inside, we have a fine surface, rubber coated, very pleasing to touch and premium, but with a little drawback: you can see any fingerprint on it.

Honestly, from my perspective, the only thing that should be changed at this design is the display bezel – the screen margins are the only proof that we are sporting a 2017 design.

Most of the 2019 laptops have a bezel under half of a centimeter thick and honestly, I would’ve loved to see an ultra-thin bezel screen like the ones on the Zephyrus series.

And no, I know we can’t except a shrinking of the case because of the cooling, but I wouldn’t mind a screen 1.5” bigger in the same chassis. And with that, a resolution bump up to 2K. But more about the screen, in the dedicated chapter.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The keys offer a pleasant feedback, with long travel distance, very long for a laptop, of 2.5mm. The layout is well spaced.

The illumination is present and it’s done key by key. Only thing is that I don’t really like this illumination coming out from under the keys like a light-bleeding. And speaking about key lighting, I love the way they did the WASD keys and I would’ve liked if all of the keys were the same.

The touchpad is precise and fast. You can’t click on it, but the tapping/double/triple tapping is accepted. Big buttons, soft click, for the left and right click placed under the touchpad is something I loved at all of the high-end models I’ve seen.

I find very useful the buttons placed on top of the F keys for various shortcuts (volume, microphone ON/OFF, AURA, ROG Armory Crate, XBOX Gamebar, etc.)

Ergonomics

Being a very tall laptop, in front with nothing less than 3.5cm height from the desk, I can say that it feels bad on the wrists. I tried to adjust my chair at its highest height setting, but even then I was not pleased with the results. No, it’s not the type of laptop you’ll be writing hours on, at least, not without breaks.

If you have a taller chair than mine (even though mine is above average, with 56cm base height) the good part is that you’ll fill less strain on the wrists and the screen will be still clear thanks to the angle of leaning: 130 degrees.

I remember the wrist pad from the ACER Predator Helios 700… I am sure that there are ways. Only that they’re hidden somewhere, there, in the mind of an engineer, waiting to be discovered.

Under the hood: technical details, hardware specifications

Intel Core i9-9980HK

The Intel Core i9-9980HK CPU is incredibly strong and it showed it’s muscles when I played with the ACER Predator Helios 700 and the Omen X 2S.

A very powerful CPU with 8 physical cores and a total of 16 threads, clocked between 2.4 and 5GHz. Its TDP is just 45W, the only condition is not overcharge it. That means don’t try to get it to full load on all of its cores and threads because that’s the moment when the TDP unleashes. I’ve seen values of 160W TDP in a test! With a condition though: ensure it’s cooled in order to avoid thermal throttle and cut our performance. Well, G703GXR has a very efficient cooling system and the CPU didn’t throttle a bit.

Cooling system: That’s how it should be done!

I never said and I am not the fan of “quantity over quality”, or in romanian, more is better. But in this case, the 8 heatpipes are doing a great job and as a personal note I would like to add: so it can be done, engineers and designers out there, and without sharing heatpipes on both the CPU and GPU, right? (honestly, I didn’t wanted to tear the laptop apart, credits for the following pictures going to the miss from MobileTechReview – YouTube tech lady).

GeForce RTX 2080 Laptop (200W!)

If the CPU is an old friend of this website, the GPU is something never seen before. It is a model with it’s TDP unleashed up to 200W which is almost like the desktop model! Below, there are the specs of the GPU integrated in ROG G703GXR:

And in Turbo mode, which can be selected from Armory Crate, we see clocks with 100Mhz over the base RTX 2080 Laptop model seen in other laptops.

SSDs and memory

Next to the sheer power of the CPU and GPU, ROG G703GXR excels in the storage department too where terms like “a lot” and “incredibly powerful” are working hand in hand. We have no less than 3 SSDs in RAID: two 512GB Intel SSD from the 760p series and a 512GB Samsung PM981 Polaris.

Yes, 1.5TB of SSD working at such speeds that I must put a picture for you to believe me:

I’ve never seen something like this! How did the ASUS engineers did this black magic trick? This is a spell called HyperDrive Extreme and it’s based on a little gimmick: two out of three SSD units are connected directly to the CPU.

The RAM quantity is direct proportional to the rest of the system, all of the four slots being populated with 16GB modules with 2666Mhz clock made by Samsung.

17” Display, G-Sync, 144Hz, IPS

We meet again with an AUO panel, more specific the 4th generation of B173HAN panels (panel code: AUO409D), the one we met on the Alienware Area-51.

It seems that this is a popular panel. And I don’t see why it wouldn’t be. As I said, I’d rather prefer FullHD or 2K resolution on a 17” screen rather than a 4K panel. And I thing the majority of gamers are on the same page. For games, this IPS panel is ideal: 3ms, 144Hz.

Ah, and as a little note, when the “senior” of the series was announced, the first G703, it was sporting the first 144Hz panel on the market, 2 years ago!

G-Sync guaranteed a smooth gameplay, without hiccups, tearing or stuttering. And the system is featuring Optimus, for switching between the NVIDIA GPU and the integrated Intel UHD 630 on the fly, in order to gain a bigger autonomy.

On the other hand, for photo-video editing, this AUO panel is a basic one: even though the laptop is pretty good on sRGB standards (97% sRGB), the NTSC space is covered only in 68% percent and the Adobe RGB is only 74%. If at the first glance this panel could get the work done, the chromatic uniformity will disappoint you:

As you can see, on the left hand corner we have a huge deviation of the DeltaE, with the highest brightness (100%), which goes down at 8.9 at 50% brightness. Possibly that this particular model’s panel to be faulty or who knows?

The laptop gains back some points at brightness uniformity which is way above average compared with other laptops we’ve seen.

The maximum brightness and contrast are in the standards of gaming laptops: 266cd/m2, contrast 780:1.

Overall, from our colorimeter the screen gets 4/5 stars which is good.

Performance, temperatures, overclocking and noise

Aaaand… we have a new winner that we can crown as the fastest laptop ever tested by us because in benchmarks it crushed everything.

This is the second time when I see over 200 points in Cinebench R15 Singe Core test, where the overclocked 9700K in the Alienware Area-51m is still the king.

Meanwhile in the multi-core tests the overclocked i9-9980HK in the G703GXR simply crushed the competition.

Take a look at the gaming results too:

In three out of the five games, the ASUS ROG G703GXR is the clear winner, while it’s loosing in one title in front of the Predator Helios 700 (curious, could be the drivers though) and in a game they are practically on-par (Shadow of the Tomb Raider), with a lot over the rest of the pack. As a note, out of the 10 gaming laptops tested this year, I choose the most powerful models in this graph.

The cooling system of the ASUS ROG G703GXR is very good and the GPU maintained under 80C. The CPU, even though it was in “ideal” parameters (room temperature of 24C, Air Conditioning) when I tested it in a regular night in a place with a 27C ambient temperature, the clock went from 4.68Ghz down to 4.51Ghz instantly because the CPU temperature reached its threshold of 99C in the majority of time, the CPU slows down and the score is going down to 1896 points, so we’re talking about a 5% penalty. It doesn’t seems that much, but you can clearly see that the cooling system, even if it’s very well built, it’s at its limits. As a note, it is possible that changing the thermal compound would help some degrees, because every time, the aftermarket pastes are better than the ones used on the production line. It’s just… this process is not for everyone and leads to loose of the warranty so it’s better to find other solutions of keeping the temperatures lower: sub-volting the CPU, placing the notebook on a cooling pad, etc.

The noise, as in other high-end models, is a bit of an issue.

Of course, the Silent mode is ideal for the majority of scenarios, just not for gaming. For example, in Cinebench, the processor will not pass 3Ghz, exactly 2.92Ghz, scoring very low with only 1300 points. The fan on the CPU is spinning at 1500RPM, at only 24dB. But for a movie, browsing and other activities that don’t require a lot of processing power, it is a silent experience.

The Balanced mode is ideal in 2D where you need processing power but you still want some silence: the CPU and GPU fans are spinning with 2000RPM, generating a noise of 29.3dB and such the cores reach 4.2Ghz and in Cinebench we see a score of 1700 points. Not bad! The score is SuperPosition is 6396 points, the fans are spinning with 3300-3600RPM, reaching 45dB, a very good value for a gaming laptop, considering that this score is just 5% lower than the one gained in Turbo mode.

Turbo is only for headphones users. 5000RPM on both fans and 54dB is not for the faint of heart and this is plausible for all the laptops in this chart. And for what? For a little performance gain? Of course, I know the answer of maniacs. I found myself there most of the times. Depends on the situation and if it’s very hot, I don’t like to feel my ears sweating under the headphones. In this scenario, Turbo is a no-no 🙂

Anyhow, the conclusion is one: the laptop doesn’t overheat and I wasn’t annoyed by the heat felt in the chassis – on the contrary – in the keyboard area the temperature maintained itself under body temperature and on the “belly” of the laptop it was a tad bit over 40C. Whichever the case, being a massive laptop, I think that there is no way that you’ll be using it as a lap dog 🙂

Connectivity: Thunderbolt 3, 2.5 Gigabit

Connectivity is very good and I felt a bit of panic in only one scenario, when all the 3.1 Gen 2 Type A USBs were used. But there’s an extra USB 3.1 Gen 2 (Type-C)/Thunderbolt 3 port (yes, finally, TB on an ASUS ROG). To complete the list, I would like to mention the classic HDMI 2.0a, a mini-DP 1.4, a 2.5 Gigabit LAN, an SD Card reader and audio jacks.

And a Kensington lock 🙂 You get it.

The wireless network is offered by the Intel Wireless-AC 9560 160Mhz adapter that was on top. As usual. I downloaded the massive Ubisoft games with 58MB/s (they have very good download servers), at a room distance from the router and I am sure I would’ve gone better results only with a cable hooked up.

Battery

The 96Wh ASUS Battery is the biggest I’ve bet so far, but I couldn’t get more than 2 hours of work time with brightness set at 50%, non-illuminated keyboard, no Bluetooth, browsing the web, creating graphs/tables and editing photos for this article.

Conclusion

A super powerful laptop, practically the new king of gaming laptops that enters our editor den, robust, well-built. I am eagerly waiting to see what the designers will do with the next model, to get rid of the 2017 bezel.

Until then, enjoy the new king! The ones who can afford it because premium and exclusivity, to performance comes with a cost. Last time when I say it at retailers it was somewhere around 3800 euros and it was on sale 🙂 This is it, a Lambo is a Lambo, ROG G703GXR is a ROG G703GXR. The rest is can-can and sweet dreams.

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