A desktop-beating powerful gaming notebook usually entails lugging it around on a cart. But not anymore. ASUS ROG has just unleashed the ROG Zephyrus GX501, the world’s slimmest gaming notebook armed with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 graphics. ASUS‘ dedicated gaming brand also announced the launch of the ROG Masters 2017 Grand Finals that will take place on 16-17 September 2017, offering a prize pool of MYR100,000.
The ROG Zephyrus is unbelievably slim despite the amazing power it packs under the hood. It measures 16.9mm at its thinnest point, with a great-looking body that boasts an innovative hinge and fan module. It’s surprisingly light too, just 2.2kg.
It rocks a 15.6-inch Full HD (1920×1080) 120Hz anti-glare LED backlit display that offers wide viewing angles, 100% sRGB gamut and 72% NTSC coverage. It also features NVIDIA G-Sync, which ensures there’s minimum stuttering, input lag and eliminates visual tearing. In short, silky smooth gameplay, even for the most intensive games.
With such an ultra-slim chassis, there’s always a challenge of keeping things cool. Here’s where some cool ASUS technology (pun intended) swoops in.
The ROG Zephyrus rocks an innovative Active Aerodynamic System (AAS) that combines some mechanical and electronic wizardry to keep things cool at all times.
When you flip open the notebook, a portion of the bottom flexes and opens up to create more space for air circulation, around 20% more space to be exact. It’s pretty cool, actually.
Then there’s AeroAccelerator (AA) technology that improves airflow by 32%, and reduces temperatures by 20% compared to conventional cooling. A cool chassis means no throttling, and a more stable system overall.
AA consists of a carefully shaped aluminium alloy shroud around the intake. The super slim fan blades are made of special liquid crystal polymer, which ROG says improves airflow through the fan by 26%.
The heatsink fins are amazingly just 0.1mm thick, half of the thickness of typical fins. ROG has also built dedicated heat pipes to the board, GPU and CPU.
The source of amazing gaming performance is the top-rung NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card with Max-Q design, packing 8GB of GDDR5X VRAM.
It rocks a 7th Gen Intel Core i7-7700HQ processor running at 2.8GHz, coupled with up to 24GB of DDR4 (2400MHz) SDRAM.
Moving on, the keyboard is flushed to the front of the chassis to make way for better cooling. There’s Aura RGB lighting if you’re into customising colour effects for your entire keyboard. Anti-ghosting tech ensures each command is instant and accurate–even up to 30 keys simultaneously.
The notebook features a superfast 1TB NVMe M.2 PCI-e HyperDrive SSD which delivers incredible 3,504MB/s sequential read speeds, and 1,824MB/s sequential write speeds.
In terms of connectivity, the ROG Zephyrus offers plenty despite its slim chassis. There’s USB Type-C that can deliver up to 40Gbps to Thunderbolt devices as well as four USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports, a HDMI 2.0 port, and 3.5mm audio jack.
The ROG Zephyrus runs Windows 10 Home/Pro, and comes bundled with ROG Gaming Center to manage your gaming profiles and hardware settings.
Pricing and availability
The ROG Zephyrus GX501 retails for MYR15,999 and can be pre-ordered now at ASUS authorised retailers.
ROG is offering “Epic 12” a limited bundle that includes a ROG Centurion 7.1 Headset, ROG Gladius II gaming mouse, 2x ROG Masters International Grand Final VIP Tickets at KLCC. The bundle is valued at over MYR2,000.
Be quick though, because it is limited to only 12 units.
Official Photos
