ASUS, with its flagship Republic of Gamers brand, had marketed products to revolutionize the gaming segment. Armed with solid build quality, out-of-the-box innovations, and one of the many firsts in the gaming laptop segment, ASUS ROG has created a niche for itself with the gaming enthusiasts, who prefer a mobile device rather than a desktop one. With the G703 variants, Asus charges into the eighth generation CPU powered gaming laptop market, with the device itself advertises to be a replacement for a desktop.
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Form Factor and Design
ASUS has advertised this product to be a desktop replacement, and its form factor quite suits the advertisement. The ASUS ROG G703GI-XS99K weighs around 5 kg and has an approximate of 48 millimeters on the thickest side. Most of it is attributed to the fans, which instead of being all over is on the sides. There is an I/O slot in between two fans behind the laptop. Design wise, this 17-inch laptop, has a round brushed finish all over, with a metallic grey color forming an accent over the black.
Also, the top of the lid features the ROG eye logo which lights up to the AURA RGB lighting scheme of the laptop. The Laptop features massively sized cooling vents at the back and sides of the laptop, which mainly add up to the bulk. To add up to the value the cooling system is guarded with the proprietary, anti-dust technology of Asus, preventing the dust deposit on the fan vents. The screen though is not bezel-less, yet has a 3ms 144Hz refresh rate.
The Keyboard is backlit by the Aura RGB lighting scheme of the ROG laptops, which sends out a color ripple when a key is pressed. This laptop has quite a bit of firepower as far as the IO ports of this device are concerned. A segment that is placed between the vents, houses the massive charging port, one HDMI, one mini display port, and a USB 3 Port, and on the sides features, a 2 USB 3.1 Type A ports, 1 USB Type C Thunderbolt port, an RJ 45 jack and headphone line in line out and microphone in jacks.
Unfortunately, there are no DVI ports or any provisions for the legacy system. Also, there are no optical drives in this machine, which makes this laptop not truly desktop replacement. The front, however, features two twitters which add up to the sound experience apart from the bottom speakers.
APU and GPU Performance
Asus brings into the competition of gaming laptops with the muscle of Intel Core i9 processors, the groundbreaking Coffee Lake series Hexa-Core processor from the Intel Stable, and overclocking it themselves to provide extra computing power.
The Asus ROG G703GI-XS99K features the eighth generation Intel Core i9-8950HK hexa-core 12 thread processor, and Asus factory overclocks it to 4.8 GHz. If that’s not enough, the GPU has enough steam as well. The laptop is powered by NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 GDDR5X GPU with 8GB of dedicated graphics memory, which though Asus doesn’t do it out of the box, but is, overclock-able. Thus all in all the laptop has sufficient firepower to run any modern games at high to Ultra gameplay settings without any lag.
Display
ROG G703GI-XS99K comes with the FHD 17.3-inch IPS NVIDIA G-SYNC display with a refresh rate of 144Hz and response time of 3ms.
RAM
The laptop comes with a massive 64GB DDR4 dual channel 2666 MHz SDRAM.
- Other Version ASUS ROG G703GI-XS98K Desktop Replacement Gaming Laptop Review
Storage Devices
The onboard storage is something that makes this laptop a real deal to go for. The laptop has on board the innovative Hyperdrive extreme technology which combines three PCIe Solid State Drives into a single 1.5TB RAID0 storage affording read rates of around 8700 MBps.
Apart from that, it has a hybrid 7200 rpm FireCuda Storage drive, taking the total storage count to 3.5 TB with a 2TB FireCuda Storage and a 1.5TB PCIe SSD storage.
Audio System
The Laptop features an immersive audio experience with two small twitters in the base of the screen, throwing the sound data towards the user that coupled with the bounced surround bass output coming from the base of the laptop, gives a truly immersive sound experience.
Keyboard ASUS ROG G703GI-XS99K
The keyboard of the laptop is a backlit Chiclet keyboard with Aura RGB four zone backlighting, which can be customized through the in-built dedicated ROG key on the Keyboard.
The dedicated ROG keyset on the top of the keyboard has in storage total customization options from that of overclocking the CPU to customizing the keyboard lighting and a dedicated key for connecting to an Xbox console.
Connectivity Options
The laptop features connectivity speeds both in the WiFi connectivity and fixed-line connections. The connectivity options seem robust but need a reality check, with the existing speed limitations worldwide.
| Specs of ASUS ROG G703GI-XS99K |
|
| Processor | Intel Core i9-8950HK 6-core (up to 4.8 GHz) |
| Graphics | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 8GB |
| RAM | 64GB DDR4 |
| Storage | 1.5TB RAID0 PCIe SSD + 2TB FireCuda |
| Display | 144Hz refresh rate 17.3″ Full-HD |
Other Peripherals
The laptops have connectivity options with Bluetooth with an option of Bluetooth 5.0 and have the option to connect Xbox peripherals without the requirement of having any middleware connected to it. To add up to the zing of the laptop, the laptop supports Aura Sync, which syncs the compatible devices to glow in sync with the keyboard RGB color scheme. The laptop comes installed with Windows 10 Pro.
