Asus shows ROG Mothership with 17.3″ screen, kickstand and detachable keyboard
Asus has unveiled the ROG Mothership, a 17.3″ gaming laptop that serves as a desktop replacement. The laptop is placed vertically with a kickstand, as if it were an all-in-one. The fold-out and detachable keyboard doubles as a display protection.
The Asus ROG Mothership, or GZ700, is according to Asus a new type of desktop replacement that is intended for gamers. When folded, ROG Mothership is a large, oversized gaming laptop. You can prepare the setup by first unfolding and disconnecting the keyboard that sits over the screen. Then users can place the screen part, which also contains all the hardware, vertically with the corresponding kickstand.
According to Asus, this kickstand automatically folds out at the bottom of the computer as soon as the stand hits a surface. Users can use the keyboard wirelessly with a 2.4GHz connection, but it can also be attached to the screen area with magnets. To save space, the keyboard is foldable; when the ROG Mothership is fully folded up, the keyboard takes up the entire front. Due to this upright design, the air intake and hot air vents are higher than normal and the speakers are located directly below the screen.
The laptop has the mobile version of Nvidia’s RTX 2080 and the high-end i9-8950HK CPU from Intel. According to Asus, both are overclocked, which due to the separate design of the laptop should not cause cooling problems due to the standing position. The 17.3″ screen has an IPS panel with a 1080p resolution, a refresh rate of 144Hz and a gray-to-gray response time of 3ms. The screen supports G-Sync, although it is not clear in what range the frequency of the screen is synchronized with the output of the GPU.The ROG Mothership also comes with three NVME SSDs in a raid-0 setup.There is support for 64GB of DDR4 memory.
The GZ700 has a Realtek 2.5G Ethernet controller that, according to Asus, provides twice the speed compared to common Ethernet connections. Furthermore, the laptop contains an Intel Wi-fi 6 AX200 chip with which the bandwidth can theoretically go up to 2.4 Gbit/s. The ROG Mothership also has a webcam and support for Windows Hello, so that users can log in to the operating system through facial recognition. There is a USB-c connection with Thunderbolt 3, a regular USB-c connection and four USB 3.1 connections. An HDMI connection is also available and VirtualLink is supported.
The ROG Mothership weighs 4.7kg and measures 510 x 320 x 29.9mm. Asus has not yet announced a price for the desktop replacement, which should be released sometime in the coming months.