Asus has announced that its new ROG Strix GL702VM gaming laptop, which aims to strike a tempting balance between power and portability, is now on sale.
The GL702VM is fully VR-ready and is the official gaming notebook of the International 2016 Dota 2 championships, no less. It's powered by an Intel i7-6700HQ Skylake CPU clocked at 2.6GHz (with Turbo up to 3.5GHz) alongside an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 with 6GB of video memory. You also get a plentiful dollop of 16GB of DDR4 2133MHz system memory.
The display is a 17.3-inch affair with a Full HD resolution (1920 x 1080) and it's another Asus model that comes with Nvidia's G-Sync technology to combat stuttering and tearing. It's an anti-glare matte screen and Asus promises wide viewing angles of 178 degrees.
This little lot fits into a chassis which is 22mm at its thinnest, and 25mm at its thickest point, with the laptop weighing 2.7kg. Ports include a USB 3.1 Thunderbolt Type-C connector, along with three USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI connector and a Mini-DisplayPort 1.2.
Super-cool system
Asus is also proud of the cooling system employed here which makes use of copper heatpipes and three fans – one for the processor, one running full-time on the GPU, and the third provides additional cooling for the GTX 1060 when the going gets really tough.
The keyboard also boasts anti-ghosting technology with 30-key rollover (i.e. you can mash 30 keys simultaneously and they will all register successfully) and a comfortable travel distance of 1.6mm for a key press. You also get red backlighting and highlighted WASD keys which are colored red.
There are two models of the GL702VM available, the only difference being one has a 1TB hard disk on board, and the other adds in a 256GB SSD for extra speedy loading. They are priced at $1,399 (around £1,080, AU$1,855) and $1,599 (around £1,230, AU$2,120) respectively.
- Check out our recent review of the Asus ROG Strix GL502, which rocks Full HD gaming
