Published , by Kevin Tucker
Published , by Kevin Tucker
Republic of Gamers, the gaming-oriented PC brand from Asus, has an all-new system the company believes will "redefine" the concept of a desktop replacement system. Announced via CES 2019 and built ostensibly as a gaming laptop, the new ROG Mothership is a powerhouse of a portable system with a hybrid design that perhaps shares more design inspirations from media center PCs than traditional laptop computers.
According to a post made on the official ROG Asus website, the ROG Mothership is a gaming system meant to address the design limitations of laptop PCs without compromising on performance or versatility. The team claims that desktop replacement laptops "make concessions to conform to a clamshell form factor that’s unnecessarily rigid for deployment on a desk," and they've come up with a new design that should "raise your game."
The ROG Mothership's biggest features include the machined aluminum chassis, detachable keyboard, and 17.3" IPS gaming display with a 144Hz refresh rate, 3ms response time, and G-Sync compatibility. Inside the system is an Intel i9-8950HK CPU that reaches up to 4.3GHz, up to 64GB DDR4 memory, a NVMe RAID 0 array for storage, and the latest GeForce RTX 2080 GPU with 8GB of dedicated GDDR6 memory.
The system is certainly no slouch, but its case and design are likely to draw as much interest as the power under the hood. Designed as sort of a hybrid system not too far removed from devices like the Microsoft Surface, the ROG Mothership is a clamshell-style design with a detachable keyboard and front-firing speakers. The system stands much more upright than a laptop, a notion that is apparently meant to increase cooling capabilities — ROG says that keeping the heatpipes and heatsinks up top behind the monitor help keep the keyboard at comfortable operating temperatures, while "a special shield prevents heat from the CPU and GPU from affecting the display."
RGB keys, a folding keyboard design, a touchpad that doubles as a numpad, and a suite of modern connectors like USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt help round out the Mothership experience. Asus hasn't provded any sort of pricing details yet, but the team has at least said that PC gamers can expect the ROG Mothership to become available in the second quarter of 2019. For more hot tech reveals, be sure to head over to Shacknews' CES 2019 home page.