Asus ROG GX700
Damn is it hard not to love Asus and its wacky, kitchen-sink ideas. Just a few years ago, the Taiwanese laptop maker released the ROG GX700, a monstrous gaming laptop with a giant liquid cooler attached to its butt.
Every PC gamer knows the biggest laptop killer is poor thermals. Adding thinner fans, using clever heat sink placement, and improving airflow are the usual tactics for preventing a laptop from exploding (or, more likely, throttling). Yawn. How boring. Asus threw those methods out the window and instead created a ridiculous water-cooled dock that mounted to the back of the laptop via four connector pins.
The cooling system used a custom-sealing valve to pump coolant through the laptop and back into the system where the heat was expelled by 92mm radiators. With 500W heat dissipation, the GX700 saw a 20% boost in performance and 30% decrease in thermals for the CPU and GPU. It all sounds great, but come on, look at this thing! It’s huge. The laptop already weighed 8.6 pounds but adding the dock brought the combined weight to over 10 pounds. At this point, you may as well get a desktop or a normal laptop with an eGPU.
Hoping to add more value to its impractical monster, Asus released another version a year later except with dual graphics cards (two Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 GPUs), but even that wasn’t enough to make this beast worth buying.
