Asus ROG GX800 May Be World's Most Powerful Laptop

Putting water cooling on a laptop is ridiculous enough, but at Computex 2016, Asus took crazy to a whole new level by shoehorning a second desktop-level GPU into its beastly 18.4-inch ROG GX800.

The madness doesn't end there though, because while the demo unit Asus showed off in Taiwan featured two Nvidia GTX 980 GPUs, by the time this $6,000 behemoth -- no, that's not a typo -- is ready to ship late this summer, it will pack even more beastly Nvidia GTX 1080 graphics cards.

Asus says that the GX800 will also be the first laptop on the market to feature a 4K 18.4-inch screen with Nvidia's G-Sync display technology. In short, the GX800 looks like it's going to be the most powerful gaming laptop in the world.

Another improvement on the GX800 is its new mechanical keyboard, which Asus designed from the ground up with its own MechTAG switches and a full array of embedded RGB LED lights.

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When I got the chance to check out the GX800 for myself, I had a hard time getting past the sheer size of this system. This thing's got presence. And even with a new graphics-hungry game such as Doom, the GX800 put out gameplay that looked silky smooth even at 4K.

You can detach the GX800 from its water-cooled addon if you want to entertain the idea of moving it around, although without that extra heat management, performance will fall by about 10-15 percent when it reaches its max thermal load. 

The MechTAG keyboard, which stands for Mechanical Tactile Advanced Gaming, didn't have quite the same level of polish, although Asus admits that it's still in the process of fine tuning its feel.

After seeing all these components packed into a single system, I'm a little nervous to see how the next big gaming laptop one-ups this kind of insanity. I mean, how much nuttier can gaming notebooks really get?

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