Asus Showcases New Ultra-thin ROG GX500 Gaming Notebook with 4K Screen

Thanks to advances in processor technologies, both on the CPU and GPU front, gaming notebooks have become slimmer and slimmer. Their display resolutions are also on the rise. Full-HD is almost the bare minimum these days and there are already a couple of gaming notebooks offering QHD such as the latest Razer Blade and Aftershock XG13-V2.

The Asus Republic has just launched Gamers (ROG) GX500 is a new ultra-thin notebook designed to deliver exceptional gaming performance in a thin and light notebook.  The 15.6-inch GX500 measures just 19mm (0.75 inch) thick and weighs just 2.2kg (4.85lbs) but it squeezes some impressive specs into a relatively small notebook.

The ROG GX500 is very similar in design to the Blade and the GS60, and these designs share a passing resemblance to Apple's MacBook line of laptops. Like the MacBook, the GX500 sports rounded corners and a large trackpad. There are some touches that stand out, however -- the speaker grills are located at the sides of the keyboard, meaning it should sound loud and clear. While most gaming laptops slather on the red paint, the GX500 keeps it relatively restrained, with red accents on the keyboard lights and trackpad.

Thanks to Nvidia’s GeForce Experience platform, you can use cool features such as automatic game optimization and ShadowPlay. The latter automatically records segments of your games (depending on how you have it set) so you can upload and share your most triumphant moments. You’ll also find Nvidia’s Battery Boost technology to squeeze more power out of the GX500’s 6-cell battery.

Aside from the 3840x2160 screen measuring 15.6” (that is 280 PPI), this 2.2kg beast will feature i7 processors along with an NVIDIA GTX860M.  One might argue that this mobile GPU is not powerful enough for 4K/UHD, and I would incline to agree.  To this extent users might dial back settings, or use the system in 4K mode for desktop but 2560x1440 in gaming.

The Asus GX500 doesn’t use a SATA hard drive or SATA SSD, instead it uses an M.2 PCIe x4 SSD, more faster than a SATA based SSD. It also features 802.11 ac WiFi connectivity and comes with Bang & Olufsen ICEpower for its Audio. 

In terms of I/O connectivity, the GX500 offers the usual triple USB 3.0 ports and HDMI output. However, it spices things up by also offering a Mini-DisplayPort, which will come in handy for users who want to output to high resolution displays beyond 1080p.

With a resolution this high, the ROG GX500 has a display pixel density of a staggering 280 ppi, easily surpassing that of Apple’s Retina display. As a result, images and text look sharp and crisp. That said, we do have our concerns regarding the GPU. As we have seen in our review of the Aftershock XG13-V2, the GeForce GTX 860M is pretty powerful, but its performance does suffer when playing at such extreme resolutions. To play able to play comfortably at the ROG GX500’s native resolution would undoubtedly mean that users would have to sacrifice on image quality.

I really like what I saw of the Asus ROG GX500, and this gaming machine, along with the Asus Chi and Transformer Book V, are the stand-out products from the Taiwanese company here at Computex.