ASUS dethrones the Razer Blade Pro with the ROG GX501, world's thinnest laptop with GTX 1080?

Laptop Media is reporting the existence of an ASUS laptop packing an Nvidia GTX 1080 into a 16.65mm-thick chassis. According to the brief post, the few details known about the machine were leaked due to it receiving a "Taiwan Excellence" award. Taiwan Excellence is an organization that annually gives awards to outstanding designs from Taiwanese companies.

The ASUS ROG GX501 will allegedly have a 15.6-inch 4k display and G-Sync support. This means optimus is not supported, and so battery life will likely be short. It will have Intel's latest Kaby Lake quad-core CPUs, a PCIe x4 NVME SSD, and up to 24 GB RAM. Based on the image allegedly nipped from the Taiwan Excellence Awards website (a search at the time of writing revealed no hits), the device will feature a trackpad with dedicated buttons and the ability to function as a capacitive number pad as well. This is likely due to the massive area above the keyboard dedicated to cooling the CPU and GPU.

Speaking of cooling, given that the laptop is only 16.65mm thick, it's likely that ASUS has tweaked the voltage or clocks of the GTX 1080 to suit the cooling solution of such a thin machine. We will have to wait and see what the real world performance is like, but there is no getting around physics: reviews of the Razer Blade Pro with GTX 1080 say it is loud and hot. The Razer Blade Pro also appears to be underclocked, based on its benchmark scores: synthetic benchmarks put the Razer Blade Pro's GTX 1080 at only about 15% faster than the HP Omen 17, a laptop with the same CPU but a GTX 1070. Reports of sub-par performance (compared to other GTX 1060 notebooks) have even been plaguing the Razer Blade 14", a thicker machine (18mm) which only packs a GTX 1060.

As usual these days, we can expect to learn more at CES!