Asus ROG G800VI Notebook Preview

Unfortunately, there is not much to say about the case, input devices, the emissions and the power consumption because our review unit is a prototype based on the chassis of the GX800 (including the components for the water cooling). The shown pictures are therefore not representative of the final product. On the other hand, the performance and the components – except for the panel type – of our pre-sample should be pretty meaningful. Asus does at least want to deliver a similar performance at the launch in Autumn 2016.

Like its 5.7 kg (~13 lb) 18-inch sibling GX800, the first thing you will notice after the boot is the Gaming Center with its completely new design. Not only can you configure the dedicated auxiliary keys, but also the keyboard illumination and the fan behavior via additional apps.

The most important element is the Turbo Gear option, which controls the clocks of the CPU and GPU, respectively, in different modes. The "Extreme" preset results in very high clocks. While the Core i7-6820HK is accelerated up to 3.9 GHz (default: 2.7-3.6 GHz), the video memory of the GeForce GTX 1080 reaches up to 5200 MHz (default: 5000 MHz). The core of the DirectX-12 chip runs with 1682 to 1784 instead of 1632 to 1734 MHz – hence, 50 MHz more.

The Pascal architecture was, however, designed to manage even higher clocks depending on the cooling capabilities of the system. According to the GPU-Z Render test, the GTX 1080 manages almost 1900 MHz. The core will level off at around 1800 MHz in practice (quick check with Unigine Heaven benchmark), but the results are still great compared to the Maxwell generation. The previous top model GeForce GTX 980, for example, runs at a maximum of only 1200 MHz.

We have included several screenshots (CPU, RAM, storage, …) to give you an idea of the potential hardware components of the G800.

As mentioned before, the Core i7-6820HK reaches up to 3.9 GHz in the Extreme Mode, but we can only see 3.2 GHz in multi-core scenarios (could be a result of the prototype status).

The G800 still performs very well in the CPU benchmarks. Both Cinebench R11.5 as well as Cinebench R15 see the 18-inch system ahead of the 6820HK rival MSI GT72S. The Core i7-6700HQ notebooks Alienware 17 R3 and Asus G752VY are also beaten, while the desktop processor of the Schenker XMG U726 is in the lead by a few percent.

The performance of the G800 is particularly great in the system benchmarks. 7826 points in PCMark 7 is an excellent result, which can easily surpass the other comparison devices (deficit: 8 to 24%).

The high system scores are mainly a result of the storage devices. Asus has equipped our model with two PCIe-SSDs (500 GB each) in a RAID-0 configuration. We are therefore not surprised by the excellent sequential results of the 18-inch notebook in CrystalDiskMark. More than 3000 MB/s (read) and 2000 MB/s (write) were not possible a couple of years ago. Typical SATA-III-SSDs are limited at 500 to 550 MB/s. Subjectively, the G800 is extremely responsive in all aspects (application launches, loading times, data transfers, boot sequence).

We can see small deviations in terms of clocks. While the Founders Edition of the desktop GTX 1080 is specified with 1607 to 1733 MHz, Asus allows the GPU to run at 1632 to 1734 MHz (not including the factory overclocking).

Otherwise, the siblings are quite similar, which is also supported by our benchmarks. The GTX 1080 manages a GPU score of 21501 points in the 3DMark Fire Strike test and is therefore actually 2% faster than the desktop version (21154 points). A notebook GTX 1070 is beaten by 26%; the GTX 980 falls behind by 65% – even though the high-end Maxwell GPU only has 20% less CUDA cores. The difference compared to the very popular GTX 980M is even bigger since it is beaten by 100% in the Fire Strike test. The differences are similar in the other 3DMark versions.

Before we start to analyze the gaming performance, we want to talk about the driver. The device was shipped with the ForceWare 368.91, which was used for all synthetic benchmarks and Origin as well as Uplay games. Nvidia released ForceWare 372.53 just before we finished our measurements, so we only used it for the Steam games. Another test with 3DMark 13 and the Unigine Heaven 4.0 benchmark did not show any performance gains, so the different driver versions should not be a problem.

But back to the topic: As expected, the GeForce GTX 1080 can mix up the ranking and wins the title of "most powerful Notebook GPU". 1920x1080 pixels are usually not really a challenge for the high-end GPU, and it starts to get interesting at 3K and 4K resolutions. But the 16-nm still has sufficient performance reserves in almost every game. Even very demanding games such as “The Witcher 3”, “Call of Duty Black Ops 3” or “The Division” run pretty smoothly at high details and 3840x2160 pixels. This level of performance is not possible with a GPU from the Maxwell generation. Even the GTX 980 often dropped below 35 fps in our 4K setting.

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