Asus ROG GX700VO (17.3-Inch, 2016)

Incredible performance ; VR gaming on a laptop ; Awesome design ; Fun to use

Absurd price ; Only 1080p display ; Have to return to Asus to replace coolant

The first liquid-cooled laptop is a stylish and incredibly powerful machine - especially once it's connected to its water-cooling base station. It's absurdly expensive, however, and is held back by its Full HD display.

It’s a very good-looking laptop.

Costs a lot of money.

If you want a ridiculously fast, watercooled, premium-grade laptop – there is only one place to look. The GX700 is a top-class piece of kit, if you can afford it.

Epic gaming performance from Core i7 and desktop GTX 980.

Ideally the laptop would overclock automatically when the dock is engaged.

Asus ROG GX700 tears up the rule book and sets a new standard for gaming laptops.

desktop-level performance, GTX 980 with full Turbo, high-contrast IPS panel, USB 3.1 & Thunderbolt, overclocked processor, up to 64 GB DDR4-RAM, pretty cool hardware, interesting tools, large touchpad, nice design, good sound, macro keys, SSD-RAID

build quality issues with our pre-production sample, Wi-Fi range could be better, extremely heavy with water-cooling, suboptimal port layout, bottom of the chassis susceptible to scratches, somewhat spongy keyboard, enormous power consumption, Hydro...

The GX700 leaves pretty mixed impressions after we finished all tests. The idea to use a water-cooling sounds very promising on paper, but we can hardly find any advantages over a standard air-cooled laptop in practice. Yes, the notebook is thinner and...

You can be sure we'll have a full review on CNET when the GX700 is available.

Overclocked CPU ; Design ; Build ; Thunderbolt / USB 3.1 ; 64GB DDR4-RAM ; M.2 SSDs

Price ; Soft Keyboard ; Slipped disc-inducing heavy ; Battery life ; Bottom plastic panel ; Maintenance ; Susceptible to liquid damage

The price and performance, unfortunately, don’t quite match up. Buy it purely for the innovative tech Asus has clocked in, or simply for bragging rights.

Unparalleled performance Gives buyers undisputed bragging rights

Absurdly expensive Huge and heavy Underwhelming keyboard, trackpad and speakers Launched in India almost a year late

Overall, this isn't a bad laptop, but it does leave us with a dilemma. The only way you're going to get the most out of it would be to use it docked on a desk, where it isn't all that comfortable. When used as a laptop, you aren't getting all the...