Asus ROG G703GXR Review: What Can’t This Thing Do!?

Aug. 26, 2019

Design and Build

All of those good looks carry on when the lid is opened, as long as you can forgive Asus for the huge bezels on this thing. Still, the black of the laptop, with silver accents looks nice, the keyboard is well laid out, with the macro keys on the top instead of the side, which I like, and a trackpad that’s big enough. Plus, I also really like the power button — it’s just different from most other laptops and it looks cool.

Still, objectively speaking, the bulkiness here is definitely a negative. After all, carrying this laptop is more a chore than anything else and that just shouldn’t be the case for laptops. They’re supposed to be portable, or at the very least, shouldn’t break your back if you haul them around in your backpack.

It comes with a 144Hz refresh rate and a 3ms response time. Now I know, 3ms isn’t the fastest response time on a display, but for a laptop, 3ms is solid. Plus that 144Hz refresh rate makes for smooth animations and transitions across the board, and thanks to Nvidia G-Sync, supported games should run with minimal screen-tear and reduced input lag.

Apart from that, the colours look good on this screen, but it’s not the brightest panel out there. Also, the viewing angles are decent enough, but brightness drops really quickly once you move past something like a 45-degree angle.

So yeah, the display is a sort of a mixed bag. I don’t really mind the viewing angles much since I don’t look at my laptop from the sides often, but I would’ve liked a brighter display, and preferably one with thinner bezels.

I ran a bunch of benchmarks on the laptop, just to get a measure of the performance this thing can push, and well, take a look. Here are scores from Geekbench, Cinebench R20, 3DMark Time Spy, and PCMark 10, and they all look really good.

PUBG saw a similar performance on this thing with the laptop getting well over 125FPS at almost all times. There were sudden drops to around 100FPS when the game rendered smoke, or explosions, but overall, PUBG runs smoothly on this at maximum settings which is great.

Typing on this is quite fun, and it doesn’t get tiring even after long hours of playing games, or as was more often happening with me — typing.

The trackpad too is decent on this laptop. It’s considerably big, which makes it great for gestures. Plus it’s a Windows Precision trackpad, so you get a bunch of intuitive and easy gestures that it supports which is always nice. Clicking isn’t as nice an experience on this trackpad, even with its dedicated left-click and right-click buttons, but that’s something I can say for most Windows laptops out there. Overall though, the trackpad on this laptop is one of the better ones on gaming laptops.

Moving on, the port selection on a laptop this thick should be impressive right? Well, take a look. There’s a USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 port, 3 USB 3.0 Gen-2 ports, a mini-display port, and HDMI 2.0a, an RJ-45 ethernet port, an SD card reader, a 3.5mm headphone jack/mic combo port, a 3.5mm mic port, and a Kensington lock. That’s definitely quite a lot of ports, and you wouldn’t really run out of options here.

That, at least, is the overwhelming response from most of the Beebom team that heard me while I was playing songs on the laptop to see what different types of music sound like on this laptop. It’s not good.

I would call these speakers decent for gaming, but then again, the fans are so loud that they easily overpower the speakers, and most gamers would be using headphones anyway, so the speakers don’t really matter much in that scenario.

What do I even say about the battery on this laptop. It was always fairly obvious that this laptop wouldn’t get anything close to a decent battery life what with all the hardware packed inside. There’s a 9th-gen core i9 processor, an RTX 2080 GPU, and those things by themselves would devour battery and that showed in actual usage of the laptop.

What I’m saying is that you willneedto carry both the power bricks of this laptop if you intend on gaming with it, and yes, you read that right, there are two power bricks here. This beast of a machine needs all of that 560W of power input to run like butter, and man, does it run like butter then.

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