ROG Mothership GZ700 Gaming Laptop Review Best Gaming Power

The ASUS Mothership has such a unique designthat it’s not really even a laptop anymore.

It’s been designed from the ground up withoptimal thermals and performance in mind,so let’s find out what this powerful machine’sgot for us in this detailed review.

Let’s start off with the specs. There’san 8 core 16 thread overclockable i9-9980HKCPU, RTX 2080 graphics, definitely no Max-Qhere, 64gb of memory in dual channel, a 17.3”4K 60Hz screen with G-Sync, and 3 512GB M.2NVMe SSDs in a 1.5TB RAID 0 array for storage.

For network connectivity it’s got 2.5 gigabitethernet, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5, so we’redealing with top of the line specs here meaningit’s definitely not cheap,
The Mothership is quite a bit different whencompared to your traditional laptop design.

Basically when you place it against a flatsurface, two buttons are pressed in whichdeploys the kick stand for the machine torest on. Straight away this means using iton anything other than a flat surface is goingto be pretty difficult.

 Think of it more likean all-in-one desktop replacement rather thana laptop.From here the keyboard is pulled down offthe screen, it’s held in place with magnets.All of the heat generating components likethe processor and graphics are in the thicksection behind the screen.
 The keyboard canbe removed completely and used wirelesslytoo. There’s a hinge which allows you toflip it over to take up less space, and thekeyboard will automatically charge when it’sdocked to the mothership.The build quality of this thing is exceptional,it’s made from multiple solid pieces ofaluminium which combines both brushed metaland matte black anodized finishes.The weight is listed at 4.8kg on the ASUSwebsite, and I found mine a little closerto 4.7kg.

As my scales only go to 5kg, I’vehad to measure the two 280 watt power bricksand cables separately, which came in at anadditional 2kg, so in total we’re lookingat 6.8kg or 15 pounds, not exactly portable.

The dimensions of the Mothership are 41cmin width, 32cm in depth, and 3cm thick, soon the larger side for a 17 inch machine,which is kind of expected when you considerthe extra cooling space needed for the toptier specs. The larger size also means we’vegot 1cm screen bezels on the sides and thickerup top and below.The 17.3” 4K 60Hz screen has a matte finish,good viewing angles, and we also have theoption of disabling Nvidia Optimus to useG-Sync, which should improve performance atthe expense of battery life.


 Although it cangame at 4K, I think most people would havepreferred a 1440p high refresh rate panel.4K 120Hz options are meant to be on the way,but don’t seem to be available just yet.I’ve measured the colour gamut using theSpyder 5 Pro, and my results returned 99%of sRGB, 92% of NTSC and 97% of AdobeRGB.At 100% brightness in the center I measured431 nits with an 1140:1 contrast ratio, soexcellent results in all aspects and a fairbit above average.When it came to backlight bleed it was lookingfine in this worst case, only extremely minorglow that I never noticed during normal use.There’s a 1080p camera above the screenin the middle and it’s also got infraredfor Windows Hello support.

Despite being a 1080p camera the quality isn’tvery good, the microphone’s ok though. Here’swhat typing sounds like, and this is whatit sounds like when we set the fan speed tomaximum.

 So it gets pretty loud but you canstill hear me over the fans.The keyboard has per key RGB backlightingwhich can be controlled through the ASUS ArmouryCrate software, and this syncs up with thelights on the rest of the Mothership usingAura Sync.

 You can also quickly swap througheffects and change brightness between threelevels or turn lighting off completely withthe arrow key shortcuts.Unfortunately the F keys at the top do notget fully lit up. It’s got 2.5mm of keytravel, n-key roll over, I measured key actuationat 62g and as mentioned can be used eitherwired or wirelessly.

 You can enable or disablewireless mode on the keyboard with the switchup the top right, and you can see its chargelevel in Windows. I used about 10% chargein an hour with RGB lighting on. With thekeyboard docked and charging it connects usingmagnets to keep it in place, and magnets alsohold it up against the screen when you closeit up.With the keyboard detached and folded overthere’s a Type-C port that can be pluggedin so you can still use the keyboard if thebattery runs out in an undocked manner, nocable is needed to use it docked, otherwisewith a charge it uses 2.4GHz wireless.As the keyboard plate has a hinge mechanismin the center, it does move a bit when youpress down.

 There’s a cut out ROG logo inthe brushed metal which just seems to be foraesthetics. Overall I did like typing on thekeyboard, despite the hinge flex, here’show it sounds to give you an idea of whatto expect.When you take off the keyboard it kind oflooks like a massive tablet, but there isno touch screen. This does mean you have roomto connect your own keyboard instead though,and it was kind of cool being able to movethe keyboard onto my lap with the rest onthe desk.There are four 4 watt speakers found underneaththe keyboard, along with RGB lighting, andthey sounded great, there was some bass andthey still sounded ok with the keyboard on,but they were clearer with the keyboard removed.They get quite loud at maximum volume, andthe Latencymon results looked good.Speaking of sounds, it plays this one by defaulton boot.Fortunately you can disable this through theArmoury Crate software.

The precision touchpad worked ok, howeverI’m not personally a fan of having it overon the right. I get why they needed to dothis though, to have the keyboard moved upthey’d have to remove the ability to foldit, and having a large unbendable sheet wouldprobably be more awkward. The touchpad hasleft and right click buttons below it, andcan also be used as a numpad, but when inthis mode touchpad functionality is disabled.Fingerprints show up quite easily on the mattefinish around the keyboard, and on the brushedmetal finish which is all over the machine.

The smooth surfaces were easy to clean, butthe brushed finishes were a little harderonce dirt gets into the grooves.On the left from the bottom there are twoUSB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A ports, 2.5 gigabit ethernet,3.5mm audio combo and mic jacks, USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A port and USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C portwith Thunderbolt 3 support.On the right from the bottom there are thetwo power inputs, HDMI 2.0 output, USB 3.1Gen 2 Type-A port, USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C portwith DisplayPort 1.4 and a full size SD cardslot.On the front, so underneath the keyboard,there’s a brushed metal finish with ROGlogo.On the bottom there are just the two buttonsthat activate the kick stand when they getpushed in, while up on the top of the machinethere are air exhaust vents.On the back there’s the kickstand whichkeeps it standing upright.

 It’s a solidpiece of aluminum and was quite sturdy feeling.By default the hinge puts the screen on a105 degree angle, but you can push it backfurther to 127 degrees. The hinge is steplessso you can adjust it anywhere between theseranges, the weight of the unit will keep itin place. I had to use my hands to pull thehinge back, but simply pulling the machineforward would automatically retract it.

 There’san opaque ASUS logo in the middle of the stand,and RGB lighting slightly shines through frombehind the stand, otherwise there’s justa Kensington lock behind the stand.To open it up you need to remove 7 Phillipshead screws from the top and bottom, and 4TR7 screws from around the sides.

 The backpanel easily popped off for me once thesewere taken out. We can see there’s a dustfilter on most of the intake holes, exceptdirectly above the two fans, although ASUSapparently has self-cleaning anti-dust fans.Unfortunately I can’t see how this goeswithout long term use.Inside we’ve got the 90 watt hour batterydown the bottom, three PCIe M.2 slots abovethis below the black heatspreader, two memoryslots, and WiFi 6 card on the right. You canconfigure the Mothership with up to 128gbof memory as it’s got 4 slots, I’ve got4 16gb sticks here, the other two are foundon the back of the motherboard, making themmore difficult to access.To test the 90 watt hour battery I’ve setthe screen brightness to 50% and disabledbackground apps and RGB lighting.

 so with theIntel integrated graphics in use, it lastedfor 4 hours and 5 minutes. With Optimus disabled,which requires a reboot, the Nvidia graphicsare in use the whole time which is neededto use G-Sync, it lasted for almost half ofthis, at 2 hours and 4 minutes.

 While gamingwith the Witcher 3 capped to 30 FPS with Nvidiabattery boost it lasted for an hour and 10minutes and frame rate didn’t drop at anypoint.You don’t need to carry both power brickswith you, you can get away with just a single280 watt brick for many less power consumingtasks, but for full gaming performance you’llwant both. With both bricks plugged in I neverhad any battery drain during any of my testing.When you swap to battery mode the screen flashesblack, as it automatically swaps from thedefault 60Hz refresh rate down to 48Hz, whichshould help with battery life a little.

 Youalso can’t use turbo mode when on battery,more on what that does shortly.Let’s move onto the thermal testing, asyou’d expect with this level of hardwarewe’ve got some pretty serious cooling whichincludes 8 heatpipes covering the CPU, GPUand VRM, 4 thick heatsinks, Thermal Grizzlyliquid metal and two 12v fans.

 Basically airis pulled in through the back and exhaustedout of the four vents near the top corners,so no hot air blowing on your mouse hand.This allows the machine to breathe much easiercompared to a traditional laptop design wherethe fans are squashed right against the desk.The ASUS Armoury Crate software gives us theoption of swapping between silent, performanceand turbo modes.

 These adjust things likepower limits and perform overclocking, asspecified on screen here, and I’ve testedall three modes. I want to point out thatthe i9-9980HK CPU has a default all core turboboost speed of 4.2GHz, so overclocking all8 cores to 4.9GHz in turbo mode is prettycrazy stuff.

 You can swap between these modesthrough software, or by using the functionand F5 key, the one with the fan icon.Thermal testing was completed in an ambientroom temperature of 21 degrees Celsius, soexpect different results in different environments.At idle both the CPU and GPU were lookingfine.The rest of the results are from combinedCPU and GPU workloads, and are meant to representworst case scenarios as I ran them for extendedperiods of time.The gaming results towards the upper halfof the graph were tested by playing WatchDogs 2, as I find it to use a good combinationof processor and graphics.


 The stress testresults shown on the lower half of the graphare from running the Aida64 CPU stress testwith only the stress CPU option checked, andthe Heaven GPU benchmark at max settings atthe same time to fully load the system.Whether gaming or under combined CPU and GPUstress test, the temperatures were lower bothin silent and performance modes, as theserestrict the power limits, as we’ll seesoon.

 Turbo mode raises power limits and performanceat the expense of additional heat and fannoise, as you’ll hear later. By defaultturbo mode overclocks all 8 cores to 4.9GHz,in my best case test I pushed this a littlefurther to 5GHz and applied a small undervolt.This didn't really help the thermals in thestress tests, and lowered them by 1 in thisparticular game.These are the average clock speeds for thesame tests just shown. Silent mode had thelowest clock speeds as the power limits werethe lowest, performance mode steps up clockspeeds a bit, then turbo mode saw the largestincrease.

 The 9980HK has a 4.2GHz all coreturbo boost speed by default, so althoughthe 4.9GHz all core overclock in turbo modeis not being hit, we’re still seeing excellentresults and above best case stock performance.My additional undervolt helped improve thingsby over 100MHz more, I couldn’t push ittoo far though as the CPU needed pretty muchall the power it could get at this speed.These are the average TDP values during thesesame tests.

 In silent mode we can see theCPU TDP is capped to 45 watts, then 55 wattsin performance mode. In turbo mode we’recapped to 90 watts, and this was our limitationpreventing further performance. I was notable to boost the TDP higher in Intel XTUwhen under a combined CPU and GPU stress test,90 watts on the CPU seemed to be the limit.Don’t worry though, as we’ll see laterin the game benchmarks the results are stillinsane, and to be fair as we saw this preventedthe CPU getting too hot. Otherwise we cansee the GPU was performing extremely well,averaging 195 watts in the stress test andhitting 200 watts at times.Here are the CPU clock speeds while undera CPU only stress test, the results are higheras the Nvidia graphics are now idle.

 Turbomode was able to hit the 4.9GHz all core overclockin this workload, and my manual tweaks gotus to 5GHz over all 8 cores, pretty impressive.Here’s what we’re looking at in termsof temperatures, it looks like my extra 100MHzoverclock to 5GHz is being offset by the smallundervolt. This is shown when we look at theaverage TDP reported by hardware info, theCPU was drawing around 115 watts in both tests,so higher than the 90 watt limit that wasobserved in a combined CPU and GPU load likegaming.To demonstrate how this translates into performanceI’ve got some Cinebench CPU benchmarks fromthese same modes.

 For reference, a good i7-9750Hcan get to 3000 points in this test, so we’reseeing significantly higher performance withthe 8 core i9 in turbo mode, as this overclocksall cores to 4.9GHz.So how do these different changes actuallyaffect game performance? I’ve tested a coupleof games to find out.Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested withthe built in benchmark at highest settings.There wasn’t really much difference at all,my changes only gave us 1 FPS extra, whichmakes sense given the undervolt is minor and100MHz extra isn’t really much at all, especiallywhen we’re usually GPU bound here.Far Cry 5 was tested with the built in benchmarkat ultra settings, and the results were similarin terms of average frame rate.

 What I tookaway from these tests was that we can stillget high levels of performance from silentmode, and while not silent the fan was definitelyquieter compared to turbo mode, as you’llhear soon.As for the external temperatures where you’llactually be putting your hands, at idle thekeyboard was cool.

 Normal laptops are around30 degrees in this test, but as there areno heat generating components underneath thisone is a cool 20, the screen does get to 30though. Looking around the back it’s alsoaround 30 degrees too.

 With the stress testsgoing in turbo mode there’s no major changeto the keyboard, though the screen is about10 degrees hotter now at about 40 degrees.Looking on the back we’re seeing aroundthe mid 40s too, while the exhausts are obviouslyhotter still. No where you’re actually touchinggets hot, and the parts that do heat up aren’ttoo bad either.The screen was a little warmer than most others,but as I saw at CES, ASUS are placing a metalplate between the heat generating componentsand the screen to shield it so they have obviouslyconsidered this.Here’s what the fans sound like during thesedifferent tests.At idle in silent mode the fan was definitelystill audible.

 With the stress tests runningin silent mode it was actually quieter thanmost other gaming laptops while still destroyingthem in performance as we saw earlier. Inperformance mode it’s close to many othergaming laptops, and then in turbo mode it’svery loud at around 59 decibels, you’lldefinitely want to use some headphones here.The results from the ASUS Mothership are extremely impressive. The RTX 2080 also runs up to 200watts, that’s higher than the Alienware51m just for comparison.

 Despite packing allof this hardware the Mothership didn’t gettoo hot either, temperatures peaked at 90degrees Celsius worst case on the CPU and80 for the GPU. Ok sure that’s getting alittle warm, but when you put it in perspectivewith the performance compared to other laptopsit’s very impressive.Next let’s take a look at some gaming benchmarks.I’ve tested these games at all setting levelsat 4K, 1440p and 1080p resolutions with turbomode enabled and Optimus disabled for bestperformance, so CPU and GPU are overclocked.Battlefield 5 was tested in campaign mode.At 1080p even RTX was playing alright, with60 FPS averages still reached at ultra settings,while RTX off, shown by the purple bars, wasgetting much higher performance, 130 FPS atultra is pretty crazy stuff.

Stepping up to1440p and we’re still getting results betterthan what most other gaming laptops are ableto provide at 1080p, though the RTX resultsare now about inline with 1080p results fromthose other machines. RTX on was still playableat all settings, though much better at medium,and 100 FPS at ultra with RTX off at thisresolution is quite nice. At 4K RTX on ispretty much a write off at all but the lowersetting levels making it kind of pointlessin my opinion, however we were still almostable to average 60 FPS even at ultra 4K withRTX off.Control was tested by running through thestart of the game, and again I’ve testedboth RTX on in green, and RTX off in purple.At 1080p RTX on played fine even at max settings,though like Battlefield 5 we could get muchhigher FPS with RTX off. At 1440p RTX offstill played perfectly fine for me, averagingabove 60 FPS at max settings, though RTX onwas starting to get a little slower at mediumand high settings but was usable. At 4K RTXis pretty much a no go, however with ray tracingoff it was still playable at low settingsand didn’t look too bad, the game looksquite decent even with the low preset.Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested withthe built in benchmark, and these are someof the best results I’ve ever seen froma laptop, well I guess it’s not really alaptop if you can’t use it on your lap,plus it’d crush you.

 Anyway for referenceat max settings the Mothership is even beatingthe Alienware 51m with 9900K, we’ll lookat how these compare soon. At 1440p the framerates are still good even at higher settings,still excellent performance here. At 4K theresults drop back significantly, however 60FPS was still achieved with the second highestsetting preset, with almost 100 FPS stillfrom lowest settings.Ghost Recon Breakpoint was also tested usingthe built in benchmark.

 Starting out with1080p, ultra settings was still averagingabove 100 FPS, again extremely impressiveresults compared to the other laptops I’vetested this game on so far. At 1440p the framerates drop back a little, but 100 FPS averageswere still possible at very high settings,and above 60 was still coming out of ultimatesettings. 4K is pretty rough on this resourceheavy game, but the Mothership is handlingit pretty well, with 60 FPS still possibleat very high settings.Borderlands 3 was again tested using the builtin benchmark, so the exact same test was doneat all setting levels and all resolutions,and above 100 FPS was still possible withhigh settings at 1080p. At 1440p there’sminimal change at the lower setting levelsand more of a difference at the higher presetswhich are more resource intensive, thougheven at max settings above 60 FPS averageswere still being reached. At 4K the framerate at max settings almost drops in half,with medium settings now required to maintainabove 60 FPS averages in this test.I’ve tested way more games in the dedicatedgaming benchmark video, check the card inthe top right if you’re after more results.

Let’s also take a look at how this configof the ASUS Mothership compares with otherlaptops, use these results as a rough guideonly as they were tested at different timeswith different drivers.I’ve tested Battlefield 5 with ultra settingsand I’ve got the Mothership highlightedin red. This is the best result I’ve everrecorded for a machine like this, it was actuallyahead of the Alienware 51m with desktop 9900K,most likely as I found the 2080 would runat 200 watts, so it had more GPU power.

Here are the results from Far Cry 5 with ultrasettings in the built in benchmark. This timethe 51m was slightly ahead in terms of averageFPS, but it was only a couple of frames, whilethe 1% low from the mothership was ahead.Either way both machines are clearly on acompletely different level from what I usuallytest.These are the results from Shadow of the Tombraider with the built in benchmark at highestsettings, and again the Mothership was outahead here. This was expected given the GPUpower limit differences between the two, andthat this test at max settings is fairly GPUheavy.As we’ve seen the ASUS Mothership is offeringserious levels of performance, which is tobe expected, it’s a thick machine with anoverclocked 8 core CPU and overclocked RTX2080 graphics capable of running up to 200watts. 1080p and 1440p gaming was no problemat all, while many titles at 4K ran alrighttoo depending on setting level.Now for the benchmarking tools, I’ve testedHeaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine,as well as Firestrike, Timespy and Port Royalfrom 3DMark, just pause the video if you wanta detailed look at these results.I’ve used Crystal Disk Mark to test thestorage, and the RAID 0 array which is madeup of three NVMe SSDs was offering extremelyimpressive read performance, lower comparativelyfor the writes but still great numbers.


 TwoSSDs are Intel drives which are connecteddirectly to the CPU with 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0each, while the third Samsung drive goes viathe chipset. The SD card slot performed fairlywell with my v90 rated card too.For updated pricing check the links in thedescription, as prices will change over time.At the time of recording in the US the ASUSMothership with these same specs seems tobe going for $6500 USD, though it’s alsoavailable with double the storage and memoryspace if you’re a baller. Meanwhile herein Australia the Mothership will set you backabout 10 grand, it’s clearly an expensivemachine.So who is the ASUS ROG Mothership for? It’snot really a laptop at this point, but moreof a portable all-in-one desktop replacement.Obviously it’s going to be way cheaper foryou to build a more powerful PC, and for mostpeople that does make more sense. I can onlysee this really being beneficial to a smallniche group of people where having everythingin one portable unit outweighs the cost.I know if I had to travel overseas with apowerful system I’d probably prefer thiscompared to a PC case, monitor, keyboard andmouse, assuming of course I was made of money.

You could argue a mini ITX system is stillquite portable, and I’m right there withyou, especially when you consider you couldget that plus a good gaming laptop for lessmoney, so I think it really depends how badlyyou just want to pay for a ready to go systemthat has a screen built in, keyboard and touchpadincluded with battery power that’s goingto offer killer performance.So to conclude you’re getting top end performancefrom a machine that’s still more portablethan a traditional desktop at the expenseof some features that you normally get froma normal laptop.The big downsides, are of course the price,and the size and weight.

 Although it isn’tdifficult to pack up and transport, the machineitself is 4.7kg with another 2kg for the twopower bricks. It also gets extremely loudwhen in turbo mode, so if fan noise isn’tyour thing you’re going to want some decentheadphones. It did still play very well inthe lower performance modes while also beingquieter.The unique Mothership design is a bit of adouble edged sword. On one hand, it’s clearlyoffering excellent thermal performance whenyou consider the specs inside.

 On the otherhand though, you can only really use the machineon a flat surface and not like a normal laptop.It’s not going to work out on your bed oron your lap for instance, and that’s justdue to stability associated with the kickstandand not even the fact that it’ll crush you.Those are the major issues with the ASUS Mothership,let’s also summarise what’s good aboutit. The all metal build quality was excellent.The performance is undeniably awesome.

 Simplyby enabling turbo mode the 8 core i9-9980HKCPU overclocks to 4.9GHz on all cores, andthe overclocked RTX 2080 runs up to 200 watts,delivering extremely impressive results. Despitethis, thermals were kept under control dueto the custom design and use of liquid metal.1080p and 1440p gaming worked great withoutany problems at all, and even 4K gaming waspossible in most games with just one or twolevels below maximum settings.Considering the specs, I think it would begreat to see the Mothership with a 4K 120Hzpanel once those are available, that way youcould still run high refresh rate at lowerresolutions if you want. Despite seeing someof those screens at Computex earlier thisyear they still don’t seem to be available.

The screen was excellent, no observable bleedduring normal use, high contrast ratio, aboveaverage brightness and good colour gamut withthe option of G-Sync. I really liked thatASUS give us the option of picking if we wantto run with Optimus enabled for better batterylife, or Optimus disabled for best performance.Granted at this price range you’d also expectthat it has all the bells and whistles.So to summarise my summary, it’s cool, unique,extremely powerful, but is large, heavy, andcosts a lot of money making it only for asmall group of people.I’m really interested to hear what you thinkabout the ASUS Mothership down in the comments.