What is the Asus ROG G703?
The latest laptop from Asus is a gaming product that doesn’t focus on slim design or a lightweight build.
Instead, the Asus Republic of Gamers G703 priority is performance. This device is huge, heavy and expensive, featuring desktop-class components and a £3,100 price tag.
Asus ROG G703 – Design and build
The G703 is an eye-catching machine. Most of its body is made from a mix of gunmetal aluminium and matte-black panels, with sharp angles and straight lines dividing the different shades.
The two-tone body is augmented with brighter colours. The keyboard and large ROG are underpinned by RGB LEDs, and the back of the machine features shiny, burnt orange panels.
The G703 looks the part, and its striking design is paired with huge dimensions: it weighs a whopping 4.8kg and is 50mm thick. The G703’s heft does translate to excellent build quality, but it also means that you’ll need a sturdy backpack and some solid shoulder muscles to lug this machine to LAN parties.
Its generous proportions mean that the G703 has plenty of room for ports. These include four USB 3.1 connectors, a USB 3.1 Type-C jack, mini-DisplayPort, Thunderbolt and HDMI outputs, a card reader and even a built-in Xbox wireless receiver for gaming with multiple controllers. On the inside, there’s dual-band 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth and Gigabit Ethernet.
Internal access is good, too. Only a single screw needs be removed from the bottom panel to access to two spare memory slots, two free M.2 connectors and all of the existing storage.
Asus ROG G703 – Keyboard and trackpad
The G703’s size and sturdy build make for a solid base for the keyboard. There’s absolutely no give, which is good for hammering away during gaming sessions. The keys themselves offer 2.5mm of travel – a little more than most gaming laptops.
The typing action is consistent and reliable, and the layout is good: there’s a separate number pad, sizeable keys throughout, and a little extra highlighting on the WASD buttons. An extra row of buttons sits above the keyboard, with shortcuts to open the Asus Gaming Center app, XSplit Gamecaster, the Xbox Gamebar and the machine’s lighting settings.
The firm base and extra travel make the G703’s keyboard one of the best I’ve ever used on a gaming laptop – especially since almost all rivals use chiclet keyboards. It’s certainly robust enough to handle FPS gaming, MOBAs and other frantic competitive titles.
However, there’s no doubt that mechanical keyboards are still king when it comes to gaming, thanks to their extra strength, deeper travel and firmer action. If that’s a deal-breaker for you, a machine such as the Aorus X9 could be your only hope until Cherry’s new low-profile keys make their way to more laptops.
It’s a similar tory with the trackpad. It’s good, with buttons offering reasonable snap and a light touch, but a proper mouse will be more responsive, with shallower buttons and thus greater precision. And, of course, it’s easier to attach a mouse to this machine than a keyboard.
Asus ROG G703 – Screen and sound quality
The G703’s 17.3in IPS screen presents solid gaming credentials. It has Nvidia G-Sync at a peak of 144Hz, and the native resolution of 1080p is entirely fine.
Other laptops have higher figures, sure, but those are often moot when a 1080p resolution looks sharp enough on a notebook. I’d rather have a 144Hz refresh rate with G-Sync than a few extra pixels anyway, and the G703’s GTX 1080 graphics core will run games smoothly at this machine’s resolution and refresh rate.
The solid screen specification is paired with decent benchmark results. The brightness level of 269 nits is enough to handle home and office lights, and the black level of 0.21 nits is deeper than most gaming laptops can offer – so dark areas in games will have plenty of depth.
Those figures create a contrast ratio of 1278:1. That’s better than most gaming devices, and that creates solid depth and distinction across every part of the panel. No matter the colour palette your games use, they’ll look punchy on this screen.
The great contrast is paired with consistent uniformity and viewing angles. Colours, meanwhile, are fine – the average Delta E of 4.1 isn’t ruinous, and the colour temperature of 7573K is cool without proving problematic. It covered around 96% of the sRGB colour gamut.
In fact, the only area where this screen falls seriously short are the various screen modes. They’re available in the Gaming Center app, and are designed to work with different genres. None of them are good: Racing mode ruins the contrast, and the Scenery option is too oversaturated thanks to a 1.89-nit black point. The FPS mode is similarly afflicted, while the RTS/RPG option is too dark.
The screen is accompanied by solid audio kit. The two 3W units produce ample volume and decent clarity at both the mid-range and high-end. There’s no subwoofer, meaning bass is a little weak, but these speakers are still good for a gaming laptop.
Asus ROG G703 – Performance
Asus hasn’t just slapped a GTX 1080 inside the G703 and left it at that. Instead, the firm has taken the GPU’s core of 1556MHz and overclocked it to 1682MHz. And that improved clock is a fine partner for the GTX 1080’s 2560 stream processors and 8GB of GDDR5X memory.
The first 3DMark result indicated the kind of performance to expect from this machine. In the app’s Ultra test, it scored 5349 points. That’s one of the best scores I’ve ever recorded from a laptop, and it’s also better than most of the desktops I review.
That stellar score translated to stonking real-world games performance. I ran Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor at its Ultra settings and the Asus returned an average of 163fps; in Tomb Raider it hit 97fps.
The Asus handled other demanding games, too. It romped through Total War: Warhammer at 114fps, and it handled the ultra-intensive Deus Ex: Mankind Divided at 74fps.
These superb results don’t just mean consistently smooth gameplay in today’s top titles. It also means that games will run quickly enough to take advantage of the screen’s 144Hz refresh rate with only minor graphical tweaks.
The Asus also has the power to output to VR headsets and larger-resolution panels, although it will likely struggle a little with 4K.
The graphics card isn’t the only overclocked component. The Core i7-7820HK is one of Intel’s only unlocked mobile processors. Asus has taken this quad-core, 2.9GHz processor and boosted it up to 4.3GHz. It’s paired with an impressive 32GB of memory, clocked to 2400MHz.
Not surprisingly, the G703 delivered superb application performance. Its single- and multi-core Geekbench results of 5266 and 17,409 are some of the fastest I’ve ever seen in a laptop, and the Asus then scored 5579 in the PC Mark 8 benchmark – another excellent result.
Suffice to say, the overclocked processor won’t bottleneck any games. It will also happily handle productivity tasks, from streaming to photo and video creation. The SSD does its part, with solid read and write speeds of 3269MB/sec and 1699MB/sec.
And, while the Asus has high-end components inside, its size and construction meant that it performed reasonably well in thermal tests – an area where many gaming laptops fall short. During the toughest stress-test, the CPU and GPU peaked at 93°C and 81°C. During this test the laptop remained cool, and the fan noise was modest.
The CPU and GPU reached 87°C and 80°C during an extended gaming test, and the exterior and noise performance remained at decent levels – certainly cooler and quieter than almost any rival. The Asus didn’t suffer throttling issues during any of these tests: the CPU ran at 3.5GHz when it was at load and at 4.3GHz during gaming benchmarks, and the GPU sat at a consisted 1950MHz.
The only issue was heat ejection from vents on both sides of the system, which could prove a little uncomfortable if you’re using a USB mouse. But even then, I’ve tested laptops that have been worse in this regard.
One area where you shouldn’t expect great things is battery life, however. The G703 lasted for around an hour in a gaming test – about average for a powerful gaming laptop.
The G703 is governed by the Asus Gaming Center tool. I’ve already mentioned its various screen modes, but there’s plenty more available in this utility. It can switch the CPU and GPU between their default Extreme clock modes and slower Standard options, and it monitors the clock speeds, temperatures and fan speeds of all the vital components. It has options for fan customisation, audio tweaks and networking tools, and an app can be used to manage the laptop from your Android or iOS smartphone.
Why buy the Asus ROG G703?
Not many new gaming laptops are as bulky as the Asus ROG G703, but this model’s sheer size and weight aren’t necessarily a bad thing.
The G703’s build quality is rock-solid, it offers plenty of ports, and its keyboard is better than most rivals. The Asus’ size also ensures it copes well with the powerful components inside – it’s certainly cooler and quieter than the vast majority of gaming laptops.
The G703 pairs its cool, quiet operation with class-leading performance and good screen quality with 144Hz operation.
Indeed, this machine’s biggest issues are its size and its price. If either is going to be a problem, then the rest of the market is amply stocked with laptops that are slimmer, lighter and cheaper, with inevitable compromises on quality.
If you’re after the best and don’t mind spending a tidy sum, though, the G703 is superb.
Verdict
The Asus ROG G703 is a large and imposing laptop, but it’s a superb choice if you’re not willing to make any compromises.
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