Asus's monstrous liquid cooled laptop now overclocks to 4.4GHz with Kaby Lake

You may not know the Asus GX800 by its model number, instead remembering it by its defining characteristic: that insane liquid cooled laptop that snaps into a dock and starts pumping icy coolant through its veins to deliver performance once unfathomable in a laptop. That's the GX800, all right. Considering Asus released the original model last year, you might be wondering what it was doing at Computex. Though the GX800 may have been overshadowed by newer, thinner laptops, it's still got it where it counts. Raw power, courtesy of SLI GTX 1080s (good lord!) and now a new standard for CPU speed with Kaby Lake.

4.4 GHz. In a laptop! When the GX800 is docked, it automatically cranks into its maximum performance overclock mode, which used to take it to 4.1 GHz. But thanks to the higher clock speeds on Intel's Kaby Lake CPUs, it can now reach 4.4 GHz without melting or setting off fire alarms. 

And that's about all there is to say about the GX800. I appreciate that while Nvidia's big talking point at Computex is "Max-Q," optimizing laptop performance to allow for insanely thin systems with GTX 1080s, there's still hardware out there like the GX800 that says nahhh and makes no compromises on the path to disgusting amounts of power. 

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

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