ASUS Booth Tour at CES 2016: 10G Switches, External GPU Dock, USB-C Monitor and more
by Ian Cutress on January 19, 2016 9:00 AM ESTLaptops Laptops Laptops Laptops
Section by Brett Howse
ASUS didn’t have any really new laptops for CES, but we did get a chance to check out some that had been announced over the last couple of months with the launch of Skylake. The 15.6-inch ZenBook Pro is arguably ASUS’s flagship laptop, with a full aluminum chassis and 45-Watt Skylake CPUs. It also features an NVIDIA GTX 960M GPU, and PCIe storage. Optionally there is a UHD display with 100% Adobe RGB color space coverage. It’s a great looking laptop, and plenty powerful as well.
Moving down in price and performance is the UX303UA, which is a 13.3-inch Ultrabook with U series Skylake processors. It’s fairly light and thin, and is an incremental upgrade over the previous model. ASUS also had the UX305CA, which is the Skylake powered version of the UX305 that we reviewed in 2015, and ASUS sent us the new Skylake model to put through its paces so look for a review of this soon. The UX305 was one of our recommended Ultrabooks of 2015, as it offers more bang-for-buck at 8 GB of memory and 256 GB of SSD storage for just $699.
UX303UA
UX305CA
On the ROG side of things, I (Ian) saw the ROG GX700 laptop with the external water cooling graphics dock for the first time. Actually seeing the device (and how heavy it is), I finally understood the concept which didn’t come across that obvious before. The unit is a fully sealed graphics card and water loop, almost like a dock, which attaches firmly in place to the laptop and can’t be removed in use. When connected, it uses PCIe to interface between the CPU and GPU, much like other solutions such as the GS30.
What was perfectly clear is that this arrangement doesn’t come cheap. The laptop itself is a hefty number as well, making it less mobile than expected.
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pixelstuff - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
Or for $530 at Netgear GS728TX-100NES which gives 4 10GB ports and 24 1GB ports.http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OZCFVVC
thewishy - Thursday, January 21, 2016 - link
The D-Link DGS-1510-28X is even cheaper. This goes with an SFP+ approach rather than copper 10GBaseT - but given the power consumption and latency for 10GBaseT, that's no bad thing.Fibre is cheap, SR SFP+ is cheap. Direct Attach Copper is cheap. As long as you're not trying to reuse existing structured cabling, it's the logical route right now.
nils_ - Sunday, January 24, 2016 - link
SFP+ DA is cheap? I think the last time I had to pay around 60 EUR for a 3m cable...pixelstuff - Wednesday, January 20, 2016 - link
What I am really hoping to see in the near future are 10G ports on all the Mini-ITX boards. I have been trying to make all my new computers builds with Mini-ITX if at all possible (to get a tiny case) and I don't want to give up the graphics card slot for higher networking speeds.nils_ - Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - link
PCIe lanes may still pose a problem there, although with DMI 3.0 there are now more options.azrael- - Thursday, January 21, 2016 - link
No C236 motherboard? ASUS, I am disappoint!06GTOSC - Thursday, January 21, 2016 - link
I don't understand why they don't come out with a standard port that wires to into the PCI-e lanes specifically for external graphics. This way we get standardized enclosures and connections and it will support any GPU. External graphics have been an idea for over a decade. Yet they have not done this.Murloc - Thursday, January 21, 2016 - link
because not enough people need it enough to pay for it.Laptop gamers are a minority, those who aren't happy with laptop performance and know the difference between one video card and another and care enough about performance yet they don't buy a normal tower computer because they don't care about the ergonomics or have to move around THAT often are an even smaller minority.
newcracksoftware - Monday, February 1, 2016 - link
thanks for the one who had created this article.Lieuchikaka - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link
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