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The ASUS ROG Mothership | A Unique Design Laptop
The ASUS Mothership has such a unique design that it’s not even a laptop anymore.
It’s been designed from the ground up with optimal thermals and performance in mind,
so let’s find out what this powerful machine’s got for us in this detailed review.
Specs Of The ASUS ROG Mothership:
Let’s start with the specs. There’s an 8 core 16 thread overclockable i9-9980HK CPU, RTX 2080 graphics, definitely no Max-Q here, 64gb of memory in dual channel.
A 17.3” 4K 60Hz screen with G-Sync, and 3 512GB M.2 NVMe SSDs in a 1.5TB RAID 0 array for storage.
The Mothership is quite a bit different when compared to your traditional laptop design.
When you place it against a flat surface, two buttons are pressed in which deploys the kickstand for the machine to rest on.
Straight away this means using it on anything other than a flat surface is going to be pretty difficult.
Think of it more like an all-in-one desktop replacement rather than a laptop.
From here the keyboard is pulled down off the screen, it’s held in place with magnets.
All of the heat-generating components like the processor and graphics are in the thick
section behind the screen.
The keyboard can be removed completely and used wirelessly too.
There’s a hinge that allows you to flip it over to take up less space, and the keyboard will automatically charge when it’s docked to the mothership.
The build quality of this thing is exceptional, it’s made from multiple solid pieces of
aluminum which combines both brushed metal and matte black anodized finishes.
The weight is listed at 4.8kg on the ASUS website, and I found mine a little closer
to 4.7kg. As my scales only go to 5kg.
I’ve had to measure the two 280 watt power bricks and cables separately, which came in at an additional 2kg, so in total, we’re looking at 6.8kg or 15 pounds, not exactly portable.
The dimensions of the Mothership are 41cm in width, 32cm in-depth, and 3cm thick.
So on the larger side for a 17-inch machine, which is kind of expected when you consider the extra cooling space needed for the top tier specs.
The larger size also means we’ve got 1cm screen bezels on the sides and thicker up top and below.
Although it can game at 4K, I think most people would have preferred 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 color gamut using the Spyder 5 Pro, and my results returned 99%
of sRGB, 92% of NTSC and 97% of AdobeRGB.
431 nits with a 1140:1 contrast ratio, so excellent results in all aspects and a fair a bit above average.
When it came to backlight bleed it was looking fine in this worst case, only extremely minor glow that I never noticed during normal use.
There’s a 1080p camera above the screen in the middle and it’s also got infrared for Windows Hello support.
Despite being a 1080p camera the quality isn’t very good, the microphone’s ok though.
Here’s what typing sounds like, and this is what it sounds like when we set the fan speed to maximum.
So it gets pretty loud but you can still hear me over the fans.
The keyboard has per-key RGB backlighting which can be controlled through the ASUS Armoury Crate software and this syncs up with the lights on the rest of the Mothership using Aura Sync.
You can also quickly swap through effects and change brightness between three
levels or turn lighting off completely with the arrow key shortcuts.
Unfortunately, the F keys at the top do not get fully lit up. It’s got 2.5mm of key travel, n-key rollover, I measured key actuation at 62g and as mentioned can be used either
wired or wirelessly.
You can enable or disable wireless mode on the keyboard with the switch up the top right, and you can see its charge level in Windows.
I used about 10% charge in an hour with RGB lighting on.
With the keyboard docked and charging it connects using magnets to keep it in place and magnets also hold it up against the screen when you close it up.
With the keyboard detached and folded over, there’s a Type-C port that can be plugged in so you can still use the keyboard if the battery runs out in an undocked manner.
No, the cable is needed to use it docked, otherwise with a charge it uses 2.4GHz wireless.
As the keyboard plate has a hinge mechanism in the center, it does move a bit when you press down.
There’s a cut out ROG logo in the brushed metal which just seems to be for aesthetics.
Overall I did like typing on the keyboard, despite the hinge flex, here’s how it sounds to give you an idea of what to expect.
When you take off the keyboard it kind of looks like a massive tablet, but there is
no touch screen.
This does mean you have room to connect your keyboard instead though, and it was kind of cool being able to move the keyboard onto my lap with the rest on
the desk.
There are four 4 watt speakers found underneath the keyboard, along with RGB lighting, and they sounded great.
There was some bass and they still sounded ok with the keyboard on, but they were clearer with the keyboard removed.
They get quite loud at maximum volume, and the Latencymon results looked good.
Speaking of sounds, it plays this one by default on boot.
Fortunately, you can disable this through the Armoury Crate software.
The precision touchpad worked ok, however, I’m not personally a fan of having it over on the right.
The touchpad has left and right-click buttons below it, and can also be used as a Numpad, but when in this mode touchpad functionality is disabled.
Fingerprints show up quite easily on the matte finish around the keyboard and the brushed metal finish which is all over the machine.
The smooth surfaces were easy to clean, but the brushed finishes were a little harder once dirt gets into the grooves.
On the left, from the bottom, there are two USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A ports, 2.5-gigabit ethernet, 3.5mm audio combo and mic jacks, USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A port and USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port with Thunderbolt 3 support.
On the right from the bottom, there are the two power inputs, HDMI 2.0 output, USB 3.1
Gen 2 Type-A port, USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C port with DisplayPort 1.4 and a full-size SD card slot.
On the front, so underneath the keyboard, there’s a brushed metal finish with ROG
logo.
On the bottom, there are just two buttons that activate the kickstand when they get
pushed in, while up on the top of the machine there are air exhaust vents.
On the back, there’s the kickstand which keeps it standing upright. It’s a solid
piece of aluminum and was quite a sturdy feeling.
By default, the hinge puts the screen on a
105-degree angle, but you can push it back further to 127 degrees.
The hinge is stepless so you can adjust it anywhere between these ranges, the weight of the unit will keep it in place.
I had to use my hands to pull the hinge back, but simply pulling the machine forward would automatically retract it.
There’s an opaque ASUS logo in the middle of the stand, and RGB lighting slightly shines through from behind the stand, otherwise, there’s just a Kensington lock behind the stand.
To open it up you need to remove 7 Phillips head screws from the top and bottom, and 4 TR7 screws from around the sides.
The back panel easily popped off for me once these were taken out.
We can see there’s a dust filter on most of the intake holes, except directly above the two fans, although ASUS has self-cleaning anti-dust fans.
Unfortunately, I can’t see how this goes without long term use.
Inside we’ve got the 90-watt hour battery down the bottom, three PCIe M.2 slots above this below the black heat spreader, two memory slots, and WiFi 6 card on the right.
To test the 90-watt hour battery I’ve set the screen brightness to 50% and disabled
background apps and RGB lighting.
While watching YouTube with Optimus enabled, so with the Intel integrated graphics in use, it lasted for 4 hours and 5 minutes.
With Optimus disabled, which requires a reboot, the Nvidia graphics are in use the whole time which is needed to use G-Sync, it lasted for almost half of this, at 2 hours and 4 minutes.
While gaming with the Witcher 3 capped to 30 FPS with Nvidia battery boost it lasted for an hour and 10 minutes and the frame rate didn’t drop at any point.
You don’t need to carry both power bricks with you, you can get away with just a single 280-watt brick for much less power consuming tasks, but for full gaming performance, you’ll want both.
With both bricks plugged in, I never had any battery drain during any of my testings.
When you swap to battery mode the screen flashes black, as it automatically swaps from the default 60Hz refresh rate down to 48Hz, which should help with battery life a little.
You also can’t use turbo mode when on battery, more on what that does shortly.
Thermal Testing:
Let’s move onto the thermal testing, as you’d expect with this level of hardware we’ve got some pretty serious cooling which includes 8 heat pipes covering the CPU, GPU and VRM, 4 thick heatsinks, Thermal Grizzly liquid metal, and two 12v fans.
Air is pulled in through the back and exhausted out of the four vents near the top corners, so no hot air blowing on your mouse hand.
This allows the machine to breathe much easier compared to a traditional laptop design where the fans are squashed right against the desk.
The ASUS Armoury Crate software gives us the option of swapping between silent, performance and turbo modes.
These adjust things like power limits and perform overclocking, as specified on screen here, and I’ve tested all three modes.
You can swap between these modes through software, or by using the function and F5 key, the one with the fan icon.
Thermal testing was completed at an ambient room temperature of 21 degrees Celsius, so expect different results in different environments. At idle both the CPU and GPU were looking fine.
The rest of the results are from combined CPU and GPU workloads and are meant to represent worst-case scenarios as I ran them for extended periods.
The gaming results towards the upper half of the graph were tested by playing Watch
Dogs 2, as I find it to use a good combination of processor and graphics.
The stress test results shown on the lower half of the graph are from running the Aida64 CPU stress test with only the stress CPU option checked.
The Heaven GPU benchmark at max settings at the same time to fully load the system.
Whether gaming or under combined CPU and GPU stress test, the temperatures were lower both in silent and performance modes, as these restrict the power limits, as we’ll see soon.
Turbo mode raises power limits and performance at the expense of additional heat and fan noise, as you’ll hear later.
By default turbo mode overclocks all 8 cores to 4.9GHz, in my best case test, I pushed this a little further to 5GHz and applied a small undervolt.
This didn't help the thermals in the stress tests and lowered them by 1 in this particular game.
These are the average clock speeds for the same tests just shown.
Silent mode had the lowest clock speeds as the power limits were the lowest, performance mode steps up a clock speed a bit, then turbo mode saw the largest increase.
The 9980HK has a 4.2GHz all-core turbo boost speed by default, so although the 4.9GHz all-core overclock in turbo mode is not being hit, we’re still seeing excellent results and above best-case stock performance.
My additional underfoot helped improve things by over 100MHz more, I couldn’t push it too far though as the CPU needed pretty much all the power it could get at this speed.
These are the average TDP values during these same tests.
In silent mode, we can see the CPU TDP is capped to 45 watts, then 55 watts in performance mode.
In turbo mode, we’re capped to 90 watts, and this was our limitation preventing further performance.
I was not able to boost the TDP higher in Intel XTU when 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 later in the game benchmarks the results are still insane, and to be fair as we saw this prevented the CPU getting too hot
Otherwise, we can see the GPU was performing extremely well, averaging 195 watts in the stress test and hitting 200 watts at times.
Here are the CPU clock speeds while under a CPU only stress test, the results are higher as the Nvidia graphics are now idle.
Turbo mode was able to hit the 4.9GHz all-core overclock in this workload, and my manual tweaks got us to 5GHz over all 8 cores, pretty impressive.
Here’s what we’re looking at in terms of temperatures, it looks like my extra 100MHz
overclock to 5GHz is being offset by the small undervolt.
This is shown when we look at the average TDP reported by hardware info, the CPU was drawing around 115 watts in both tests, so higher than the 90-watt limit that was observed in a combined CPU and GPU load like gaming.
To demonstrate how this translates into the performance I’ve got some Cinebench CPU benchmarks from these same modes.
For reference, a good i7-9750H can get to 3000 points in this test, so we’re seeing significantly higher performance with the 8 core i9 in turbo mode, as this overclocks
all cores to 4.9GHz.
So how do these different changes affect game performance?
I’ve tested a couple of games to find out.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the built-in benchmark at the highest settings.
There wasn’t much difference at all, my changes only gave us 1 FPS extra, which
makes sense given the undervolt is minor and 100MHz extra isn’t much at all, especially when we’re usually GPU bound here.
Far Cry 5 was tested with the built-in benchmark at ultra settings, and the results were similar in terms of average frame rate.
What I took away from these tests was that we can still get high levels of performance from silent mode, and while not silent the fan was quieter compared to turbo mode, as you’ll hear soon.
As for the external temperatures where you’ll be putting your hands, at idle the keyboard was cool.
Normal laptops are around 30 degrees in this test, but as there are no heat-generating components underneath this one is a cool 20, the screen does get to 30 though.
Looking around the back it’s also around 30 degrees too. With the stress tests going in turbo mode there’s no major change to the keyboard, though the screen is about
10 degrees hotter now at about 40 degrees.
Looking on the back we’re seeing around
the mid-40s too, while the exhausts are hotter still.
No, where you’re touching gets hot, and the parts that do heat up aren’t too bad either.
The screen was a little warmer than most others, but as I saw at CES, ASUS is placing a metal the plate between the heat-generating components and the screen to shield it so they have obviously
considered this.
Here’s what the fans sound like during these different tests. At idle in silent mode, the fan was still audible.
With the stress tests running in silent mode, it was quieter than most other gaming laptops while still destroying them in performance as we saw earlier.
The results from the ASUS Mothership are extremely impressive. The RTX 2080 also runs up to 200 watts, that’s higher than the Alienware 51m just for comparison.
Despite packing all of this hardware the Mothership didn’t get too hot either, temperatures peaked at 90 degrees Celsius worst case on the CPU and 80 for the GPU.
Ok sure that’s getting a little warm, but when you put it in perspective with the performance compared to other laptops it’s very impressive.
Next, let’s take a look at some gaming benchmarks.
I’ve tested these games at all setting levels at 4K, 1440p and 1080p resolutions with turbo mode enabled and Optimus disabled for best performance, so CPU and GPU are overclocked.
Stepping up to 1440p and we’re still getting results better than what most other gaming laptops can provide at 1080p, though the RTX results are now about in line with 1080p results from those other machines.
RTX on was still playable at all settings, though much better at medium, and 100 FPS at ultra with RTX off at this resolution is quite nice.
At 4K RTX on is pretty much a write off at all but the lower setting levels making it kind of pointless in my opinion, however, we were still almost able to average 60 FPS even at ultra 4K with RTX off.
Control was tested by running through the start of the game, and again I’ve tested
both 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 much higher FPS with RTX off.
At 1440p RTX off still played perfectly fine for me, averaging above 60 FPS at max settings, though RTX on was starting to get a little slower at medium and high settings but was usable.
At 4K RTX is pretty much a no go, however, with ray tracing off it was still playable at low settings and didn’t look too bad, the game looks quite decent even with the low preset.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the built-in benchmark, and these are some of the best results I’ve ever seen from a laptop, well I guess it’s not a laptop if you can’t use it on your lap, plus it’d crush you.
Anyway, for reference at max settings the Mothership is even beating the Alienware 51m with 9900K, we’ll look at how these compare soon.
At 1440p the frame rates are still good even at higher settings, still excellent performance here.
At 4K the results drop back significantly, however, 60 FPS was still achieved with the second-highest setting preset, with almost 100 FPS from the lowest settings.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint was also tested using the built-in benchmark.
Starting with 1080p, ultra settings were still averaging above 100 FPS, again extremely impressive results compared to the other laptops I’ve tested this game on so far.
At 1440p the frame rates drop back a little, but 100 FPS averages were still possible at very high settings, and above 60 was still coming out of ultimate settings.
4K is pretty rough on this resource the heavy game, but the Mothership is handling it pretty well, with 60 FPS still possible
at very high settings.
Borderlands 3 was again tested using the built-in benchmark, so the same test was done at all setting levels and all resolutions, and above 100 FPS was still possible with
high settings at 1080p.
At 1440p there’s minimal change at the lower setting levels and more of a difference at the higher presets which are more resource-intensive, though even at max settings above 60 FPS averages were still being reached.
I’ve tested way more games in the dedicated gaming benchmark video, check the card in the top-right if you’re after more results.
Let’s also take a look at how this config of the ASUS Mothership compares with other
laptops, use these results as a rough guide only as they were tested at different times
with different drivers.
I’ve tested Battlefield 5 with ultra settings and I’ve got the Mothership highlighted in red.
This is the best result I’ve ever recorded for a machine like this, it was ahead of the Alienware 51m with desktop 9900K, most likely as I found 2080 would run at 200 watts, so it had more GPU power.
Here are the results from Far Cry 5 with ultra settings in the built-in benchmark.
This time the 51m was slightly ahead in terms of average FPS, but it was only a couple of frames, while the 1% low from the mothership was ahead.
Either way, both machines are clearly on a
completely different level from what I usually test.
These are the results from Shadow of the Tomb Raider with the built-in benchmark at highest settings, and again the Mothership was out ahead here.
This was expected given the GPU power limit differences between the two, and that this test at max settings is fairly GPU heavy.
As we’ve seen the ASUS Mothership is offering serious levels of performance, which is to be expected, it’s a thick machine with an overclocked 8 core CPU and overclocked RTX 2080 graphics capable of running up to 200 watts.
1080p and 1440p gaming was no problem
at all, while many titles at 4K ran alright too depending on setting level.
Now for the benchmarking tools, I’ve tested Heaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine, as well as Firestrike, Timespy and Port Royal from 3DMark, just pause the video if you want a detailed look at these results.
I’ve used Crystal Disk Mark to test the storage and the RAID 0 array which is made up of three NVMe SSDs was offering extremely impressive read performance, lower comparatively for the writes but still great numbers.
It’s not a laptop at this point, but more of a portable all-in-one desktop replacement.
It’s going to be way cheaper for you to build a more powerful PC, and for most people that does make more sense.
I can only see this being beneficial to a small niche group of people were having everything in one portable unit outweighs the cost.
I know if I had to travel overseas with a powerful system I’d probably prefer this
compared to a PC case, monitor, keyboard, and mouse assuming, of course, I was made of money.
You could argue a mini ITX system is still quite portable, and I’m right there with you, especially when you consider you could get that plus a good gaming laptop for less
money.
So I think it depends how badly you just want to pay for a ready to go system that has a screen built-in, keyboard, and touchpad included with battery power that’s going to offer killer performance.
So to conclude you’re getting top-end performance from a machine that’s still more portable than a traditional desktop at the expense of some features that you normally get from a normal laptop.
The big downsides are of course the price, and the size and weight.
Although it isn’t difficult to pack up and transport, the machine itself is 4.7kg with another 2kg for the two power bricks.
It also gets extremely loud when in turbo mode, so if fan noise isn’t your thing you’re going to want some decent headphones.
It did still play very well in the lower performance modes while also being quieter.
The unique Mothership design is a bit of a double-edged sword.
On one hand, it’s offering excellent thermal performance when you consider the specs inside.
On the other hand, though, you can only really use the machine on a flat surface and not like a normal laptop.
It’s not going to work out on your bed or your lap for instance, and that’s just due to stability associated with the kickstand and 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 about it.
The metal build quality was excellent. The performance is undeniably awesome. Simply by enabling turbo mode the 8 core i9-9980HK CPU overclocks to 4.9GHz on all cores, and the overclocked RTX 2080 runs up to 200 watts, delivering extremely impressive results.
Despite these thermals were kept under control due to the custom design and use of liquid metal.
1080p and 1440p gaming worked great without any problems at all, and even 4K gaming was possible in most games with just one or two levels below maximum settings.
Considering the specs, I think it would be great to see the Mothership with a 4K 120Hz the panel once those are available, that way you could still run high refresh rate at lower resolutions if you want.
Despite seeing some of those screens at Computex earlier this the year they still don’t seem to be available.
The screen was excellent, no observable bleed during normal use, high contrast ratio, above-average brightness and good color gamut with the option of G-Sync.
I liked that ASUS gives us the option of picking if we want to run with Optimus enabled for better battery life or Optimus disabled for best performance.
Granted at this price range you’d also expect that it has all the bells and whistles.
So to summarise my summary, it’s cool, unique, extremely powerful, but is large, heavy, and costs a lot of money making it only for a small group of people.
So that set for this review please let me know in the comments section which laptop that you want to see in the next review.
Here are the CPU clock speeds while under a CPU only stress test, the results are higher as the Nvidia graphics are now idle.
Turbo mode was able to hit the 4.9GHz all-core overclock in this workload, and my manual tweaks got us to 5GHz over all 8 cores, pretty impressive.
Here’s what we’re looking at in terms of temperatures, it looks like my extra 100MHz
overclock to 5GHz is being offset by the small undervolt.
This is shown when we look at the average TDP reported by hardware info, the CPU was drawing around 115 watts in both tests, so higher than the 90-watt limit that was observed in a combined CPU and GPU load like gaming.
To demonstrate how this translates into the performance I’ve got some Cinebench CPU benchmarks from these same modes.
For reference, a good i7-9750H can get to 3000 points in this test, so we’re seeing significantly higher performance with the 8 core i9 in turbo mode, as this overclocks
all cores to 4.9GHz.
Game Tasting:
So how do these different changes affect game performance?
I’ve tested a couple of games to find out.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider:
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the built-in benchmark at the highest settings.
There wasn’t much difference at all, my changes only gave us 1 FPS extra, which
makes sense given the undervolt is minor and 100MHz extra isn’t much at all, especially when we’re usually GPU bound here.
Far Cry 5:
Far Cry 5 was tested with the built-in benchmark at ultra settings, and the results were similar in terms of average frame rate.
What I took away from these tests was that we can still get high levels of performance from silent mode, and while not silent the fan was quieter compared to turbo mode, as you’ll hear soon.
As for the external temperatures where you’ll be putting your hands, at idle the keyboard was cool.
Normal laptops are around 30 degrees in this test, but as there are no heat-generating components underneath this one is a cool 20, the screen does get to 30 though.
Looking around the back it’s also around 30 degrees too. With the stress tests going in turbo mode there’s no major change to the keyboard, though the screen is about
10 degrees hotter now at about 40 degrees.
Looking on the back we’re seeing around
the mid-40s too, while the exhausts are hotter still.
No, where you’re touching gets hot, and the parts that do heat up aren’t too bad either.
The screen was a little warmer than most others, but as I saw at CES, ASUS is placing a metal the plate between the heat-generating components and the screen to shield it so they have obviously
considered this.
Here’s what the fans sound like during these different tests. At idle in silent mode, the fan was still audible.
With the stress tests running in silent mode, it was quieter than most other gaming laptops while still destroying them in performance as we saw earlier.
The results from the ASUS Mothership are extremely impressive. The RTX 2080 also runs up to 200 watts, that’s higher than the Alienware 51m just for comparison.
Despite packing all of this hardware the Mothership didn’t get too hot either, temperatures peaked at 90 degrees Celsius worst case on the CPU and 80 for the GPU.
Ok sure that’s getting a little warm, but when you put it in perspective with the performance compared to other laptops it’s very impressive.
Gaming Benchmarks:
Next, let’s take a look at some gaming benchmarks.
I’ve tested these games at all setting levels at 4K, 1440p and 1080p resolutions with turbo mode enabled and Optimus disabled for best performance, so CPU and GPU are overclocked.
Stepping up to 1440p and we’re still getting results better than what most other gaming laptops can provide at 1080p, though the RTX results are now about in line with 1080p results from those other machines.
RTX on was still playable at all settings, though much better at medium, and 100 FPS at ultra with RTX off at this resolution is quite nice.
At 4K RTX on is pretty much a write off at all but the lower setting levels making it kind of pointless in my opinion, however, we were still almost able to average 60 FPS even at ultra 4K with RTX off.
Control was tested by running through the start of the game, and again I’ve tested
both 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 much higher FPS with RTX off.
At 1440p RTX off still played perfectly fine for me, averaging above 60 FPS at max settings, though RTX on was starting to get a little slower at medium and high settings but was usable.
At 4K RTX is pretty much a no go, however, with ray tracing off it was still playable at low settings and didn’t look too bad, the game looks quite decent even with the low preset.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider:
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the built-in benchmark, and these are some of the best results I’ve ever seen from a laptop, well I guess it’s not a laptop if you can’t use it on your lap, plus it’d crush you.
Anyway, for reference at max settings the Mothership is even beating the Alienware 51m with 9900K, we’ll look at how these compare soon.
At 1440p the frame rates are still good even at higher settings, still excellent performance here.
At 4K the results drop back significantly, however, 60 FPS was still achieved with the second-highest setting preset, with almost 100 FPS from the lowest settings.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint:
Ghost Recon Breakpoint was also tested using the built-in benchmark.
Starting with 1080p, ultra settings were still averaging above 100 FPS, again extremely impressive results compared to the other laptops I’ve tested this game on so far.
At 1440p the frame rates drop back a little, but 100 FPS averages were still possible at very high settings, and above 60 was still coming out of ultimate settings.
4K is pretty rough on this resource the heavy game, but the Mothership is handling it pretty well, with 60 FPS still possible
at very high settings.
Borderlands 3:
Borderlands 3 was again tested using the built-in benchmark, so the same test was done at all setting levels and all resolutions, and above 100 FPS was still possible with
high settings at 1080p.
At 1440p there’s minimal change at the lower setting levels and more of a difference at the higher presets which are more resource-intensive, though even at max settings above 60 FPS averages were still being reached.
I’ve tested way more games in the dedicated gaming benchmark video, check the card in the top-right if you’re after more results.
Let’s also take a look at how this config of the ASUS Mothership compares with other
laptops, use these results as a rough guide only as they were tested at different times
with different drivers.
Battlefield 5:
I’ve tested Battlefield 5 with ultra settings and I’ve got the Mothership highlighted in red.
This is the best result I’ve ever recorded for a machine like this, it was ahead of the Alienware 51m with desktop 9900K, most likely as I found 2080 would run at 200 watts, so it had more GPU power.
Here are the results from Far Cry 5 with ultra settings in the built-in benchmark.
This time the 51m was slightly ahead in terms of average FPS, but it was only a couple of frames, while the 1% low from the mothership was ahead.
Either way, both machines are clearly on a
completely different level from what I usually test.
These are the results from Shadow of the Tomb Raider with the built-in benchmark at highest settings, and again the Mothership was out ahead here.
This was expected given the GPU power limit differences between the two, and that this test at max settings is fairly GPU heavy.
As we’ve seen the ASUS Mothership is offering serious levels of performance, which is to be expected, it’s a thick machine with an overclocked 8 core CPU and overclocked RTX 2080 graphics capable of running up to 200 watts.
1080p and 1440p gaming was no problem
at all, while many titles at 4K ran alright too depending on setting level.
Now for the benchmarking tools, I’ve tested Heaven, Valley, and Superposition from Unigine, as well as Firestrike, Timespy and Port Royal from 3DMark, just pause the video if you want a detailed look at these results.
I’ve used Crystal Disk Mark to test the storage and the RAID 0 array which is made up of three NVMe SSDs was offering extremely impressive read performance, lower comparatively for the writes but still great numbers.
It’s not a laptop at this point, but more of a portable all-in-one desktop replacement.
It’s going to be way cheaper for you to build a more powerful PC, and for most people that does make more sense.
I can only see this being beneficial to a small niche group of people were having everything in one portable unit outweighs the cost.
I know if I had to travel overseas with a powerful system I’d probably prefer this
compared to a PC case, monitor, keyboard, and mouse assuming, of course, I was made of money.
You could argue a mini ITX system is still quite portable, and I’m right there with you, especially when you consider you could get that plus a good gaming laptop for less
money.
So I think it depends how badly you just want to pay for a ready to go system that has a screen built-in, keyboard, and touchpad included with battery power that’s going to offer killer performance.
So to conclude you’re getting top-end performance from a machine that’s still more portable than a traditional desktop at the expense of some features that you normally get from a normal laptop.
The big downsides are of course the price, and the size and weight.
Although it isn’t difficult to pack up and transport, the machine itself is 4.7kg with another 2kg for the two power bricks.
It also gets extremely loud when in turbo mode, so if fan noise isn’t your thing you’re going to want some decent headphones.
It did still play very well in the lower performance modes while also being quieter.
The unique Mothership design is a bit of a double-edged sword.
On one hand, it’s offering excellent thermal performance when you consider the specs inside.
On the other hand, though, you can only really use the machine on a flat surface and not like a normal laptop.
It’s not going to work out on your bed or your lap for instance, and that’s just due to stability associated with the kickstand and 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 about it.
The metal build quality was excellent. The performance is undeniably awesome. Simply by enabling turbo mode the 8 core i9-9980HK CPU overclocks to 4.9GHz on all cores, and the overclocked RTX 2080 runs up to 200 watts, delivering extremely impressive results.
Despite these thermals were kept under control due to the custom design and use of liquid metal.
1080p and 1440p gaming worked great without any problems at all, and even 4K gaming was possible in most games with just one or two levels below maximum settings.
Considering the specs, I think it would be great to see the Mothership with a 4K 120Hz the panel once those are available, that way you could still run high refresh rate at lower resolutions if you want.
Despite seeing some of those screens at Computex earlier this the year they still don’t seem to be available.
The screen was excellent, no observable bleed during normal use, high contrast ratio, above-average brightness and good color gamut with the option of G-Sync.
I liked that ASUS gives us the option of picking if we want to run with Optimus enabled for better battery life or Optimus disabled for best performance.
Granted at this price range you’d also expect that it has all the bells and whistles.
So to summarise my summary, it’s cool, unique, extremely powerful, but is large, heavy, and costs a lot of money making it only for a small group of people.
So that set for this review please let me know in the comments section which laptop that you want to see in the next review.
ASUS
ASUS Mothership
ASUS Mothership review
ASUS ROG
ASUS ROG Mothership
ASUS ROG Mothership laptop
ASUS ROG Mothership review
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The ASUS ROG Mothership
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