I confess that I have little idea of who this is actually for. Anyone who expects to sit down and play games at home would be far better off with a good desktop PC and something light like a Nexus tablet or a Surface if they need portability rather than this...thing. I admire almost anything that pushes boundaries, but watercooling a video card to get a few more frames out of a laptop just feels like a technology that I'm not built to understand, like Snapchat.

Actually, poking into it a bit more, it looks like the watercooling system actually enters the body of the laptop itself while it's plugged into the port, which I admit is kind of neat. But I would also assume that you'd want to dock this and run it to a monitor or two, while keeping the laptop available for portability's sake...but I'm not seeing the external DVI or HDMI ports to make that possible in the screenshots.

What a weird device. I guess every tech company has to make some weird outlandish device that no one will actually use at some point.

The idea of it is awesome, but as in "awesome but impractical." I guess it's the logical conclusion of those monster 17" or more, ten pound behemoths that would run dual GPUs, but just as I never saw a reason for those to exist, I see even less of a reason for this to exist.

@mirado: I was just thinking the same thing...I'm just not sure who this is for. Can you imagine how much this beast weighs, and how big the power brick must be?

I know there are edge cases for everything, but this seems pretty extreme. More of a "We built it because we can" type thing than anything else. I do love Asus stuff, though. I try to buy their components whenever I can, and my Nexus 10 tablet is even made by Asus and that thing is top quality.

Will it plug into my car's lighter so I can play DotA 2 while driving during my commute to work?

I doubt the socket puts out enough amperage to power the brick. This thing is so dumb, I kind of love it though.

Well, it seems that I somehow missclicked and I ended up in TESTED! I thought this was Giant Bomb, a website about VIDEO GAMES!

I kid, I kid. I guess this laptop shouldn't be taken as an actual laptop, but rather as a smaller-form factor desktop PC. If you have enough space in your desk for the water cooler, but don't want to deal with having a tower nearby, I guess it can be useful. Otherwise... what for?

I can see the business reasoning for this. I can imagine them selling that dock as a separate upgrade with an a tag line like "Improve Your Gaming!" so people will pay more for their laptop. It's like the lightning cable of laptop cooling pads! I doubt they will actually move it beyond prototypes though.

@audiobusting: I don't think the dock works with any other laptop, though. The whole point is that there is a water cooling loop inside the laptop that hooks up to the dock. So without this specific PC with the rest of the loop already inside it, the dock is useless.

@mike: that's what I was thinking with lightning cables, since they are exclusive to Apple devices the same way these are to those laptops. But I guess my analogy breaks down where you can put those laptops on any old laptop cooling pad.

I dunno, when I started college I moved about 10 times in 3 years, and one of the most annoying things to pack/set up was my PC. Would have been nice to have a giant, hideous laptop instead.

My Dad used to bring a slim PS2 with the screen attachment to play games in hotels when he was sent to another city to work (he'd also let me use it when I was frequently in hospital) so that was basically a laptop that could only play games. I can imagine that do something similar to play modern games today must be incredibly tough to do - and the heating must be a huge issue so I'm not surprised this exists. But it does seem especially niche that I doubt it will do well.

Edit - in other news, this takes my vote as "most likely to be a Decepticon"

Yeah, ASUS has put out some real quality stuff over the years, and I've owned more than a few of their products. This one...this one won't be one of them.

I found the way to pair that process down to the bare essentials, and became exceeding efficient at it. The ability to have a monster PC at my apartment which could play whatever I wanted at the best settings possible, and then have a smaller laptop to keep me mobile between classes, made those teardowns every few months worth it. I eventually built a NAS which was always on and set up a VPN back to my home network, meaning I had access to terabytes of media wherever I went.

Lugging around a massive laptop is the last thing I wanted to do after a 12 hour day of dealing with the idiots on whatever group project I was assigned.

As someone who isn't home a whole lot, but really loves games, my options have been limited recently to what I can use on the go. This potentially solves that problem for me. I also love bringing multiplayer games to friends houses and parties, with this I wouldn't need a desktop for "my private pleasures" and a laptop for my social ones. It'd just be one big monster! And hey if it's beefy enough to not crash while exporting video then I can use it for work and school too! As someone who doesn't own a decent gaming PC (I used my family's Mac desktop and consoles during high school) and is soon to be in the military, this seems right up my alley.

This is actually kind of an interesting idea, and kind of solves the problem with laptops where it's usually easy enough to cram whatever you want into them, but they can't cool for shit. One of the more recent Macbooks had an an issue, where the processor was very powerful, but because it didn't have decent cooling. It would just thermal throttle constantly meaning it was pretty useless. This at least means you could carry around an under-clocked laptop for when you need it, but not have to keep a completely separate PC for intensive home use.

The big problem with this is when it's underclocked you're essentially carrying around something that's probably 8 years old in terms of power to weight ratio. A better solution that was tossed around a few years ago that I'm surprised more people haven't capitalised on is having an external GPU in a Thunderbolt chassis or something similar that can be plugged into whenever you're at home, it might not be as powerful for home use, but it's a lot more reasonable not having to lug around the extra weight of a graphics card or two.

@makayu: You might be surprised how powerful current gaming laptops with GTX 970m's are - they are quite capable machines. And far more powerful than either the Xbox One or PS4, I might add. There are even SLI configurations with two 970m GPUs, or two 980m GPUs. I think the desktop GTX 980 in a laptop is overkill, and not even the good kind that a lot of PC gamers are into.

@mike: For my edge case I think you're totally right. Even with high end games, unless I'm really trying to jack up the resolution, most modern gaming laptops would suite my needs just fine. I'm honestly a bit out of the loop as I haven't kept up with the specs of newer machines for the last two or three years. But all this has prompted me to brush up, so cheers! If it's true that GTX 970m's out class a PS4 (which doesn't surprise me) then that would suite my needs just fine. Thanks for the info yo.

This isn't stupid, it's Metal Gear Stupid. I love it! I mean, just saying the words "water cooled laptop," brings a childish grin to my face.

i.e. awesome to think about and look at but seems impractical for the most part.

@makayu: No problem! There are several manufacturers using the 970m in laptops right now. I think some of the brands to look at are Asus ROG, MSI G-series, and the Razer Blade line. You're probably looking at around $1,500 and up for a decent gaming laptop with at least a 970m in it, though.

As always, I strongly discourage anyone from ever buying an expensive gaming laptop unless there is absolutely no way they can make a small desktop build like a mini ITX work. For the price of a nice gaming laptop, one could build a kick ass gaming desktop AND buy a standard $400-$500 laptop that they can use to carry around and stream games to with Steam In-Home Streaming. I know there people out there for whom gaming laptops still do make sense, but in general, I think it's best to avoid them completely.

@mike: I'll take this advice to heart! I've been a console gamer most of my life, but more recently I've been considering PC's because of theyre versatility and the diversity of games that come out on the platform. I think for my situation right now a gaming laptop makes more sense unfortunately. I'll quite literally only be living with the amount possessions I can carry physically and won't have a private living space for months or possibly years and expect to travel heavily. So unfortunately that doesn't leave much room for too separate machines. Ideally though I would probably take your advice. Either way the help is greatly appreciated! I'll be looking into those recommendations soon :)

Water? Pshaw! Get back to me once they've made a liquid nitrogen cooled one.

People are still talking about water cooling laptops as if it's a thing? We're water cooling phones now!

Kinda...

The bigger news that came out at the same time as this laptop cooling add on is that Nvidia has put out a proper 980 on the market for laptops. For people who use high end gaming laptops (like me) it's kind of a huge deal.

For years now gaming laptops had to settle for mobile versions of the desktop cards like say a 6990m or a 980m the (m) designation at the end is to show they are not the same as the desktop ones, due to power and spacing requirements. They cost more and offer less. For example on benchmarks a 980m is almost equivalent to a real 970. But in reality it's not even on that parity level due to certain effects and processes having a much larger impact on performance then it would in a normal card. Needless to say going from a 980m to a 980 would be a massive performance boost. And if all goes well and they continue it will usher in a new phase in which gaming laptops are now completely on par to desktops performance wise for all intents and purposes.

Talking about performance, I don't really see a desktop grade 980 in a gaming laptop as total overkill. A 980m was the best thing on the market in that space for some time and even that will not allow you to truly really max out the top of the line games. Like say Witcher 3, I can run at 60fps on a lot of things maxed out, but not object draw distance, SSAA or hairworks.

As for the liquid cooling for a laptop itself. Sure there is a use case for it. There have obviously been enough use cases for your regular 15-18" gaming laptops over the years, as several different manufacturers keep selling new models in that space and even competing with one another to a degree. Now gaming laptop design has come far over the years, resolving heat issues that were still prevalent 5 years ago, introducing low power modes, cutting down on the noise. But unfortunately noise is still a factor, now in a relatively non GPU intensive state most of them are quiet enough, but if a game is making a good use of that card you can bet your ass those laptops start to pipe up and the noise can get intense for some models. This could go a long way to solving that. Am I gonna buy one? Probably not, I splurged on a new gaming laptop just last year and I am not that rich just yet. And it's not gonna work for playing in bed either :P

When I was in college I had a decent laptop that I needed to bring to classes for taking notes and to the library for writing papers. However it was the only PC I had/couldn't afford a desktop (and had gotten a laptop in the first place as school was what I mainly needed it for, though also it was good enough to play games on the side). Over 4 years of college I eventually scrounged up enough for a separate monitor, but by the end overheating was definitely the #1 issue (as it tends to be with most laptops you play games on).

So there's a case where this would be useful.

So the guys over at Tested talked about this a couple of weeks ago on This is Only a Test. This thing is making a lot of VR developers extremely excited. Right now doing demos for VR games involves lugging around a desktop PC because a GTX 980 is pretty much the minimum spec for VR. A lot of VR teams are small handfuls of people. Having 5 demo stations at something like PAX means getting 5 bulky cases and all the bits there. With this thing, the space requirements for shipping went from a good part of a box truck to the trunk of my hatchback with room to spare. Also it turns out the kind of meeting rooms that developers go to for funding stuff aren't always very conducive to hooking up a desktop PC for your pitch.

So yea, it's mostly for developers. The marketing isn't going to say that though because they don't want to alienate the half dozen or so crazy people that want to get this so they can play maxed out games in their local Starbucks.

This doesn't seem like something most people would need. In the professional and hard core gamer market...maybe?

Surface Book looks sexy af and can play games. This... not so.

Also didn't realize vr was going to be so hardware intensive. So much for reaching the masses i guess.

Snapchat is for when you have an idea/moment that you want to share but don't think it's good/funny/clever enough to share on "real" social media.

Been there, done that....

@ripelivejam: It will take a few years before that happens. Next year the 1000 series should let a 1060 run a VR setup just fine, and the series after that you get into the budget cards being able to do it. By that time we should also start seeing more stuff games wise, and the headsets themselves will have a few years of life to work out the kinks.

Well i could see some use for it if you travel a lot, instead of having 2 systems (gaming laptop and desktop) you could have both. Leave the dock with the water cooler at home and just use the 980m when traveling, then at home you have a decent gaming computer with a gtx 980. Now taking that bulky ass water cooler anywhere seems stupid as shit though IMO.

However the water cooler looks ugly as hell, unless you have a spaceship themed office/room or something it just stands out in a bad way. But depending on the price you have a laptop and desktop in one sorta, maybe not the highest end desktop for that much hardware though. Although i'm not sure what the performance difference between a 980 and 980m is, i heard a 980m is actually pretty damn good itself.

@dave_tacitus: The new Lumia phones are actually water-cooled.

@isomeri: As someone who refuses to spend more than £100 on a phone I'm kinda speechless.

But also a little in awe...

@dave_tacitus: The phones are able to power a full Windows 10 desktop, which is pretty impressive. Then again I can't really think of a use case for a feature like that right now, but then again I thought the same way about PC to TV streaming 15 years ago.

For gamers by gamers! Get your elite gaming gear!

@isomeri: Now that AIO cooling systems are so common (and cheap) for desktops I guess it's not surprising that things are filtering down.

Love it.

It's the kind of ridiculous thing that I can get behind but wouldn't even buy. Might as well just build another desktop with the money you spend on that thing but I just love the thought that this exists.

Considering that you can get a full-fat GTX 980 in a laptop now, this seems more pointless than ever before (not that this doesn't look absurdly awesome, it totally does)!

Its scary to think that in maybe 10 years we might see 7nm CPUs standard, not just high end chip but the stuff in your mom's every day computer or a cheap phone. Such chips, likely made from more exotic materials, will run with a lot less power and generate a lot less heat. We will look back on liquid cooling chips and laugh.

Maybe in 20 years we might make Picometer chips, maybe circuits that are four or five atoms wide. They might be passively cooled even for our largest most densely packed CPU chips, or require only a small fan running slow enough to be nearly silent.

@dave_tacitus: Linus will stop at nothing until every device he owns is water cooled.

This is what I did. Get one of those reviled alienware laptops for gaming because I knew the impracticality of lugging around a real PC during college. It made total sense and only seems applicable to that situation.

Prefacing this by saying I think gaming laptops are the dumbest thing ever.

That said, this is a good solution for like, Navy people who don't really have a "home". So like, if you want to play game, have no internet, and physically can't have a desktop, this seems like a good workaround (I think the size of this would be pushing it though)

@dave_tacitus: @isomeri: Well, as someone who's currently using the Lumia 935, some kind of cooling solution is definitely in order. My phone gets uncomfortably hot when I run games on it.

I don't know how it is in the US, but in various countries over here in Europe people like to go to LAN-parties a lot. Maybe there might be a market for something like this for people who are into that.

You might as well use a desktop instead of that.