When you think of laptops, the clam shell design comes immediately to mind. This applies to even the largest of laptops, including those labelled as desktop replacements. ASUS has revealed the ROG Mothership that challenges this deep-seated design notion.
So what is the ASUS ROG Mothership? It’s essentially a notebook, except that it looks a lot more like a massive tablet. Instead of having all its internal components stored in the half with the keyboard, this one has everything squeezed right beneath the display.
This inevitably makes the screen the heaviest component of the setup. So much so, in fact, it comes with a foldable stand. The keyboard is also detachable, and when you do that, you can fold it in half so that it doesn’t take up unnecessary space.
The fact that it’s a standing tablet also means that ASUS has had opportunity to change things up for the cooling. The Mothership still uses air cooling, but rather than having it at the bottom where the hinges connect the two halves, ASUS has placed the vents for the cooling up top. This slows down dust buildup, as the Mothership isn’t taking air from off the table it’s sitting on.
Beyond the radical redesign, the ASUS ROG Mothership sports a 17.3-inch Full HD display with a 144Hz refresh rate and 3ms GTG response time. On the inside are the Intel Core i9 8950HK CPU and a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 mobile graphics. As for storage, we’re looking at a Raid 0 array of three NVMe SSDs.
ASUS has not yet announced the availability of the ROG Mothership, but the company has said that it will be made available in Q2 of 2019. Whether or not that includes the Malaysian market remains to be seen.
