Gadgetory

so we'll begin as always with a shout-out to Squarespace thanks for allowing us to be here at CES 2016 this my friends is the kind of stuff I get really really excited about portability and performance with no compromises I was trying to find another P word it didn't happen anyway this is the ROG XG 2 very creatively named the X is for extreme the G is for Gophers and the 2 is for second generation none of which is obviously right its external graphics I don't know what the 2 is maybe they have an internal project that God can somewhere along the way but this one looks like it turned out pretty darn well so in terms of the size I would say it's fairly comparable to that magma thing that I checked out about three years ago in terms of the functionality it bears very very little similarity so they've got one of those like badass like I did plasma tube things going on in the front this is a bit of a new look for them I'm not sure if that's going to make it into the final product or not apparently yes that will make it into the final product because this is not the final product look the whole thing just like comes apart so there's a couple cooling fans on the top and what they've got down there looks like a completely custom PCB that is converting to external DC power bricks so in this case each of them is about a 220 watt external brick into whatever connectors you want there's actually a 24 pin ATX connector in there although I don't know what that would be for in this form factor but what's actually connected to it now is two PCI Express power connectors and we have a geforce gtx 980ti running in here and it looks like a soos has pretty much gotten around the restrictions in terms of space for GPUs by just making the box a little bit bigger so you can have tall cards you can have long cards you can have rear blower cards you can put in pretty much whatever you want but that doesn't mean that the entire ecosystem will be totally open asus has not yet determined if the product while being definitely not validated on other makers notebooks will be compatible or whether we locked out and I personally feel pretty strongly it shouldn't be locked out because if you're willing to buy the box you've already given Asus your money so let us know in the comments if you agree with me in the meantime let's move on a little bit further so it adds not just display connectivity to your laptop not ads not just more GPU horsepower but it also acts as a USB hub and I wonder does it have a LAN port back here or did you not manage to squeeze that in there looks like no LAN port unfortunately but that's okay so basically the way it works is it's using a USB 3.1 type-c connector with Thunderbolt 3 to get a PCI Express 4x 3.0 link to your graphics card which is by the way more than enough that's about equivalent to a PCIe Gen 1 16x slot which is still not a bottleneck today so they're running all kinds of benchmarks over here on a mistery system that quite frankly they're being total assholes about and here it is so they're getting a score of 14,000 in firestrike which is pretty darn respectable you probably have to have a quad-core CPU for that yeah turns out they do so they've got a skylake core i7 6700 HQ running on this machine it's got 32 gigs of DDR 4 memory a 512 gig nvme PCI Express SSD it's got I don't know what else is they won't tell me anything about it they're letting me look at the system info in 3dmark but what they will not tell me they'll tell me that this processor the quad core like 3.3 gigahertz turbo processor they're telling me it doesn't throttle but they're not telling me how the crap they are doing it I don't believe them that it's an early prototype blah blah blah project that doesn't even have a name it's bullshit because the hinge on this thing is gorgeous the build quality of it is immaculate this is not an engineering sample I don't buy it at all in terms of i/o it's got mini DisplayPort it's got two USB type-c so one of those is for data over to that external box and one of them is actually for for charging power it's got a headphone jack it's got a couple USB 3.1 Zhai would guess but who knows they're probably not going to tell me that either it's got a mic it's got an SD card slot and this thing is gorgeous are telling me the display is 1080p I don't believe them because it doesn't look it doesn't look like it keyboard feels keep okay okay the keyboards a bit mushy maybe that's something they still have some work to do on but basically if this is a quad-core that doesn't throttle in this form factor with that external box then they basically nailed it now the one Holy Grail thing is whether it can survive being unplugged without causing a system crash because you've effectively just changed the graphics card of a system on the fly you've hot-plug the graphics card and let's give them a couple seconds they're advertising that it is functionality that it will have they're not necessarily saying that it works now so maybe it doesn't work yet ah yes well I wasn't going to leave the Asus booth without breaking at least one demo so there you go I broke it but they've got hopefully at least a few more months to get that fixed and I think that pretty much wraps up these suits booth for me thanks for checking out this video guys and thanks to Squarespace for allowing us to be here at CES 2016 covering the show if you guys are looking to build a website I think you know where to go squarespace.com slash Lynas use offer code linus and start building your beautiful website today