just yet. You’ll get just under three
hours of life out of it, and that’s
from normal usage and not
attempting to run any games.
Our advice would be to set the
Mothership up in one space,
and only use it on battery if
you need to briefly relocate
it somewhere.
Upgrading the Mothership is in
theory possible, but is a slightly
daunting affair. There are a
number of screws hidden away
around the chassis, proving that
Asus doesn’t want consumers to
go tinkering around inside. But
should your curiosity get the better
of you like ours did, it is entirely
possible to unscrew the back and
peek inside.
Here you’ll be greeted by the
three SSDs firmly screwed to the
motherboard, sitting under their
own heatsink. We’d wager that
RAM is also upgradeable as well,
but that is hidden away under its
own more complicated-looking
heatsink that we didn’t quite feel
like disturbing.
The Asus ROG Mothership is
certainly a feat of engineering, with
plenty of powerful components
hidden away in a fairly deceptive
form factor. It crosses a weird line
between the world of laptops
and desktops, and we’re impressed
by what Asus has managed to
pull off.
But what ultimately stands out
is not the performance of the
Mothership, but its price tag.
Could you build an equally
powerful desktop PC for the
same amount or less? Possibly.
Would it look as cool as this?
Probably not.Gets a lot right for a first attempt,
but still needs a bit of tweaking
to make it truly flawless.rather than trying to swivel it
around to show something to
someone nearby.
Performance with external
screens was very good, both across
HDMI and Thunderbolt 3, so those
looking to use 4k displays won’t be
disappointed. The Mothership was
able to comfortably drive two
external displays without issues.
Keys and gaming
The keyboard is an interesting
feature of the ROG Mothership.
Detach the keyboard and you have
to wait a second or two for the
system to automatically detect that
it’s now running in wireless mode.
There’s a manual switch on the
keyboard that turns the wireless
mode off or on, but leaving it on
doesn’t cause any issues, even
when it’s attached.
Typing is quite comfortable, as
the keys have been slightly curved
to cradle your fingers better. With
2.5mm of key travel, you don’t have
to press as hard to register a
keystroke, so long hours of gaming
shouldn’t be a problem. The
keyboard also supports per-key
RGB lighting, so you can pick a
visual style that matches your
preferences, or just turn off the
lighting altogether.
A point to note is that when the
keyboard is attached, there’s an
alarming amount of flex to it at the
part where the hinge is attached
just above the keys. We’d be quite
worried if something heavy fell on
this keyboard, as it most certainly
would cause some damage to it.
The other annoyance is the
second hinge the connects the
keyboard to the Asus ROG
Mothership often takes a bit of
fiddling to properly connect. It’s
not as quick as connecting a
keyboard cover to an iPad or even
the Microsoft Surface, so you’regoing to spend a good few seconds
wriggling things about until the
keyboard is seated properly.
Given that the ROG Mothership
bundles an RTX 2080 GPU, we
were keen to see how it would
handle ray tracing, which is
being introduced to more and
more games. Firing up Shadow
of the Tomb Raider on Ultra with
ray tracing enabled clocked in
82fps, which is still very impressive.
Likewise, Remedy’s Control gave us
a steady 98fps with ray tracing
enabled, turning an already
excellent-looking game into a
visual treat.Battery and upgrades
The Mothership does have a
battery, but don’t get too excited“An unfortunate side effect of having this much
power is that you need two power bricks to drive it”
Upgrade
Asus ROG Mothership
December 2019 | |^81
Specs as reviewed
Asus ROG Mothership
Supplier http://www.asus.com
CPU 2.4GHz Intel Core i9-9980HK
GPU Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080
RAM 64GB
Storage 3x 512GB NVME SSDs
Connectivity 802.11ax Wi-Fi,
Bluetooth 5.0
Weight 4.8kg