Asus’s drool-worthy ROG gaming laptops pack extreme specs into small spaces

Tucked among the CES 2023 reveals of health sensors that you pee on and pod PCs were this year’s laptop announcements—and while they don’t grab headlines in quite the same way, these upcoming releases still give hardware fans plenty to be excited about.

Take Asus’s lineup for example. Its ROG gaming laptops span the gamut in size, with ultraportable 13-inch models on one end and astronomic 18-inch offerings on the other. But no matter the footprint, every single one of these notebooks sport incredibly beefy hardware. Long gone are the days of four-core processors and cut down mobile graphics. These laptops mean business, sporting top-of-the-line processors and ultra fast graphics.

You can catch all of them in the video embedded above, including the astoundingly thin Zephyrus M16, which measures less than 20mm thick yet still sports a Core i9-13900H and discrete Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics chip. It wasn’t the only ROG laptop with Nvidia’s top-of-the-line graphics chip, either. Full, untamed versions power the ROG Strix Scar 16 and 18, rated at a blistering 175W TDP—you won’t have to make compromises in your game settings. And the Strix models boast plenty of eye candy on the machines themselves, too, with gorgeous RGB LED strips at the front and rear of the chassis, along with translucent paneling reminiscent of the 90s.

Be sure to also get the rundown on the company’s two 13-inch thin-and-light models, the detachable tablet ROG Flow Z13 and 360-hinge ROG Flow X13. By their looks, you might assume they’re underpowered, with mid-range processors and a half-step above integrated graphics, but you’d be wrong. The tiny Z13 runs a Core i9-13900H and an RTX 4060 inside—leaps and bounds above what you’d get from a similar-looking Surface Pro. Meanwhile, the X13 features AMD’s newly unveiled Ryzen 9 7940HS and an RTX 4070. And as icing on the cake, you can link these laptops with one of Asus’ proprietary external GPUs. The RTX 3080 version is out now, and Asus is promising a 4090 version to come in the future.

Prices have yet to be announced, but we should hear more on that in the coming weeks. Good news is, you won’t have long to wait—these juicy new laptops will start hitting streets in the second quarter of the year. While you wait, check out our roundup of the best laptops at CES 2023 and be sure to subscribe to PCWorld’s YouTube channel for more videos like this!