Asus's ROG G703 gaming laptop has a super-smooth screen to die for

Asus has announced that its ROG G703 gaming laptop, which boasts a seriously impressive 17.3-inch display with a 144Hz refresh rate for slick frame rates, is now on sale in the US. 

However, this power-packed portable is far from cheap.

In fact, it’ll set you back a weighty $3,499 (around £2,670, AU$4,530) – yes, cover your wallet’s ears – but the machine has an undeniably impressive spec, particularly that IPS screen which benefits from a 144Hz refresh rate as mentioned, along with Nvidia’s G-Sync tech to combat tearing and stuttering.

It has a 7ms response time (perhaps a slight weak point here, as we might have hoped for slightly lower) and is a Full HD resolution panel. The latter makes sense because to crank up the resolution further would rather defeat the point of the high refresh rate (as it would be difficult for any notebook to drive some games at those frame rates in a higher resolution).

We were certainly highly impressed with the panel in our recent hands-on experience with the notebook.

Naturally, Asus has put plenty of heavyweight components inside the G703 to drive that display, leading with an Intel Core i7-7820HK processor (which comes already overclocked, running at up to 4.3GHz) along with an overclockable GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card (with 8GB of video RAM).

Backing that up is a hefty 32GB of DDR4 (2,800MHz) system RAM. As for storage, you get a pair of 256GB NVMe PCIe SSDs set to RAID 0 configuration, with a 1TB hard disk for additional space.

Deliver us from dust

Asus further notes the laptop has plenty of (doubtless necessary) cooling, with a neat-sounding system that boasts a pair of high-performance fans along with a heat-pipe design that cools the CPU and GPU independently.

This cooling system is also designed to keep dust from accumulating inside the machine, which is probably a good idea given that the powerful components resident in the chassis don’t need any extra thermal stresses.

Other goodies include an RGB backlit mechanical gaming keyboard, and built-in wireless support for up to eight Xbox One controllers.

802.11ac (2x2) Wi-Fi is supported as well as Bluetooth 4.2, and connectors include one USB 3.1 Type-C port, backed by four USB 3.0 ports. There’s also a mini DisplayPort 1.4 and an HDMI 2.0 connector.

• You can purchase the Asus ROG G703 from Amazon here

You can buy the ROG G703 right now for $3,499 (around £2,670, AU$4,530), as mentioned, direct from Asus or from a number of retailers in the US, including Amazon.

• Will this make the cut for our best gaming laptops of 2017?