Log in member
This miniature PC unit is designed to offer intense performance, all in a compact and tight body.
"Hello everyone and welcome to another Gamereactor Quick Look.
While we are waiting for Valve to finally give us the pricing models and the release date of the Steam Machine, you can already buy gaming PCs out there that are inherently made to either just save you space on your desk if it is you're using a gaming PC, or maybe approximate what a console does."
"So for instance, it could be next to your TV and you want to play PC games on there or use the PC platform.
And what springs to mind is, first of all, this.
This is the Asus ROG GR70 and I don't know if it is realistically represented on camera, but I would say this is around a third of the overall dimensions and space and volume of the PS5 Slim."
"That makes it really small.
And there is really not a lot of stuff that you save in terms of the overall functionality or the components inside.
So again, you could have this if you have your TV at home on something like a pedestal, you could mount this in a PS5 slot at the back, or you could even square this away in an entertainment sort of center underneath your TV and people wouldn't be any the wiser."
"The point is, the compact gaming PC is an overall interesting concept, one that Valve is very much trying to get in on by offering their Steam machine soon.
But you can already get something similar to it.
The GR70 is very small and very compact, but there is no real, at least tangible, way up front at the very least, that gives that away."
"So if you look here at the front, you get really strong I.O. already, so two USB-A ports and one USB Type-C port and a headphone jack.
But it gets way crazier back here, where we get double HDMI, double display port, USB 40G, 2.4 gigs of networking, and four USB Type-A ports."
"That's like a full desktop computer's worth of I.O. in a chassis with a motherboard that is really small.
Obviously, like with a lot of these kinds of things, you can get it in different SKUs, but this particular one, which I believe is like the Halo version, comes with an AMD Ryzen 9 9995X HX3D, though these CPU names are not getting any easier."
"And you also get an RTX 5070, however, that 5070 should be said is the laptop version.
These are no longer called Max-Q, they haven't for a couple of generations, but it is clocked at 115 watts, I believe, and has 8 gigs of onboard VRAM.
That means that it is definitely the less powerful version of this card, and in some instances I see have been compared to a desktop 4070, so last gen, compared to a laptop version of the 5070."
"So that should be just basically noted if you're going to purchase this.
And as far as I could tell, you can't get it with a larger GPU than that.
You can also get up to 96 gigs of DDR5 5600MHz RAM, which is very, very audacious, and obviously I think there are open M.2 SSD slots inside if you want to upgrade it yourself, but you can obviously get several terabytes if that's what you want."
"So, cooling.
How does that happen?
Well, there is this frosted plastic surface here on one side, but the overall cooling profile is mounted here on the side."
"What this is essentially called is something that Asus has coined as QuietFlow.
It is a triple fan setup here, ROG, so triple fans here mounted sideways on the board where both the CPU and the GPU is housed.
From here, it will take in cool air from the side and then exhaust at the back."
"Not an untraditional setup, but something that Asus in particular seemed to be very proud of in their own marketing and in the proposed results that this will give you.
They claim around, let's say, 45 decibels in performance mode, which really spools the QuietFlow fans up, which isn't really half bad, but we're going to have to see how that affects temperatures when we finally get around to testing this thing."
"As far as I could tell, it is a bit of a point of contention for something to be this small and then offer a compromised GPU experience.
The laptop 115-watt GPU unit seems to be a little low-balling in terms of what this thing is expected to cost and also just what kind of performance you could expect out of an expensive, let's say, space-saving machine like this, but we're going to put it through its paces."
"Maybe this is one of those instances where something like DLSS can really help, but we'll fully review this and get back to you very soon.
For now, it is extremely impressive that Asus were able to do this, so let's see if it can perform."
