Asus ROG Strix GL702ZC gaming laptop is a Ryzen-powered beast

At Computex, AMD has shown off the first Ryzen-powered gaming laptop – made by Asus – and its an eight-core CPU beast.

The freshly unveiled Asus ROG Strix GL702ZC, a 17.3-inch laptop which has a ton of power under the bonnet courtesy of an octo-core Ryzen 7 1700 processor. That’s the top spec version, mind you, and there will be lower-end variants of the notebook featuring six-core Ryzen 5 1600 and quad-core Ryzen 3 1200 CPUs.

As for the graphics card, there’s a full discrete AMD Radeon RX 580 with 8GB of video RAM on board.

Asus notes that overclocking of the processor will not be possible, doubtless due to the laptop form-factor and thermal issues, but even running at stock speeds, that’s a mighty powerful combination.

It’ll be backed by up to 32GB of DDR4-2400 system memory, and on the storage front there’s an M.2 slot for an NVMe SSD of up to 512GB capacity. There will also be a 2.5-inch drive bay for a second SSD or a larger spinning hard disk.

As for the display, that’ll be a matte IPS panel available in a number of different options, including 1080p or a 4K screen – the latter will run with a refresh rate of 60Hz, with the Full HD screens offering a choice of 75Hz or 120Hz.

Whichever display you plump for, it’ll come with AMD’s FreeSync tech to minimize stuttering and tearing, for a smoother, all-rounded gaming experience.

The Strix GL702ZC weighs in at just under 7lb (just over 3kg) and is 33mm thick – not the smallest laptop in the world by any means, but given the power on board here, that’s only to be expected.

No pricing has been mentioned yet, but this ROG notebook is expected to launch later this summer.

Mobile magic

Beyond this lone Ryzen-powered gaming laptop, AMD has also stated how its latest mobile APUs could benefit thin-and-light notebooks. The company indulged us with the first public demonstration of a Ryzen mobile APU running in a super-slim reference design laptop.

For the uninitiated, APU stands for Accelerated Processing Unit (as opposed to CPU), and it simply means that AMD has put the processor and GPU on the same chip.

The new APU boasts a quad-core processor (with eight threads) and a Vega-based graphics solution – which is AMD’s next-gen graphics architecture – and it’s designed to bring relatively powerful performance levels to notebooks which are less than 15mm thick.

Sadly AMD didn’t provide any hard specs or benchmarks, but did show a laptop with the new APU smoothly playing HD video. We’ll need to see more than that, of course, but even the basic details here point to a potentially very powerful solution for ultra-portable machines.

You might also be interested to learn that we’ve taken the Asus ROG Zephyrus for a hands-on spin, the gaming notebook which features Nvidia’s Max-Q technology.