Asus ROG GX800VH Review: A Ludicrous Liquid ... - Ars Technica

The result is both a dramatic reduction in temperatures and an increase in performance versus air cooling alone. Undocked, the CPU—which is overclocked to 4.4GHz by default—is easily throttled in synthetic tests, with temperatures peaking above 91 degrees Celsius. The GPUs, while staying within their own thermal limits at 76 degrees, only hit a top clock speed of 1,721MHz.

Docked, the CPU hits a mere 50 degrees under synthetic load, while the GPU hits 60 degrees and clocks at a much higher 1873MHz. That’s almost as high as a desktop GTX 1080, offering more than enough performance to make good use of the built-in 4K 60Hz display.

However, such performance demands that you use both the included 330W power supplies—one plugged into the dock, and the other into the side of the laptop. It’s possible to use the laptop with just one power supply, but without enough juice on tap the GPUs don’t clock as high. It’s also worth noting that liquid cooling, at least in this case, doesn’t mean quiet. This is one loud laptop, with only the pitch of the fans changing depending on whether it’s docked or not. The noise is certainly more bearable when using the liquid cooling system, but if noise is a concern, a desktop is the way to go.

Performance is, as you’d expect for a computer packing an i7 and two GTX 1080’s, impressive. Compared to a GTX 1080 Ti paired with a mighty eight-core Intel processor, the GX800VH often comes in faster at its native display resolution of 4K. That said, SLI support remains something of an oddity. In Hitman, for example, the GX800VH came nowhere near the frame rate of a the lone GTX 1080 Ti. That’s not to mention that, across the board, 99th percentile minimum frame times are poor due to increased frame variance caused by rendering across two GPUs. I didn’t find it all that noticeable during gameplay, but some are more sensitive to this than others.