One product from Asus caught our eye more than most over at CES. No, it’s not the all-pink peripherals, although I am quite enamored with them, it’s Mothership: a desktop replacement gaming 2-in-1, complete with an Nvidia RTX 2080, that I can’t quite make heads or tails of.
You’ve got to love CES for all the weird and wonderful ideas that are unveiled for the very first time in Vegas. And while Razer may be well-know for its bizarre, newfangled contraptions, it’s not the only one that wants to push the boundaries of gaming tech. Asus also has some ideas on how to tackle the unique challenges it believes are present for gamers in their day-to-day lives.
One of Asus’ prospective solutions is Mothership, a desktop replacement hybrid that blends the portability and space-saving of a gaming laptop with the modularity of a device akin to Microsoft’s Surface. But while most desktop replacements are your usual laptop-style fare, it’s the monitor portion of this device that encases all the necessary components to make your games tick.
This includes a mobile Intel Core i9 8950HK, an RTX 2080, and three NVMe SSDs in RAID 0 for all your storage needs. And, seeing as it’s an ROG product, it’s got RGB lighting to boot.
Asus believes the standing orientation will be key to the Mothership’s success. While traditional laptops have to excrete hot air from the underside of the chassis, a hinge at the rear of the Mothership allows it to efficiently exude heat from all that high-powered componentry out the top and sides of the upright device.
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Otherwise the other half of the device is a humble keyboard and trackpad combo. But, as Asus found that gamers prefer gaming at an angle, it saw fit to implement a unique foldable design to not only double up as a screen protector but also fold away into a full-sized raised keyboard peripheral.
And unlike most of the weird and wonderful devices we rant about at CES or Computex every year, never to be seen ever again, Asus intends to get this device out to the market pronto. The Mothership will be available starting in Q2, with pricing for this unidentified folding object to be announced at a later date.
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