Best Asus Laptops of 2018 to buy this Festival
Best Asus Laptops of 2018: Welcome to the latest edition of tech check where we bring you everything about technology that happened over this week. Beginning with our top story, a lot of exciting innovations have taken place at one of the biggest trade shows of the year, Computex 2018 that ran from June 5 until June 9, is a very PC centric show.
It means that Computex is lurching towards us but before teaming gadgets climb aboard some absurdly long flights to Taipei, we wanted to give you an idea of what we expect from the show. There is a lot of new hardware, new laptops, new PC’s for gamers, and for regular people alike and everything that is going inside of it. There is a lot of exciting stuff to check out at Computex 2018.
Computex is dominated by ASUS, Taiwan’s biggest PC maker and we are expecting to see plenty of new products from the company. We are going to start things off on the gaming side, with Asus’ Republic of Gamers Line. They introduced two new laptops, Strix Scar2 and the Strix Hero2.
These are sort of like mid-tier gaming laptops with latest Intel Core i7, 8th generation processors, GTX1060, or 1070 GPU’s, and a 15-inch HD display. These are very much ASUS ROG laptops. The style is very distinct, but they are still rather portable for being full powered gaming laptops. Those laptops aren’t the only thing to come out of ROG, they came out with their first phone. It is very much a gamer-centric phone, has a gamer-centric design, very much looks like ROG device but it still has a lot of power behind it.
It has a high power version of the Snapdragon 845 processor. They picked the very best off the line to get the maximum performance. It has 8 gigabytes of RAM and even comes with a little fan attachment to make sure it never overheats. The ROG phone even has a dock for your TV, a fully wireless dock, a controller add-on, and even a dual display gamepad.
It is unlike anything that we have seen before in the phone space, and we are really looking forward to spending a little bit more time with it. Asus kind of caught off guard here, as they unveiled what they call, Project Precog, which is essentially a dual screen laptop because they have taken out the keyboard deck and the trackpad, and replaced it with a second touch display.
It is the sort of thing that has seen in concepts before, but Asus says that they are going to come out with it in the next 18 months, by the end of 2019.
Speaking of gaming hardware, there is MSI, known for ten years for their gamer-centric designs. And they have come out with a new laptop that at the surface level, doesn’t look so much like a gaming PC. The first laptop, PS42, drops the very gamer-centric black plastics and RGB lights design for a more understated look of thin and light, and silver aluminium. Both look out of place at a coffee shop, or at a business portable but that doesn’t mean it’s not a powerful laptop.
It sports corei7 processors and MX 150 GPU, and it’s a plenty capable, portable gaming machine, just doesn’t look like it on the outside. Asus has some other laptops in store, including the ZenBook Pro, and this is a high-powered device made primarily for creators.
It sports core i9 processor, NVidia GTX1050TIGPU, up to 16 gigabytes of RAM and a terabyte of SSD storage with four lanes of PCIe. It is a fast highly performed laptop, a sort of powerful machine that people who are working in photoshop and premier and doing 3D rendering really look forward too. It also has a 4K display with highly accurate colours that sort of designers really need to make sure that there are products as good as it can be.
It has something that is a little different, called the screen pad. They replaced the trackpad with a 5.5 inch HD display, still works like a trackpad, have Microsoft precision drivers with its own little apps in it, and also act as a second window and second display. It is an interesting concept so far the execution hasn’t been great but might be able to improve in near future.
Now if you don’t need something as powerful and expensive as the ZenBook Pro, the new ZenBook S, which is Asus’ thin and light powerful laptops. It is thinner than a MacBook, and lighter than a Dell XPS13, but has still all the power and the latest chips and processors that you want.
It also has a new Ergo Lift Hinge Design, where it actually opens up, and the bottom of the laptop lifts up about 5 degrees, for a little bit more of an ergonomic typing experience and better ventilation. And this wouldn’t be computex, if we didn’t talk about components.
Talking about the hardware and the stuff that goes inside of these PC’s and we are right at the beginning of what’s looking like the first salvos of the processor war. Intel came out, announcing a new Hexa Core processor, that can bump up to 5 gigahertz in boost mode, and then they came with another announcement that they want to do 28-core processor later this year.
However, AMD also simultaneously announced that they would do a 32-core processor later this year, and both these are due out later this year. It very much looks like that we have left the megahertz and gigahertz wars behind, and diving head first into the core wars.
Speaking of processors, Qualcomm is also getting into the PC processors game. It is seen before with the Snapdragon 835, and a couple of Windows devices, but now they are coming out with Snapdragon 850, which is designed expressly for use in Windows PC’s. With the Snapdragon 850, Qualcomm is going far after Intel and AMD’s bread and butter; they are going to be mainstream users, putting these devices in $500- $800 range.
First armed chips that are really capable of running Windows with a price range just so happens to be. This new Qualcomm chip has distinct advantages over the competing Intel chips. It runs cooler, so it means less heating. It uses less power so you don’t need much battery. You can have a longer-lasting device, and thus you can make devices that are thinner and lighter, and more responsible and flexible to what consumer demands.
It is always connected and always-on, so, your tablet or PC will behave more like a phone than a computer. The Snapdragon 850 is due out later in 2018 and looking forward to spending some time with these high-powered ARM PC’s. And while ARM processors are going to open up a whole new world of possibilities for portable computers, the desktop isn’t left out of things either.
NVidia showed off max Q, an effort to squeeze high-end graphics chips into incredibly thin laptop systems. The ROG Zephyrus, for instance, crammed a GTX1080 inside a device that was just 16.9millimeters at its thinnest. NVidia was able to cram in such a powerful graphics, thanks to the host of clever hardware and software tweaks.
We will be seeing the second generation of max-Q laptops sooner in the year-end that offer even better efficiency and heat management. Intel always turns up with something great for the Computex.
The enthusiast’s crowd would be interested in hearing about company’s 18-core, X-series chips which are silly and expensive but have the performance to match.
Microsoft has unveiled a whole new category of PC’s for the office, essentially like, the meeting room and the boardroom and calls them as Windows Collaboration Displays, inspired by Microsoft Surface Hub. The first ones coming up are from Sharp and Avocore.
We don’t know the whole lot about them right now, but we just know that Sharp’s is going to be this big 70-Inch high-resolution display, a night resolution camera on it, and is going to do more than just having a PC hooked up to a big screen in the office. We will be seeing more later this year, heading into next year.
The Oculus goal and vive focus are both stand-alone VR headsets that don’t require connections to bulky pieces to work but it is still too early to know if the public and developers will finally get on board. For everything coming out of Computex 2018, keep your eyes on aim gadgets, it is the next best thing to being there.
