If only for the shi*ty design that every "gaming" device out there must follow it seems. Or maybe the 50% markup on the price (you could probably build your own for $3500 or less. Or even the questionable technical solution chosen for cooling in combination with the slanted case (hey, it's a "gaming" device", it must look alienish) which all but guarantees hot air will have a harder time exiting the case.
Looks to me like so many companies build stuff for people with more money than sense these days. And Asus is really one of the frontrunners in this trend.
If they came in with some nice small sturdy aluminum design... "MAYBE" i'd consider it. Personally i'd rather see something along the MSI nightblade barebones.. and even MSI went all funky with something meant more fore a teen than a adult.
Also, cooling seems really iffy. CPU cooler as the sole exhaust fan? Does it have any intake fans? Those 1080's are going to run super hot, especially as they seem to be the same width as the inside of the chassis. How are they going to breathe in there? Actually, cooling isn't iffy; it seems absolutely horrible.
I know you're joking, really I do, but must say that since we both know heat rises, the heat from the VRMs is going straight over the hard drives. They will melt before the video cards do; as the blower fans will pump the GPU heat out the back. But the VRM heat will not.
The ugly hole in the front bottom looks like it could be a covered fan intake, if the cards are blower style they wouldn't need any extra exhausts, and not needing to provision extra exhaust fans is a big part of why OEMs prefer blower cards to open air designs/
Though there is not a chance in hell I would buy a system this expensive when I could come close enough in performance for half the cost, I sure hope the price includes the monitor.
The picture is a fake. The specular highlights on the GPUs are identical, and the specular highlights on the HDDs are identical. It's photoshopped together, perhaps as a proof of concept to gauge consumer interest.
It's gaudy, Bulky, expensive.. and there's nothing of major interest that you could get built anywhere else using many of your own parts for a boatload less.
My ideal machine would use a smaller aluminum casing.. with a removable MB tray, not so flashy lighting.. (logo's are fine) but a more muted approach that screams quality not bling..
Is it just me (and it probably is), but does it seem these Transformers-type tower cases, designed to instill FEAR! in its enemies and POWAH! in the warrior who wields it, is just so farking overdone to death that truly it's same-old same-old each and every year with ZERO thinking outside the clunky, cumbersome and definitely NOT sleek or aerodynamic box of beauty that we SHOULD be beholding.
Whilst doing tech support pre- and post-Y2K, I thought if I have to see one more #$%@% beige case, keyboard or monitor, my head is literally, LITERALLY, going pop off my shoulders like a rage rocket, then roll out of the office to find a taxi to Bill Gates' house and BEG him in the name of all that's right and holy and overclocked to give these case designers permission to use color.
It's like manufacturers were actually *afraid* of color. For fark's sake, it's like each and every man in the Windows milieu was convinced that nothing but beige would sell, that the product wouldn't be taken seriously unless it was HIDEOUS BEYOND WORDS. But look at iMacs. They went with the purest, most ethereal, most glass-like white and I swear I saw Tech Jesus nodding his head in approval.
Do YOU guys like the aesthetics of the towers shown in this article? If that's the style that pleases extreme users, then ya gotta give 'em what they want. Or DO you? What if manufacturers gave extreme users *better* than what want? Perhaps even mind-blowing better than anything previously imagined?
I'd bet my last sip of water in a desert that no one, not one person, was genuinely sincerely blown away by the "creativity" of this design announcement, and if anyone managed to sit through that entire exquisitely dull presentation without praying for death just to make it the pain stop, I'd give THAT smart person my last sip of water in the desert.
We went from everything-is-beige to everything-is-black. In the all-black era, color is even eliminated where it serves a purpose (color coded wiring).
Black is beautiful and there are a thousand shades of black to choose from. It was a huge welcome relief from the desert sands of beige. In fact, the color black is SO important that when color scientists developed the darkest blackest black in history, called Vantablack, an artist bought exclusive rights to the color. This black is so black is absorbs 99.965% of radiation. A whole lotta uses for that and not just artistic.
For crying out loud, Windows hardware makers couldn't even go with white. White is clean, clear and fresh. What's so wrong about that?
The public still hadn't yet begun to agree with Gates that there will be a PC in every house, so apparently beige, then black, were the only acceptable colors in a very very serious business where we take our very serious business very seriously, otherwise people might think we're a buncha girly-men.
First time I saw a shiny sparkly new chrome-bedecked laptop for sale, I nearly wept with joy. They practically had to carry me out of the store....after getting my Visa number, expiration date and 3-digit security code, of course.
Naturally that first chrome (not Chrome) laptop had shiat for cooling so it overheated and died in less than six months, approximately 2 nanoseconds after the warranty expired. Had I known it was gonna get hotter than the surface of a thousand burning suns, I'd have baked some cookies on it before throwing that cheap crap on top of the ever-growing tower of the other cheap crap I'd succumbed to.
And that's how I learned my new #1 priority when buying laptops which remains to this day: COOLING. That thing better be a farking igloo with the cooling or I'm not buying. Where are the fans?? That's IT?? Two tiny fans on the bottom with teensy air spaces the width of a paper cut?
After wasting money on who knows how many skinny "home" laptops, I said grrrrr and started buying the Alienware 18". I was no longer traveling as much for work, but I still didn't want a desktop tower, so it made sense to buy a 9,000 pound BEAST with a giant screen and enough fan power to elevate my house off the ground.
I'm on my third Alienware 18" (silver, then red, then silver) and sadly it's a rather dull affair now, slowly but surely falling to pieces. A new ASUS ROG 17" is waiting in my garage for its unveiling and am very excited about that. My first ROG. Wheeee!
If the allegedly "refreshed" Alienware 17s are as exciting as promised, which I doubt, I shall take a serious look. But it has seemed for quite some time, years even, that Dell as a whole has no more f*cks to give regarding cutting-edge hardware. We should hold a funeral for them, for in their heyday, Dell ROCKED.
God these companies keep churning out ugly ass computers. Seriously who looked at that in the developmental stages and said that is one good looking computer. Just crap!
1. CPU=$300 2. MOBO=$200 3. GPUS=$1400 4. Cooling=$140 5. RAM=$250 6. SSD's=$250 7. PSU=$80 8. CASE=$120 9.FANS=$80 ============= Total: $2570 givce or take and ASUS wants $4999 for it? Outrageous, though I am sure there will be many suckers who will fall for it, just not us, enthusiasts.
I guess to extract maximum margins, they need a product to appeal to rich, tasteless customers who don't know much about computers.
The non-rich or knowledgeable customers will demand a smaller mark-up. That leaves the rich, tasteful customers who don't know much about computers, who will buy Macs.
This isn't a review nor does it claim to be a review. Anton doesn't usually post reviews, rather PR statements from different manufacturers. The only expectation I have from these articles is to be fact checked and not let the OEMs try to bullsh*t potential buyers with unclear or contradicting statements. If AT clears up all potential irregularities from that PR statement then I see nothing wrong with it.
After checking out tweak town's dive on this it actually is a much better solution than I thought. No mention of TRIM support but it seems implied that it is present given things like samsung magician's OP can be used. What a nice future the storage specs and intel have made for us.
However that means of the 20 available lanes 16 wants to be used by each GPU and 4 wants to be used by each SSD. Only 8 lanes per GPU and 2 lanes per SSD are used. This isn't a big deal for the GPUs but the SSDs will almost certainly be limited by that. The performance benefit over single SSD is likely smaller in a Z chipset with two GPUs present. At this price point it really should have been a single titan xp.
I have spent that much on a computer once; it got me a four-socket 48-core Opteron server which has been crunching away 24/365 for the last six years, and is still faster at what I want to do with it than any single-socket solution Intel sells.
An absurd amount of the cost is that stupid RAID0 setup. Two NVMe M.2 drives, each costing over $300, also requires a motherboard with two NVMe drives. Since this is Asus, that leaves only the Asus Z170 Deluxe ($280) or the Asus Z170-WS ($350). Had they gone with a more sane single SSD setup using NVMe, it would cut $315 off the storage cost plus they can downgrade to the Z170-A, a $150 board, saving another $130. In effect, that 1TB RAID0 NVMe setup costs $760 which is an entire GTX 1080-OC. The lack of description of the 1TB drive leads me to suspect they went cheap with a WD Blue or similar. A better setup would be a Z170-A with a 256GB NVMe Samsung 950 Pro and some hard drive configuration using WD Black drives. Let the customer choose what they want: 2 drives in RAID0, 2 drives in RAID1, 3 drives in RAID5, 4 drives in RAID5, or 4 drives in RAID10, and let them choose the capacity - WD Blacks range from 1 to 6TB.
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52 Comments
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bigboxes - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
Not a chance. LOLclose - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
If only for the shi*ty design that every "gaming" device out there must follow it seems. Or maybe the 50% markup on the price (you could probably build your own for $3500 or less. Or even the questionable technical solution chosen for cooling in combination with the slanted case (hey, it's a "gaming" device", it must look alienish) which all but guarantees hot air will have a harder time exiting the case.Looks to me like so many companies build stuff for people with more money than sense these days. And Asus is really one of the frontrunners in this trend.
just4U - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
If they came in with some nice small sturdy aluminum design... "MAYBE" i'd consider it. Personally i'd rather see something along the MSI nightblade barebones.. and even MSI went all funky with something meant more fore a teen than a adult.MaidoMaido - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
Well said!MaidoMaido - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
It's a $5k eyesore.Meteor2 - Sunday, November 13, 2016 - link
Well I like it. Each to their own.close - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
The aesthetics are the only aspect that might be up for debate due to subjectivity. Everything else is not.Kepe - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
Erm... You save ~1000 - 1500 USD by building this thing yourself. That's quite a hefty price to pay just for someone to build the system for you.Kepe - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
Also, cooling seems really iffy. CPU cooler as the sole exhaust fan? Does it have any intake fans? Those 1080's are going to run super hot, especially as they seem to be the same width as the inside of the chassis. How are they going to breathe in there?Actually, cooling isn't iffy; it seems absolutely horrible.
bigboxes - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
No, you got it all wrong. The case is tilted and all the heat runs out the back!Eidigean - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
I know you're joking, really I do, but must say that since we both know heat rises, the heat from the VRMs is going straight over the hard drives. They will melt before the video cards do; as the blower fans will pump the GPU heat out the back. But the VRM heat will not.DanNeely - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
The ugly hole in the front bottom looks like it could be a covered fan intake, if the cards are blower style they wouldn't need any extra exhausts, and not needing to provision extra exhaust fans is a big part of why OEMs prefer blower cards to open air designs/abrowne1993 - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
Yep, without even trying to be frugal I priced out a similar build for around $3200.t.s - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
Well, this build is for people that's not so normal. So, it's not for you, for me, or for anybody here, I think :)descendency - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
For the price difference, you could include Titan Xs instead of 1080s.supdawgwtfd - Saturday, November 12, 2016 - link
No SLI on Titan X is there?Murloc - Sunday, November 13, 2016 - link
even if you're unable to, you can take the list of pieces and pay only extra 100$ to a shop to build it for you, with warranty and everything.Shadowmaster625 - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
2017 is 6 weeks away. To celebrate, I'm going to blow $5000 on... skylake? Wait what?Yuriman - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
What's wrong with that case? It's leaning and it looks like the front is broken.Tewt - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
Though there is not a chance in hell I would buy a system this expensive when I could come close enough in performance for half the cost, I sure hope the price includes the monitor.vred - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
That case. Looks like run-of-the-mill $50 case with Transformer-esque plastic shroud.Eidigean - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
The picture is a fake. The specular highlights on the GPUs are identical, and the specular highlights on the HDDs are identical. It's photoshopped together, perhaps as a proof of concept to gauge consumer interest.abrowne1993 - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
Most promotional images are faked in one way or another.close - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
These days most marketing images are renders. Case in point: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10811/zotac-zbox-mag...Hurn - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
Looking at the photo of the rear - where'd the 2nd video card go? There appears to only be one.TemjinGold - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
DDR4-2800 for a $5k rig? Really?just4U - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
Here is the problem Asus..It's gaudy, Bulky, expensive.. and there's nothing of major interest that you could get built anywhere else using many of your own parts for a boatload less.
My ideal machine would use a smaller aluminum casing.. with a removable MB tray, not so flashy lighting.. (logo's are fine) but a more muted approach that screams quality not bling..
OooShiny - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
Is it just me (and it probably is), but does it seem these Transformers-type tower cases, designed to instill FEAR! in its enemies and POWAH! in the warrior who wields it, is just so farking overdone to death that truly it's same-old same-old each and every year with ZERO thinking outside the clunky, cumbersome and definitely NOT sleek or aerodynamic box of beauty that we SHOULD be beholding.Whilst doing tech support pre- and post-Y2K, I thought if I have to see one more #$%@% beige case, keyboard or monitor, my head is literally, LITERALLY, going pop off my shoulders like a rage rocket, then roll out of the office to find a taxi to Bill Gates' house and BEG him in the name of all that's right and holy and overclocked to give these case designers permission to use color.
It's like manufacturers were actually *afraid* of color. For fark's sake, it's like each and every man in the Windows milieu was convinced that nothing but beige would sell, that the product wouldn't be taken seriously unless it was HIDEOUS BEYOND WORDS. But look at iMacs. They went with the purest, most ethereal, most glass-like white and I swear I saw Tech Jesus nodding his head in approval.
Do YOU guys like the aesthetics of the towers shown in this article? If that's the style that pleases extreme users, then ya gotta give 'em what they want. Or DO you? What if manufacturers gave extreme users *better* than what want? Perhaps even mind-blowing better than anything previously imagined?
I'd bet my last sip of water in a desert that no one, not one person, was genuinely sincerely blown away by the "creativity" of this design announcement, and if anyone managed to sit through that entire exquisitely dull presentation without praying for death just to make it the pain stop, I'd give THAT smart person my last sip of water in the desert.
cbm80 - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
We went from everything-is-beige to everything-is-black. In the all-black era, color is even eliminated where it serves a purpose (color coded wiring).OooShiny - Saturday, November 12, 2016 - link
Black is beautiful and there are a thousand shades of black to choose from. It was a huge welcome relief from the desert sands of beige. In fact, the color black is SO important that when color scientists developed the darkest blackest black in history, called Vantablack, an artist bought exclusive rights to the color. This black is so black is absorbs 99.965% of radiation. A whole lotta uses for that and not just artistic.Photo of the blackest black material ever invented:
http://hyperallergic.com/279243/anish-kapoor-gets-...
For crying out loud, Windows hardware makers couldn't even go with white. White is clean, clear and fresh. What's so wrong about that?
The public still hadn't yet begun to agree with Gates that there will be a PC in every house, so apparently beige, then black, were the only acceptable colors in a very very serious business where we take our very serious business very seriously, otherwise people might think we're a buncha girly-men.
First time I saw a shiny sparkly new chrome-bedecked laptop for sale, I nearly wept with joy. They practically had to carry me out of the store....after getting my Visa number, expiration date and 3-digit security code, of course.
Naturally that first chrome (not Chrome) laptop had shiat for cooling so it overheated and died in less than six months, approximately 2 nanoseconds after the warranty expired. Had I known it was gonna get hotter than the surface of a thousand burning suns, I'd have baked some cookies on it before throwing that cheap crap on top of the ever-growing tower of the other cheap crap I'd succumbed to.
And that's how I learned my new #1 priority when buying laptops which remains to this day: COOLING. That thing better be a farking igloo with the cooling or I'm not buying. Where are the fans?? That's IT?? Two tiny fans on the bottom with teensy air spaces the width of a paper cut?
After wasting money on who knows how many skinny "home" laptops, I said grrrrr and started buying the Alienware 18". I was no longer traveling as much for work, but I still didn't want a desktop tower, so it made sense to buy a 9,000 pound BEAST with a giant screen and enough fan power to elevate my house off the ground.
I'm on my third Alienware 18" (silver, then red, then silver) and sadly it's a rather dull affair now, slowly but surely falling to pieces. A new ASUS ROG 17" is waiting in my garage for its unveiling and am very excited about that. My first ROG. Wheeee!
If the allegedly "refreshed" Alienware 17s are as exciting as promised, which I doubt, I shall take a serious look. But it has seemed for quite some time, years even, that Dell as a whole has no more f*cks to give regarding cutting-edge hardware. We should hold a funeral for them, for in their heyday, Dell ROCKED.
doggface - Sunday, November 13, 2016 - link
Cool story broZak - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
Yikes! Awful. At least they managed to make some of their ROG displays not look awful, but this is gaudy. GT=Gaudy Turd?bull2760 - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
God these companies keep churning out ugly ass computers. Seriously who looked at that in the developmental stages and said that is one good looking computer. Just crap!Gazzy - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
Way overpriced for what it offers.Achaios - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
So, let's see:1. CPU=$300
2. MOBO=$200
3. GPUS=$1400
4. Cooling=$140
5. RAM=$250
6. SSD's=$250
7. PSU=$80
8. CASE=$120
9.FANS=$80
=============
Total: $2570 givce or take and ASUS wants $4999 for it? Outrageous, though I am sure there will be many suckers who will fall for it, just not us, enthusiasts.
Achaios - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
Sry, it adds up to $2820. Error due to post-box being so small and not being able to see all of the post.Maban - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
I came out to around $2800 myself. You'd have to be an idiot to buy this.stephenbrooks - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
I guess to extract maximum margins, they need a product to appeal to rich, tasteless customers who don't know much about computers.The non-rich or knowledgeable customers will demand a smaller mark-up. That leaves the rich, tasteful customers who don't know much about computers, who will buy Macs.
Michael Bay - Friday, November 11, 2016 - link
>apple anything>taste
Yeah, right.
Murloc - Sunday, November 13, 2016 - link
it doesn't matter, it's about the reputation.mdw9604 - Saturday, November 12, 2016 - link
What was the kickback for this ad as a review?close - Saturday, November 12, 2016 - link
This isn't a review nor does it claim to be a review. Anton doesn't usually post reviews, rather PR statements from different manufacturers. The only expectation I have from these articles is to be fact checked and not let the OEMs try to bullsh*t potential buyers with unclear or contradicting statements. If AT clears up all potential irregularities from that PR statement then I see nothing wrong with it.willis936 - Saturday, November 12, 2016 - link
>NVMe in RAID 0Words fail
willis936 - Saturday, November 12, 2016 - link
After checking out tweak town's dive on this it actually is a much better solution than I thought. No mention of TRIM support but it seems implied that it is present given things like samsung magician's OP can be used. What a nice future the storage specs and intel have made for us.willis936 - Saturday, November 12, 2016 - link
However that means of the 20 available lanes 16 wants to be used by each GPU and 4 wants to be used by each SSD. Only 8 lanes per GPU and 2 lanes per SSD are used. This isn't a big deal for the GPUs but the SSDs will almost certainly be limited by that. The performance benefit over single SSD is likely smaller in a Z chipset with two GPUs present. At this price point it really should have been a single titan xp.watzupken - Saturday, November 12, 2016 - link
I think this severely overpriced to be honest.ironwing - Saturday, November 12, 2016 - link
If the eye at the bottom of the case opens and closes, I'm in.HomeworldFound - Sunday, November 13, 2016 - link
The lack of a dedicated sound card bothers me at that price. I really don't like these weak, low quality Realtek chipsets.Jason PAH - Sunday, November 13, 2016 - link
Why on earth should I spend this account od money on a pc...Tom Womack - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
I have spent that much on a computer once; it got me a four-socket 48-core Opteron server which has been crunching away 24/365 for the last six years, and is still faster at what I want to do with it than any single-socket solution Intel sells.joex4444 - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
An absurd amount of the cost is that stupid RAID0 setup. Two NVMe M.2 drives, each costing over $300, also requires a motherboard with two NVMe drives. Since this is Asus, that leaves only the Asus Z170 Deluxe ($280) or the Asus Z170-WS ($350). Had they gone with a more sane single SSD setup using NVMe, it would cut $315 off the storage cost plus they can downgrade to the Z170-A, a $150 board, saving another $130. In effect, that 1TB RAID0 NVMe setup costs $760 which is an entire GTX 1080-OC. The lack of description of the 1TB drive leads me to suspect they went cheap with a WD Blue or similar. A better setup would be a Z170-A with a 256GB NVMe Samsung 950 Pro and some hard drive configuration using WD Black drives. Let the customer choose what they want: 2 drives in RAID0, 2 drives in RAID1, 3 drives in RAID5, 4 drives in RAID5, or 4 drives in RAID10, and let them choose the capacity - WD Blacks range from 1 to 6TB.brucek2 - Monday, November 14, 2016 - link
I'm curious why the motherboard is not one of their many existing SKUs, and what's different about it. Might make for a fun article?