Asus brought
fire to this year s show, with a seemingly unending cavalcade of gaming laptops, monitors, motherboards and peripherals. For me though, the highlight of their offerings was the ROG Flow X13, a diminutive 13-inch gaming laptop with three (!!) graphics cards. You can choose between integrated Vega graphics from the Ryzen 5980HS processor, a discrete GTX 1650 GPU and a tiny external RTX 3080 graphics card.
That last option is only available if you pick up the 2021 ROG XG Mobile enclosure, doubling the price, but it should unlock a ridiculous amount of gaming performance in an incredibly compact design - and the enclosure also powers the laptop and provides a ton of extra USB ports for peripherals while it s connected. Not bad for something smaller than the average gaming laptop power brick.
HDMI 2.1 support not yet included - and big questions remain elsewhere.
Article by Will Judd, Senior Staff Writer, Digital Foundry Updated on 13 January 2021
15 months after we first covered the crowd-designed Eve Spectrum gaming monitor, the first pre-production samples have begun shipping out. This is our first opportunity to see how the Spectrum, once touted as the first HDMI 2.1 monitor to arrive on the market, actually looks in the flesh and performs in-game.
Our sample is the $689 4K 144Hz version, the flagship of a lineup that also includes more affordable 1440p 165Hz ($439) and 1440p 240Hz ($589) options, all based around 27-inch IPS panels. Eve also shipped us a stand, which is sold separately for $99 - in response to the large percentage of Eve community members that said they d be using the monitor s 100x100 VESA mount with their own monitor arms. That brings the retail