The Asus ROG Strix GL702ZC is an interesting product to say the least. Seeing six cores and 12 threads in a mainstream laptop is undeniably cool, and in specific workloads it has the ability to crush Intel's best mobile Kaby Lake offerings. However, it clearly comes at a cost with regards to size, weight, noise, and battery life ? this is very much a desktop replacement laptop. Intel is also rumoured to be bringing six-core Coffee Lake mobile CPUs to the market, although exactly when is hard to gauge. We'd guess it will be quite a while after this product launches, but it's still something that could put this laptop in a tricky position.

The RX 580 is perhaps a strange choice. Given that the CPU and GPU are separate here, Asus could have in theory gone for an Nvidia GPU and gotten the associated power saving benefits. You will at least get FreeSync baked into the screen, although we've been unable to assess how well it works with our early sample.

It's a little tricky to see where the ROG Strix GL702ZC will fit into the market, but that's because we're missing a critical piece of information: price. That will be a large part of what determines its success. Asus has opted for power and performance over portability here, although the GL702ZC wouldn't be difficult to take to a LAN once in a while. Either way, it's great to see an AMD CPU inside a powerful notebook ? let us know your own thoughts in the comments below.