Even though CES 2022 isn’t until early January, it appears that Asus is teasing a long-awaited update to its ROG Mothership GZ700. You know, the gaming “tablet” that looks like a love child between a Surface Pro and an Asus ROG gaming laptop.
The original GZ700 was released over two years ago and included features such as liquid metal compounds for the CPU, a kickstand, and a true gaming-class GPU. Although technically a tablet, the ROG Mothership GZ700’s thick body was probably a little ahead of its time. With a 9th-gen Intel Core i9 CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 graphics, the GZ700’s age shows in its hardware as well.
Because it was so dark, you probably couldn’t see what was going on if you watched the video. With the background and image lightened, you can see what appears to be the ROG Mothership GZ700’s successor. There’s almost certainly a keyboard on the front, which means it’ll be much thinner than the previous model—a gadget that, in most people’s eyes, barely qualifies as a tablet.
A tiny chassis usually means real graphics performance is sacrificed, especially with a GPU as powerful as the original GeForce RTX 2080 GPU. There’s a port comparable to the one found in Asus’s ROG Flow X13 laptop, which is fairly weird (but not as crazy as the Mothership).
This port suggests that Asus will reuse their proprietary XGm GPU port for whatever tablet this is. That’s also a fantastic idea because it means you’ll be able to use your existing ROG XG Mobile GPU with a GeForce RTX 3080 on this tablet. We say “hopefully” because nothing is certain. The GPU was connected to a Ryzen 9 CPU inside the Flow X13 through a unique x8 PCIe connection plus USB 3.2 in the original Flow X13 and ROG XG Mobile.
We don’t know which way the company will go because the original Mothership GZ700 was built on an Intel CPU and the Flow X13 was built on an AMD CPU. For all we know, Asus will use any increased PCIe support on new CPUs to improve external GPU access next year.
The original ROG XG Mobile had eight lanes of PCIe Gen 3.0 bandwidth, which was more than the four lanes of PCIe Gen 3 on Thunderbolt 3, but with PCIe Gen 4 and PCIe Gen 5 now available, we can’t say which way the company will go.
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