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While demanding gamers can choose processor and graphics card quite freely in the desktop PC range, there are much fewer options for notebooks; at least for AMD fans. We feel that 99.9% of all new high-end laptops come with a quad-core CPU from Intel's Kaby Lake generation (Core i5-7300HQ up to i7-7820HK) and a Pascal GPU from Nvidia (GeForce GTX 1060 up to GTX 1080). While a few exotic devices sported AMD hardware in the past years, most of them disappointed due to driver problems (e.g. Radeon HD 7970M in the Schenker XMG P502) or very weak CPU performance (e.g. A10-4600M in the MSI GX60), which also proved to be a bottleneck in games.

The problems should be solved now, however. While AMD's last processor architecture did not stand a chance against the competition from Intel - especially in terms of power consumption and performance per MHz, the brand new Ryzen generation can finally close the gap to the top thanks to its huge core count and improved energy efficiency. As a result, more notebooks with AMD technology might be launched again. This is sorely needed since Intel and Nvidia can currently freely dictate prices, which often makes powerful devices unnecessarily expensive.

In order to break the market dominance, Asus pioneers with the 17-inch ROG Strix GL702ZC, which uses a Radeon RX 580 with 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM regardless of the configuration. This graphics card is supposed to compete with the GeForce GTX 1060. According to the geizhals.de price comparison, 10 different models are already available at launch time. While the cheapest variant for 1399 Euros (~$1671) features a 6-core CPU (Ryzen 5 1600), a 1 TB SSHD and 8 GB of DDR4 RAM, the reviewed top model features an 8-core CPU (Ryzen 7 1700), a combination from 256 GB SSD and 1 TB HDD and 16 GB of RAM. Price: a steep 1800 Euros (~$2150).

All models come with a matte Full HD display with FreeSync support. This is the counterpart to Nvidia's G-Sync technology, which is an expensive, closed system. The goal is a smooth image without tearing through synchronizing the frame rate of the graphics card with the frequency of the display. Unfortunately, the display of the test model only supports 60 Hz. According to Asus' homepage 120 Hz panels will be available, too.

Our article basically deals with the question whether the GL702ZC is a good alternative to the established gaming competition in terms of price-performance ratio, and whether the dominance from Intel and Nvidia, respectively, begins to totter. We added the MSI GE72 7RE (i7-7700HQ + GTX 1050 Ti), the Acer Aspire VN7-793 (7700HQ + GTX 1060), the Aorus X7 v7 (i7-7820HK + GTX 1070), and the Schenker XMG U727 (i7-7700K + GTX 1080) to our comparison. These 17-inch devices cover many different CPUs and GPUs.

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