AMD kicked off proceedings at Computex by celebrating their 50th anniversary, but they’re not the only company with a milestone. The annual ASUS presser on Monday night was a celebration of the firm’s 30th anniversary, and they marked the occasion with a ton of new hardware across their corporate and gaming line.
Some of the upcoming monitors and units were announced by Nvidia earlier in the day–ASUS would be one of two manufacturers venturing into mini LED screens, with the ASUS ROG Swift PG27UQX. Like the PG27UQ, the screen would have maximum brightness of 1000 nits (a requirement for HDR10), DCI-P3 colour support, and a quoted contrast ratio of 50,000:1.
ASUS would also be launching their own Big Format Gaming Display 65-inch screen, the PG65UQ. It’s certified as a G-Sync Ultimate display, and will run at 4K/120Hz with support for DCI-P3 like the 27-inch Swift. BFG screens are enormously expensive, and the previous BFGD was never sold in Australia.
AMD’s opening keynote also revealed that ASUS would be extending their relationship with the CPU and GPU maker, with ASUS to start selling pre-built desktop gaming PCs using the third generation of Ryzen desktop hardware, although it wasn’t confirmed whether AMD’s Navi GPUs would be available as a configuration.
ASUS chairman Jonney Shih kicked proceedings off by unveiling a new logo, a triangular A almost reminiscent of Star Trek. Harking back to ASUS’s laptop from 2006 that featured a leather back, ASUS unveiled a limited edition laptop with an 18 carat rose gold plated ASUS logo. Besides the appeal to luxury, the laptop would ship with an i7 CPU (generation not mentioned), a Geforce MX250 discrete GPU, and all-white premium accessories.
A limited edition of the ZenFone 6–which won’t be making its way to Australia, Kotaku Australia understands–was then revealed. The Zenfone uses a flip camera so the front camera has the same sensor and resolution as the rear (48MP), rather than relying on a separate front-facing camera like most cameras. Specs wise, it also comes with 512GB storage and 12GB RAM.
On the motherboard side, ASUS unveiled a concept motherboard for high performance desktops. The concept would move the GPU to the back of the motherboard. The I/O would be modular, allowing users to choose if they wanted dual ethernet ports, more USB ports, and so on. The motherboard would also have a removable 7-inch OLED touchscreen that’s connected via Wi-Fi.
Portable screens became a function of the night, with a ZenScreen Touch 15.6-inch portable display that supports hybrid USB-C, micro-HDMI and a maximum battery life of four hours. It’ll weigh 0.9kg and have 10-point multi touch.
Next up was the return of the ScreenPad, ASUS’s second screen in a touchpad that was first unveiled last year. The second-gen ScreenPad uses native Windows apps, rather than ones especially built for ASUS’s ecosystem. The ScreenPad was being brought to the VivoBook and ZenBook series, but the bigger evolution was with the ZenBook Pro Duo, a laptop with a full-width second screen positioned directly above the keyboard.
The Pro Duo ships with a 15.6-inch 4K AMOLED HDR display, with 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 colour gamut and 133% quoted coverage of sRGB. As for the secondary screen, its quoted resolution is 3840×1100. It’s all running off a 9th-generation Intel i9 CPU and an NVIDIA RTX 2060 GPU. There’s also a smaller ZenBook Duo–a 14-inch model with an i7 CPU and a MX250 GPU. Both machines will launch internationally in the third quarter of 2019.
This post is being updated live. The author travelled to Computex 2019 as a guest of ASUS.
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