There's high end, and then there's high end. The ROG GT51CA from Asus is the second kind, and it's now arrived. The guts of the system are as impressive as you'd expect, but what makes the GT51CA stand out is the wrist band that comes with it. Yes, I'm serious. Called the ROG Band, this little piece of wearable tech gives its owner special access to their computer.
The ROG Band is a simple piece of tech containing an NFC chip to unlock two system functions. The first of those is the Shadow Drive, a hidden drive partition for hiding confidential data. The second function allows the wearer to activate the system's CPU overclocking. Using the ROG Band for both features is optional, making its inclusion in the first place a little odd. The band doesn't offer fitness tracking, time telling, or any other functionality.
Even ignoring the ROG Band completely, the GT51CA is a beefy system, and the specs are much clearer than they were when we first checked the system out back in April. The GT51CA comes packed with a liquid-cooled Intel Core i7-6700K CPU clocked at 4.2GHz and overclockable to 4.6GHz, and graphics configurations up to a pair of 2016 GeForce Titan X cards. Asus will happily add up to 64GB of DDR4 memory and up to two 512GB M.2 SSDs set up in RAID 0. The system can be configured with up to three hard drives for mass storage, and optional 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.
The system offers a bevy of USB ports: eight USB 3.0 ports, one USB 3.1 Type-A port, one USB 3.1 Type-C connector, and two USB 2.0 ports. Both of the USB 3.1 ports are on the front, alongside standard mic and headphone jacks. Those audio jacks run through an ESS Sabre headphone DAC and amplifier, so they should be a step up in quality from your usual motherboard audio. Interestingly, Asus chose to leave the integrated audio as the only option.
The case's RGB LED lighting is all customizable, including the robot "eye" on the front of the beast. Four different zones lighting zones are available to tinker with. The Asus ROG GT51CA configured with 64GB of RAM, two 512GB NVMe SSDs and a 1TB HDD, a pair of GeForce GTX 1080s, and 802.11ac Wi-Fi is available over at Newegg for $4,999. The ROG band is included in the price, as are a mechanical keyboard and a mouse.
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