ASUS RoG GT51CA review : Beautiful Beast

Some are happy with a teeny weeny desktop at home that can play some movies/music. Some are happy to boast how many trips it took for them to get computer parts and how many days it took for them to get that great design. There is this big legion of gamers who are not scared to shell extra for a pre-built and fully optimized gaming beasts. If you get a feeling that the ASUS RoG GT51CA is for them, you are mistaken. The ASUS RoG GT51CA is for those who are looking for the absolute best in gaming PC and do not even take a look at the price tag. This gaming beast is for those who are ready to immerse themselves in 4K resolution gaming from the moment they take the rig out of the box. This legion of gamers belong to the ‘Republic of Gamers’. In this review, we are going to take a look at the beast to know if this one can be tamed by the legion of gamers belonging to the Republic.

ASUS RoG GT51CA Key Specification

• Intel® Core™ i7 6700K (Overclocked up to 4.6 GHz)
• NVIDIA® GeForce GTX1080 8GB x 2
• 64 GB DDR4 RAM  @ 2800MHz
• 3 x PCI-e x 1, 3 x PCI-e x 16, 4 x DDR4 LONG-DIMM SLOT
• 6 x SATA 6Gb/s
• 512GB x2 M.2 PCIE SSD (RAID 0)
• Up to 3TB SATA III Hard Drive
• Slimtray Super Multi DVD burner
• 802.11 ac2 x2 (Optional), Bluetooth V4.1 (Optional), NFC (On selected models)
• 27 kgs weights
• 26.2 x 58.4 x 58.7 cm (WxDxH)

Design – monstrous and manly

When I purchased the Mac Mini, I kept in my backpack and brought it home. Even the usual desktops that I used till date were carried on my own till taxi stand or bus station. Moving those things was never a headache. When the ASUS RoG GT51CA arrived, two DHL guys carried it into the home and it needed two to pull the desktop out and place it on the desk. Such is the size of the desktop that my ‘really’ long desk looked cramped and I had to remove one display for perfect placement. I use a Mac Mini at home and I can place three of four Mac Mini’s inside this  monster. The dynamic light effects that illuminate GT51 gives aggressive look. The best part of the case is the Bumblebee’s eye like air intake vent towards the bottom. For some it may resemble Iron Man’s ARK reactor. The turbine-like air intake vent is so good that it is hard to take your eye off of it.

There are multiple ports at the top of the case (Headphone port, microphone port, two USB 3.0, one USB 3.1 Type C, one USB 3.1 Type A). About an inch below the line of ports, you will notice NFC logo. This is where you tap your NFC device (eg: RoG Band) to enable specific action. For example, the wearable ROG BAND lets you access Shadow Drive — a hidden hard drive space for keeping your personal and confidential data safe. You can also use ROG BAND to activate ROG GT51’s overclocking mode.

Two inches below the NFC logo, you will see the aggressive looking RoG logo (Republic of Gamers). The power on/off key is on the right side of the logo (along the frame) and to the left side, there is the Turbo button that instantly boosts CPU speed to 4.6GHz. Two side light strips run from above the turbine-like air intake towards the power and turbo keys. Dynamic light effects illuminate ROG GT51’s case, including the iconic ROG logo and twin side-light strips. You can customize the RGB LEDs on the air intake with any of the 8 million colors! And when you overclock ASUS RoG GT51CA, the dramatic OC lighting mode is activated.

Below the eye, ASUS had added what looks like a little bit like Megatron’s chin. The Mayan inspired lines on the chin looks very good. One of the negatives is the DVD drive (Matshita bd-cmb uj172 s). Given the premium price that GT51CA has, ASUS should’ve included a Blu Ray Drive standard across all the variants. The location of the drive disturbs the otherwise clean front side design. The button slightly sticks out like sore thumb. There is lot of space at the top and moving  the drive there or providing optional external USB 3.1 compatible drive would’ve been better.

At the top, there is the usual Mayan inspired design and a massive air vent. Take a peek and you can see the CPU cooler and the LEDs. The right side of the case has two parts. The metal plate and a boomerang shaped plastic cover. The RoG logo on metal plate looks clean. The certification stickers and Intel/Nvidia/Windows stickers are neatly places on this side. Glad that these stickers are not placed at the front.

Ports: so many that you will be confused which one to use

Gaming is best enjoyed with full size headphones. Either you game using quality headphones or you get a quality surround speakers to really enjoy gaming sessions. For such hardcore games, ASUS has included front side audio jack with gold plated connector to ensure Hi-Fi grade audio quality. To power the headphones, there is ESS Sabre headphone DAC and amp. High dynamic range (DNR) and low noise levels mean you get richer and less-distorted audio, with full-range frequency response. There are total of 12 USB ports, you can connect up to 10 displays (three DisplaYPorts, one HDMI and one DVI ports per card). Given that this system can easily drive gaming on dual 4K resolution displays, gaming on 3×3 FullHD wall of displays will be absolutely awesome.

• 1 x Headphone
• 1 x Microphone
• 2 x USB 3.0
• 1x USB 3.1 , Type C
• 1x USB 3.1, Type A

Back I/O Ports

• 6 x USB 3.0
• 2 x USB 2.0
• 1 x PS/2(Keyboard/Mouse)
• 1 x RJ45 LAN
• 1 x S/PDIF out(Audio jack)
• 1 x Audio Jack(s) (Line in/Mic in/Speaker out/Headphone out/Mic/Headphone Combo)

Internals – where did the cables go?

The interior is absolutely clean. If I build a custom made rig with same components, the interior will be extremely unorganized. For those who need a monster setup that is neatly organized, one look at these interiors will give a feeling that ASUS has build a rig that is inch perfect.You will barely see any cables running around. As with any premium chassis, all the cables can be hidden behind the metal plate to which motherboard is attached. CPU is cooled by using closed loop cooling. The radiator is behind the 120mm rear fan and the rear fan helps dissipate warm air out of the chassis and cool the liquid flowing through the radiator. The front side turbine line input is used to pull cooler air into the chassis. The GPUs are air cooled and they barely make any noise when the chassis is closed. But then again, there are not many games that can truly test this setup as of now.

Four DIMM RAM slots sit next to the CPU and given that this one has 64GB of RAM, you can see all the slots full. If you are wondering where the SSD placement is, it is under the raphics cards and they are barely visible. Changing the SSD is not going to be an easy task. Do note that there are two SSDs configured in RAID 0 mode which means that you cannot change one SSD and that if you want to upgrade, you have to change both or deactivate RAID and reload everything. The drive bay has a single 2TB Toshiba HDD installed. There are four more slots for HDDs. Given that this chassis has very tight cable management, adding a new HDD is going to be tedious task as you have to route the cables through the back plate.

Not everything is rosy here. Given the price of the GT51CA, I expected a screw-less (push pin) setup but to make any changes, I needed a screw driver. Do note that you will voids warranty if you open the case (there is a sticker attached to the plate and you cannot remove the side panel without breaking the sticker). The 80PLUS silver certified 700W PSU sits at the bottom of the chassis and all the power cables coming out of the chassis are routed into the back plate. If you need more cooling, you can attach another fan at the top but given how cool this one runs, an extra fan does no good except making it noisy.

Keyboard and Mouse – very basic set

While the bundled keyboard and mouse are good, I would strongly suggest go with proper pair that has macro keys and customization. The keyboard and mouse included with the desktop are very basic. Though the keyboard has mechanical keys and though the mouse has high DPI sensor, the experience is nowhere close to what you get when you have high end pair (like the ones from Logitech and Razer). But to truly justify this beast, you need a gaming controller like Xbox One’s wireless controller.

Software and Customization

Unlike earlier ASUS products, there is not much of bloatware. Here are few applications that are very helpful.

Aegis II is where you get to control the lighting, setup voltage thresholds for CPUs, setup your RoG band etc. The tool is extremely simple to use and looks great.
Audio Wizard : This is where you configure how the audio output should be and you can create profiles for front side ports and back side ports.
Cloud Storage Space － 100G ASUS Webstorage for 1 Year free usage :
GameFirst IV : Software that optimized network to provided optimized bandwidth for online gaming sessions.
Xsplit Gamecaster :Live streaming and gameplay recording
Windows 10 : The OS runs absolutely smooth. I have been using OS X for nearly 4 years and I can say that Windows 10 looks lot more pleasing and is lot faster than OS X on new generation hardware. I wish I got hold of a 4K resolution display to get a full blown experience of using such a powerful beast.

Performance – super fast load times and super smooth gameplay

Booting is a bit slow given the sheer number of peripherals, RAID health check and other checks that need to be done. But once you get that login window, you feel like you are shifted to expressway. Be it opening applications or games or video rendering, everything is amazingly fast. While Dual graphics cards help with gaming performance, there is more to this than two GPUs. The extremely fast UI speed, copy to and from SSD is mainly because of super fast NVMe PCIe  SSD  drives configured in RAID 0 mode. The combination of NVMe and RAID 0 delivers insane speeds of up to 3.2Gbps throughput.

The Intel Core i7 6700K can be overclocked to 4.6GHz is another top notch performer. Regarded as one of the best chips made by Intel, the Core i7 6700K can easily last for another 3-4 years (for intense applications). The dual Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 cards setup in 2-Way SLI is absolutely future proof and can run any game higher than 30fps with ease on a 4K resolution display. In case of 1080p display, it can easily run games above 60fps in Ultra graphics settings. Couple this with 64GB of DDR4 RAM that runs at 2800MHz and you know that you have a configuration that can create serious envy.

The latest ROG GT51 supports up to NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (2-Way SLI) graphics to create stunningly-beautiful and stutter-free 4K UHD gaming worlds. On top of that, NVIDIA® G-SYNC™ technology minimizes lag and frame rate stutter, and eliminates visual tearing to give you the smoothest and fastest gaming graphics — all without affecting system performance.

ROG GT51 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 2-way SLI graphics combines amazing performance with incredible energy efficiency. In product development tests, the GeForce GTX 1080 2-way SLI-equipped ROG GT51 performed 60% better than a GeForce GTX 980 SLI-equipped system. ROG GT51 ran DOOM at “Ultra” graphics settings in 4K UHD with an average frame rate of 66FPS! We could not get hold of a 4K resolution display and when we tried to play games , every game we tried stayed above 60fps. The only problem was with Dues Ex and it should be due to bad driver and we should see an update for that soon.

Discover next-gen VR performance, the lowest latency, and plug-and-play compatibility with leading VR headsets driven by NVIDIA VRWorks™ technologies. VR audio, physics and haptics let you hear and feel every moment. So strap on your VR headset and let ROG GT51 and the latest NVIDIA VR technologies immerse you in expansive gaming worlds.

Heat and noise

Thanks to liquid cooling on the processor, NVMe SSDs for primary drives and highly efficient GTX1080s, the ASUS RoG GT51CA runs very very quiet. Even when we tried stress test that took CPU and GPU usage to 100%, there was not much fan noise. Even the front and rear fans used for airflow are super quiet. You will be really surprised how well optimized the heat/noise is. One major contributor for this is super clean internals where the cold air flows cleanly across the components keeping them cooler.

Conclusion

We do agree that this desktop costs a bomb and it doesn’t come with a display. We agree that you need a big UPS to keep the desktop running during those power cuts so that your gaming sessions are saved. We agree that you need a 4K resolution display to make justice to the ASUS GT51CA. Once you setup the desk that does justice to this beast, you will end up with a grin that is so wide that you will be casted as ‘The Joker’ in future batman movies. While those who have time and patience can build a beautiful rig with liquid cooling, dual GPUs etc, gamers withou time to research on config etc want something that they can start playing games on from the moment they take it out of the box.

ASUS RoG GT51CA is exactly that kind of rig. Remember that gaming rig is not about installation and overclocking. The last thing you want is a rig that is heavily overclocked but cannot run games without crashing. This is where branded gaming rigs come in. GT51CA is heavily optimized and nearly maximum power is extracted from the components. The current hardware can easily last at least 4 years without having any hiccup. By end of 4 years, you may have to come down to Very high graphics (from Ultra) but you can still be able to play games at 60fps with little customization.

In case you want to more power, you can upgrade (voids warranty) GPUs and CPU without much effort. Changing SSDs though will require removing GPUs. The ASUS RoG GT51CA screams attention to detail. THis beast looks absolutely manly and menacing. The simple features like (RoG band to activate shadow drive, one button to overlock CPU, simple yet elegant four zone lighting, futuristic looking front air vent/fan make the ASUS GT51CA highly recommended for those who can spend good amount for a solid stable great looking gaming rig.