Imagine the situation. Your desk space is at a premium. You hate the idea of having to buy a big screen with a massive footprint and noisy fans just so you can have super high refresh rate.
What if you could replace that giant screen with that huge base, with something that has the specs you can carry around in an iPad-sized case?
That’s the pitch for a portable gaming monitor, a new monitor market that ASUS is pushing at Computex 2019. The monitor itself is the ROG STRIX XG17, a 17.3-inch IPS 1080p 3ms screen with support for 240Hz refresh rates.
It’s designed to target the esports market or gamers that largely stick to Counter-Strike, Rocket League, Overwatch, Dota 2 and other games with a highly active competitive community.
The unit connects to an existing laptop or PC via micro-HDMI or USB-C, and can run for a maximum of 3 hours if running at 240Hz. ASUS also showed off a shot of the STRIX XG17 connecting to the top of an ASUS laptop, courtesy of some attachment that the STRIX XG17 will supposedly ship with. It wasn’t being announced at Computex, however.
The monitor was currently with Nvidia for G-Sync compatible certification, ASUS announced. It’ll also support adaptive sync from 48Hz all the way through to 240Hz, which should cover pretty much every game (and the Xbox One with its variable refresh rate support).
It’ll also work with mobiles. At a pre-briefing ahead of their Computex press conference, ASUS setup a couple of test screens. One showed the STRIX XG17 acting as a portable screen for a Switch dock, with two people playing Mario Kart 8 in split-screen. Another user plugged their phone into the screen via USB-C, and used the screen to play Asphalt 9: Legends. A product manager added that you could get 90 percent charge within a single hour, but most people will have the screen plugged in at all times.
Along with the detachable ROG Mothership desktop replacement–which costs a whopping $9999 locally (!)–it seems like portable screens, second screens and detachable devices is definitely a major trend. It certainly reminds me of going to SGL and other LAN events with 13-inch and 15-inch screens tucked away in the back of the boot, although the crappy 13-inch CRT my Dad lent me could barely do 100Hz back in the day. And it was a hell of a lot heavier.
The author travelled to Computex 2019 as a guest of ASUS.