This $10,000 laptop ISN'T overpriced

What do you get when you flip convention on it’s head? Well, you get the Asus Studiobook One - one of the most powerful laptops we’ve reviewed EVER.

- Oh, man, do I have a treat for you here today?

This, is the ASUS ProArt Studio Book One, and it costs a whopping $10,000. You heard that right.

10 freaking grand. What could possibly make it worth that many dollar it is?

Well, a $4,000 graphics card is a pretty good start. Just like this is a pretty good start to my segue to our sponsor, I Fix it. The I Fix it Marlin Screwdriver Set features five specialty precision screwdrivers held by either a hard or soft wrap case.

Check it out today at ifixit.com/Linus. Yes, this is a $10,000 laptop, but not without reason. What you’re seeing is not only ASUSs new flagship laptop for creative professionals, but also a creative new approach to heat management. ASUS has taken what would conventionally be under the keyboard and moved almost all of it up behind the screen. We saw a very similar design in the ASUS Mother ship, and we actually got a tour through their design center. Definitely check that out, it’s just pure CNC porn. But anyway, you might have noticed that unlike the Mother ship, there’s no venting cut out into the back of the Studio Book One.

So, how do they let the components breathe?

Let me show you. Now, this certainly isn’t a one finger lift kind of laptop. Kind of, but watch what happens when you open up the Studio Book. As I opened the panel here, there are two little cams that are gear driven on the hinge. So, as you open it up, you get this really nice smooth action, as the clam shell opens for air. It’s just so satisfying to watch. Packed into this aluminum and magnesium chassis is an Intel Core i9-9980HK, which turbo up to five gigahertz.

But, as I alluded to earlier, the graphics card is the real star of the show here. This is the first Nvidia RTX 6,000

ever packed into a laptop. That means 24 gigs of VRAM, 4,608 CUDA Cores, plus a smattering of Ray tracing

and Tensor cores as well. In a desktop form, that card retails for four grand, and all of that power is backed up by a one terabyte SSD and 64 gigs of RAM. Of course, the 90 watt hour battery occupies the entire palm rest area. And although it isn’t quite the 100 watt hour limit for plane travel, its damn near close, and very nice to have, just like this water bottle, lttstore.com.

But just a fancy crammed hinge thing alone, wont cool all of that. Now, it’s a bit hard to see inside, but there are two honking aluminum fans that grab cool air and blast it over a titanium vapor chamber, capable of dissipating,

a mind boggling 300 watts, delivered courtesy of an ultra-efficient and compact 300 watt, gallium nitride charger. Gallium nitride slowly replacing silicon in high end chargers because it allows for higher activation energies and higher frequencies, which in turn means smaller and much more dense chargers. But, now I have a bit of an apology. I know I told you guys during my unboxing that I would show you behind this clam shell, and for that I’m deeply sorry. After discussing with ASUS, apparently there’s a special tool required to remove the lid and they were unwilling to send it to us. So, 2 out of 10 repair ability score, but enough chitchat,

how well does it actually work?

This is, or more likely was the most powerful laptop in the office. The Alien ware Area 51m, it packs heat with not just one, but two power bricks to feed the desktop Core i9-9900K and RTX 2080. For a more reasonable comparison, we also grabbed the new Dell XPS 17 with its 10th gen processor and RTX 2060. We praised it for its massive vapor chamber and never have thought I’d say this, its financially attainable when compared to the Studio Book. To compare them, we’ll be using SOLIDWORKS Visualize. This rendering suite is excellent as a benchmark because it hammers both the CPU and GPU at the same time.

- Andy Three, two, one.

- Okay.

there’s a lot of air coming out of the top of this thing. Look at that. So very impressively, the maximum temperature that the CPU in this reached was just 91 degrees, the GPU, 88 degrees, neither of them like thermal throttled. Whereas like, the Alien ware 100 degrees, Dell XPS, 100 degrees. And this thing right here completed a thousand passes of the render, in just two minutes. The Area 51m did it in three and the XPS 17 was just a bit over four. So that really gives you a good idea of just, if you’re a content creator, this is going to just get your renders out so much faster.

Raw power, we have certainly got it. But the cherry on top of this whole machine isn’t under the hood, but right on front of it with this beautiful 120 hertz 4K UHD display. When we were shooting the short circuit unboxing of this thing, David said, it looks like a print image. And I think he nailed it on the head there. Now, yes it has more bezels than you can shake a stick at, but it comes recalibrated to cover 100% of the Adobe RGB color gamut, with Delta Es of less than one. That’s no easy mark to hit. Additionally, and this is important, it Pantone validated, meaning that ASUS went out of their way to get the panel certified by an industry leading third party, so your screen is color perfect right out of the box.

In our testing, it slightly missed the mark with 98.8% coverage of the Adobe RGB color space, and a Delta E of about 1.5. Before you get your knickers in a twist though, this is still an amazing result, more than good enough for color accurate work. And this machine is pre-production. So, it’ll hopefully be improved by the final units. There are a number of problems though that won’t be fixed on the final unit. The I/O is well, sparse. There are just four ports on this machine, one for DC power in and three Thunderbolt ports. That’s it. ASUS kindly included a dongle for the usual breakouts, but even that doesn’t come with a headphone jack. When it comes to the heft, this thing is hard to beat, like, it just feels so dense. It tips the scales at 6.4 pounds or 18 and a half bananas for scale. Something that might not be loved by everyone, at least at first, is the keyboard. The spacing’s good, and there really isn’t any deck flex to speak of, but there’s very little in the way of key travel. Compared to things like the XPS 15, a ThinkPad or well, any other laptop in this class, it feels much more like you’re typing on a pane of glass than a mechanical keyboard.

That said after a few hours of use, I got used to it, just never fully loved it. The power button here also has an integrated fingerprint reader. Definitely nice to have, seeing as the webcam doesn’t support Windows Hello facial recognition. Below the keyboard though, things improve with this awesome track pad. Its super big while maintaining excellent palm rejection, and has all of the multi features you would expect. The XPS 17 has it beat on sheer size, but just barely. And I’m super excited to see Windows machines are finally catching up to Apple

in this regard. Last but not least, are the speakers. There are four of them positioned down on the sides, kind of here.

And then up here on top, as well as a dual array microphone. How are they? you ask. Its fine. Not as good as the MacBook or the XPS 17. So where does this leave us?

We’ve got hands down, one of the beefiest and just fastest laptops in terms of power and price. there’s literally no better laptop on the market for working on massive CAD models while on the go. And there must be someone that needs easy access to 24 gigabytes of VRAM. So, to the dozens of you with that requirement, I wholeheartedly recommend the Studio Book One. Just like I would wholly recommend the segue to our sponsor, Micro Center. Get the best prices and the best selection at Micro Center, across any of their 25 locations in the United States or online.

Join the new Micro Center community to get, give or receive any advice on PC parts selection and hardware. Check out their custom PC Builder configurator, and follow the link in the description for a free 32 gigabyte flash drive and 32 gigabyte micro SD card. Valid in store only. No purchase necessary. So if you want something else to watch,  then go and check out our Mother ship video, where we actually went to Taipei

and checked it out.

And, you know, get subscribed. We have a video coming up on why vapor chambers, just kick so much ass

and make laptops like this so good. You don’t wanna miss it.

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