Asus debuts 300Hz displays for gaming laptops

If you thought you were cooler than school with your gaming laptop's 144Hz or 240Hz screen refresh rate, Asus just dropped Zephryrus and ROG Strix laptops with 300Hz refresh rates.

Nope, you didn't read that wrong: The new Asus Zephyrus and ROG Strix laptops will feature 300Hz refresh-rate panels.

Although Asus is unlikely to be the only laptop maker with a 300Hz panel at IFA Berlin, it's the first to announce (though pricing and availability remain unknown). Higher-refresh panels typically help make gaming and even scrolling of 2D content appear far smoother. A similar fast pan of a game, for example, would appear blurrier at 60Hz than on a 144Hz panel.

Asus said the 300Hz refresh is 25 percent higher than on 240Hz panels, and 5X the refresh of old-timey 60Hz panels. Running at 300Hz with Vsync on, Asus said visual tearing and stuttering is minimized due to the screen's ability to redraw a new frame every 3.3ms. Asus said at 300Hz, the 3.3 timing "matches" the 3ms response time of the screen as well.

The one caveat: High-refresh-rate panels also need high-performance GPUs to keep them fed with frames. The new 300Hz panels will be available in both 15-inch and 17-inch gaming laptops.

Besides the 300Hz panels, Asus also announced new "creator-focused" laptops—in other words, laptops for users performing intensive tasks like video processing, animation, graphics rendering, and the like. Asus is specifically embracing gamers who like to create, with models that are extensions of its existing gaming lines.

The ROG Zephyrus S GX502 will feature up to 9th-gen, 6-core Core i7 CPUs, and 15.6-inch screens running at 144Hz or 240Hz. The screens are Pantone-certified and also support Nvidia's G-Sync.

The GX502 is among the few laptops available that supports a user toggle to swtich between power saving Optimus mode using Intel integrated graphics, or Nvidia's G-Sync mode, which supports variable refresh rates from 1Hz to 144Hz or 240Hz. The GX502 features a 76Whr battery, two M.2 NVMe slots with RAID 0 support, and up to 32GB of RAM. The GX502 comes with either a GeForce RTX 2060 or GeForce RTX 2070. Asus didn't say whether the GPUs were laptop-optimized Max-Q versions, but the 19mm-thick body and 4.4-pound weights pretty much say the GPUs are Max-Q.

Besides the GX502, there's also a lower-cost ROG Strix G for creator-gamers. The ROG Strix G is offered with the same 6-core Core i7 as the GX502, or a lower-cost quad-core Core i5-9300H. GPUs vary from RTX 2070 all the way down to a GeForce GTX 1650.