AMD's Ryzen CPUs have come out of the gates swinging, and have maintained that momentum still. Besides democratizing core-counts and SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading), these AMD chips brought about a revolution of sorts for AMD's CPU power efficiency, with Ryzen frequently going up against Intel's solutions - and even besting them frequently in this area. As such, that the Zen architecture would make its way to laptops was only a matter of engineering, design and testing - which usually translate to time. Ever since we reported ASUS was working on a Ryzen 7-powered laptop, the folks at ASUS have been working on it. And now, they've finally introduced the ROG STRIX GL702ZC.

The ROG STRIX GL702ZC is the world's first Ryzen 7-powered laptop, and marks the beginning of the end for AMD as the "budget" option when it comes to mobile solutions, with lower ASP of products based on AMD's platform justifying sometimes horrendous specs and configurations. The ROG STRIX GL702ZC features a 17.3" FHD IPS anti-glare display with FreeSync, driven by a Ryzen 7 1700 CPU paired with AMD Radeon RX580 graphics (the 4GB VRAM version) and 16 GB of DDR4 memory (expandable up to 32GB). The system can be further configured with an M.2 SSD (up to 256 GB) and/or an up to 1 TB , 5,400 RPM HDD.

At Computex 2017, ASUS showcased the first Ryzen-powered laptop, which the company had already teased a while back. The STRIX brings to an end a period of lacking competition in the laptop space; before this, if you wanted a high-performance gaming (or even professional-grade) laptop, you went with one with an Intel processor inside, or not at all. AMD is back in the fold, and Ryzen was the one who rose to the challenge.

The ROG STRIX GL702ZC packs a Ryzen 7 1700 8-core, 16-thread CPU; the absence of an X there isn't a typo, considering AMD themselves say the company's XFR (eXtended Frequency Range) is meant to accelerate CPU speeds under the right thermal conditions (and headroom), which a laptop almost surely wouldn't have.) This is a full desktop CPU (and I stress, an 8-core, 16-thread one) running inside a laptop. And this laptop dresses itself fully in red, with the graphics workhorse being an RX 580. The RX 580 is a great 1080p card, so it will feel right at home on the ROG STRIX GL702ZC's 17.3", 1080p IPS panel with FreeSync support. Let's just hope this is the first in a wave of AMD-powered laptops. We'll be here to see what happens with Ryzen-based APUs closer to the end of the year.