Complete gaming desktops are, at least in this region, synonymous with brand names like Alienware or, more recently, HP with their Phoenix PCs. Today, however, I’ll be looking at ASUS’ ROG CG8580 gaming desktop, who, after years of making some of the highest regarded components for PCs, have decided to go full on into providing a complete system.

The ASUS ROG CG8580 is a complete gaming system packed with a mechanical keyboard and 4000 DPI laser mouse. No monitor or headset, but the bulk of the money you’re paying for is, of course, the main case and all the goodies inside.

The Build

The ROG CG8580’s case is similar to ASUS’ Republic of Gamers branded laptops, with angular edges, and a smooth matt black coating; the design is actually inspired from stealth submarines.

On the top you have 2x USB 3.0 and 2x USB 2.0 ports, plus two 3.5mm audio jacks. On the right side is the power button and on the left is the ‘Speed’ button which basically allows you to switch the CPU speed from 4.2GHz to 4.4GHz to 4.6GHz, but more on that later.

Push open the hydraulic front panel and inside you’ll see a memory card reader, Blu-ray/ DVD combo drive and a hot-swappable 3.5-inch drive bay. Push it back up and you see the glowing ROG logo, and at the very bottom of the case there’s another LED strip that matches the color of the logo on top. The logo and bottom strip glows blue when the speed is set to 4.2GHz, and red for both 4.4GHz and 4.6GHz.

Inside the ROG CG8580 is some serious hardware, sadly the case doesn’t come with a side window for you to appreciate it.

The Specs

So what we have is an Intel Core i7-3770K CPU, ASint 16GB DDR3-1600MHz RAM, ASUS Nvidia GTX 680 with 2GB GDDR5 RAM, 2x SanDisk 128GB SSDs in RAID 0, 2x Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDDs, 1x Xonar DX sound card, and all of this is plugged into an ASUS  P8Z77-PRO motherboard powered by an AcBell R88 700W PSU.

I was actually disappointed to see that there was no ROG series motherboard and graphics card used for the ROG CG8580 PC. Most definitely you can look at the individual component prices picked from Newegg (and other online stores) below to see how much the system would have cost if components were handpicked.

That amounts to roughly AED 8.5K if we had bought the components in UAE. Of course, this price doesn’t include the cool casing from ASUS, or the labor costs for assembling the system, getting it ready for fail-proof overclock of up to 4.6GHz at the touch of a button, the 3 year warranty and peace of mind that your high-end system is completely covered.

Operations

Turning on the ASUS ROG CG8580 you’ll hear the startup sound of the system akin to a jumbo jet starting up for takeoff, except the ROG CG8580 quiets down in 10 seconds to absolute silence and you’re flying to Windows 7 desktop in just 14 seconds. The ROG logo on the front glows blue and you’re all good to go. All you need is a decent monitor and a pair of headphones (or speakers) and the Xonar DX soundcard will make anything sound amazing.

Pressing the Speed button will open a full screen popup for under 2 seconds denoting the processor speed (4.2GHz/4.4GHz/4.6GHz) and then you can go back to work. You can change the processor speed in real-time, so whether you’re playing a game or converting videos, you can feel the improvement instantly at the touch of a button.