ROG Strix GL12CX Review – A gaming beast offering unrivalled gaming experience

ROG STRIX GL12CX is a new gaming desktop with the latest 9th Generation Intel Core i9-9900K processor and NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics. It is announced last November and we are now getting the gaming beast in Malaysia! For those who are curious about its gaming performance, we got the chance to try out the desktop beforehand so here is our ROG Strix GL12CX review.

The Design

It comes in an all-black chassis with sharp angles on the front and top of the case resembling the strikes of a katana on armor. As you might have noticed, the design draws inspiration from stealthy ninjas. Some of these angles are actually intake or exhaust vents, some feature gorgeous Aura Sync LEDs. Strix GL12CX is not too big or too heavy so an adult can pick it up effortlessly.

A hot-swap SSD bay is hidden behind the front cover allowing you to quickly swap profiles and games without having the need to shut down the system. Other than this, the front panel also features a 2-in-1 card reader, 2 USB 3.1 and 2 USB 2.0 ports. While on the back, it offers 8 USB ports along with 5 audio jacks and a digital S/PDIF connector. You can view its internal layout (with RGB lights) easily thanks to the tempered glass side panel.

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A good cooling system is extremely important for a gaming desktop. ROG Strix GL12CX features the innovative interwoven HyperStream design, which allows maximum heat removal and airflow into the chassis. It has a total of 3 fans located on the top and bottom of the chassis, as well as two dedicated isolated air chambers to keep the internal components cool.

The Strix GL12CX package comes along with a ROG Strix Flare keyboard and ROG Gladius II mouse. Both features Aura Sync RGB lighting. The keyboard is using Cherry MX mechanical key switches that deliver a satisfying mechanical feel, while the mouse is having a DPI button to toggle sensitivity and a DPI target thumb button that lowers the DPI for a short instance of more accurate sniping.

The Specs

The model we get is powered by Intel Core i9-9900K CPU (can be overclocked up to 5.1 GHz) with the latest Intel Z390 chipset. It also comes with a total of 16GB RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD and 1TB HDD, along with an NVIDIA RTX 2080 graphics card. With all these powerful components, ROG GL12CX is absolutely capable of delivering high-frame-rate gaming while multitasking. We will explain more about its gaming performance later, now let’s look at its benchmark results.

PCMark 10

As we expected, Strix GL12CX got an extremely good score of 6,827 for PCMark 10 test. It gets 9,494 for App Start-up Score and 10,740 for Digital Content Creation score. This shows that it doesn’t just start-up apps rapidly, it is powerful on handling multitasking and providing great gaming performance too.

User Benchmark

One of the best results we ever get on User Benchmark test. The test gives out 139% on the gaming section, which is an outstanding score indicating that it is capable to handle almost all 3D games at the best resolution and details levels possible. Strix GL12CX gets an exceptional SSD score at 291% too.

3D Mark

Strix GL12CX got a very impressive result – 10,310 for Graphics score and 8,435 for CPU score. On both graphics test, it manages to get about 60 or over 60 FPS which is especially great for FPS or MOBA games. Meanwhile, on the CPU test, it got a result of about 28 FPS. The title of “gaming beast” fits ROG Strix GL12CX so well!

The Gaming Performance

We tried out ROG Strix GL12CX with some of the latest hit titles such as Battlefield 5, Devil May Cry 5, Apex Legends using a 1080P, 144Hz display. Playing Apex Legends on it is an enjoyable experience as the FPS can be pushed to 144 even under the highest graphics settings, while on the most situations the FPS is able to maintain at 135 or above.

Although Devil May Cry 5 used up RTX 2080’s 8GB VRAM, ROG Strix GL12CX still runs the game at a stable FPS over 100. Battlefield 5 is an essential game to test out the ray tracing technology on RTX 2080 graphics card. On Strix GL12CX, Battlefield 5 runs smoothly with exceptional graphics and visual effects, we could see the reflection of the lights and flares being rendered perfectly.

Verdict

In short, ROG Strix GL12CX doesn’t disappoint in any aspects, only that the fans might get a little loud while gaming. You can safely assume that you will get a superb gaming performance under ultra graphics settings along with a great cooling performance on it. If you are a gamer that has extremely high requirements on gaming performance, ROG Strix GL12CX should be in your consideration list.