Everyone Welcome to cnet's continuing coverage of CES 2021. We've got a Seuss here with us today and yet they just made some serious announcements. A substantial list of new products hitting the scene joining us from a Seuss. Is JJ Guerrero, thank you for being here. JJ, tell us about everything that was announced yesterday. from a personal standpoint, I'm very excited because I want to be playing with all of these new toys very soon. What do you got here for us today? We've got a lot of hardware, we're definitely not gonna be able to cover everything. But I'm sure if you guys check out the site, you'll be able to see the full breakdown of everything that we've announced. But we've got pretty much an entire portfolio when it comes to the RG set of hardware and that's what we're gonna be focusing on. So I think one of the really big things First ones is this just massive unit that you see right here, which I think is going to be pretty interesting because it's another world's first from us, which is always a big focus for most at ACS and RG so it's the world's first Wi-Fi 6e based router. So Wi-Fi 6 It'll have an apex of course has now really been trending as becoming the new de facto standard for high speed Wi Fi. But with Wi Fi six, See, the thing that's really different about it is that you now have a brand new band, the FCC essentially allowed access to the six gigahertz band to really allow for a whole nother level of wireless throughput and performance. Before we kind of take the tour of it I'm curious to hear, you know, I don't think a lot of people are familiar with that band. You know, what is the kind of like tangible you know. Sort of benefit, or at least very noticeable benefit out of the gate and are you sort of restricted by any other limitations from hardware that you might already currently have. But yes, definitely wanna see the tour of it for sure. Yeah, no great questions. So I think the first one is that when you talk about kind of what makes sense what's the really benefit of kind of picking one of these guys up Well the first thing is gonna be that traditionally kind of the perspective has been that if you had a dual band router. Which is what we've had for years regardless of whether you're on AC or AX was going to be that you had 2.4 gigahertz and then 5 gigahertz. 2.4 was crowded. Five gigahertz wasn't so crowded, right? But now really over the last decade, five gigahertz has also now be continued to become essentially crowded. And so you do have essentially contention, you can have interference, you can have a reduction in available bandwidth. And so the opening up of the six gigahertz, essentially spectrum Is really allowing for essentially an unfettered domain, right? So something that essentially doesn't have any competition and is exclusively for use for a x. And so what this translates into the real world is going to be ultra fast, high speed throughput. When we talk about routers, there's a lot of times just numbers that get thrown out. So let's say something like. 4000 megabits or some kind of number and pretty much these numbers are theoretical, in the real world once you actually account for distance, environment, obstructions and other kind of factors. Those numbers are going to go down. But it's important to understand that the reason why you want that number to be big is that you know, if you start off with let's say 1000 megabits, which is already impressive because you're talking about the speed of literally a one gigabit cable, and that's within, let's say, 10 to 15 feet of your router and let's say your laptop By the time you get to the end of your house, that number might drop off to let's say, 100 megabits, right? So, if you only have an ISP provider that's providing you let's say, 250 megabits, you're already effectively not able to fully Utilize that right. And so if we can start off and even have a higher level of throughput, so as that number kind of goes down across the range, we can essentially maintain a very high level of performance. And so that's really the kind of the key benefit and why if I succeed. In the tangible real world, if you were to actually test this, you had a Wi Fi six e client, which is going to be a requirement to be able to get the full speed of this. But they are launching this month we're going to be launching z 590 motherboards that just got announced that have native Wi Fi, six C. And Intel is putting out the AX two 10 chip set which will also be seeing its way into things like laptops and other types of devices. You are gonna effectively be able to see over two gigabits of wireless throughput. So we are talking two times the speed of a gigabit ethernet cable. Right? That's pretty crazy. Yeah, that's wild. I remember when 5G routers came on the scene there was and even still to this day sort of kind of limitations of what the those routers could sort of handle just based on physical boundaries and line of sight and stuff like that. Now with, with six G with six Hertz, six gigahertz being that new bandwidth spectrum. Is there any sort of improvement in stuff like that? Where, yeah, it's not crowded, but are there any other sort of like tangible benefits being on that spectrum. Yeah, so inherently along with the technology, there's a lot of other benefits that you have. So there's key technologies that are called multi user MIMO. So, in older kind of generation, essentially pre ax you didn't have true what is called simultaneous upload and download. Based on client device, so let's say I had something like my phone and my phone was going to connect to that device. Essentially, the router has to treat everything in a sequential fashion. So it goes from kind of one device to another device to another device. You don't perceive it this way because it's happening pretty quickly, but. But it's not actually happening concurrently across all your devices. As you move over to AX and y if I succeed you have the ability that if that device supports AX, which now way AX is very common, right? You see it in motherboards and laptops and phones, tablets, and others, even TV manufacturers that are shipping getting ready shipped, as built in, you can have what's called this multi user MIMO experience. So that's that's a key benefit. There's even Battery, Battery life enhancements that occur called target week time where the router can kind of work with the device know where it's at help to kind of maximise how the radio is kind of scanning and making connection. So you can see a lot of actually improvements. It's not just about speed. It's I think about overall experience, right, you're gonna have a faster and more reliable, more dynamic environment. Especially for most of us, and modern high kind of digital homes, you're talking about now, many people are talking, you know, 25 to 35 to 50 plus devices that all have to be managed. And that's a key part tell. So these higher end routers, especially this unit, it's a quad core 1.8 gigahertz chip that which you might not think like Wow, that's a lot of processing but there's some cool stuff as to why you would want such a high speed chip in there as well.>> Very cool. So that is going to be available soon and what's the price on that?>> So this is going to be coming out at the very end of the month. And target MSRP is going to be $550. So isn't that expensive unit but I think recapping on some of the kind of the cool things that are in addition to this four gigabit ethernet ports on there, and then you also have 2.5 gigabit connectivity on this. So if you've got an ACS enabled products at 2.5 gigabits, you've got hard line connection. And then you, of course, have your traditional WAN. It's also then gonna have your two USB 3.2 ports, and one of the really cool things with having that really fast processor on there is you can have 150 megabytes for the USB attached storage. So you're literally talking about mass storage Built into this unit so that you can go ahead and connect, a drive there, have access to all your files, and be good to go. And I think the last few things that might be interesting for people that they don't realize, so one is privacy, and the other one is going to be I think streamlining your internet experience. So we do build into the unit VPN. So a lot of people have kind of been worrying about like, I think you know being a little more anonymous on the internet or maybe taking advantage of what a VPN offers. Normally this means you've got install like an app to your phone or app to your browser or different things like that. You can run the VPN client inside the router that takes a little bit of processing power and it can reduce your performance. So having a really fast processor really helps to give you a great VPN experience. And that can then apply to all your devices. We also have an exclusive technology that we call VPN fusion. That will allow you to do both. You can run the VPN and non VPN at the same time. And the last one is we've also introduced ad guard technology built into the router. So this is a really cool feature that you can literally go into our mobile app, go and enable the Add guard function and if you want to disable ads from From being displayed on your devices, you can also do that. So, when we talk about I think about the feature set and functionality. There's a lot that we really bake into these units where it's not just about, the the speed and the range, which of course is a key part to the overall experience. But I think also usability right, how you set it up, and the feature set and ultimately, what you're trying to do when you're connected to your router. Very cool. That's that's an insane amount of features on a router that I think people are gonna be pretty surprised by. So I want to take a tour of some of the other products you guys announced here at CES. What else do you have for us in that? That bag over there. Look at this. There we go. It's my bag of my bag of holding man, so. [LAUGH] So right here, this guy, this is the brand new claim or two. So this is a follow up from the first generation claim or that we offered and really the kind of the Did you know that the trick that the Claymore offered, which was really innovative was that it had what we called the bond and so the bond was this guy right here. So this essentially, is the ability to go from a tkl keyboard which we see more people. Four people adopting I mean still full tenki is still by far the market leader in terms of volume. But tkl does have things you know in terms of the ergonomic benefits of just adjusting it to your setup, not putting as much strain on your arm. Arm, giving you the flexibility to kind of position. It's a really great choice, right? And then stylistically a lot of people like kind of the clean compact design, but it's kind of make that decision. Do you want you know Keyboard that has a 10 key and a numpad or one that doesn't right and that's the great thing about the Claymore is that you can do both and it's really, really simple. So this generation we entirely redesigned this to have like this really cool push fit design. Essentially dock it in And NM, now I'm good to go and I've got a full 10 key bass keyboard, and I'm set but we didn't stop there. We kind of even wanted to go further than we've seen kind of this progression towards even wanting to have kind of this chord free gaming great environment. We've been really big advocates of this. So I don't need the court, I can go ahead and disconnect that. And it's type C, by the way, so, you know, all our new stuff is all type C based. I can then flip a switch on the back and now I just went into Low latency 2.4 gigahertz wireless mode right and nice little integrated 2.4 gigahertz dongle stores right there in the back, pop it in there. I've got low latency I'm set and I now have full access to it. And it's I think overall just gonna be a really, really outstanding option for those that are looking for a keyboard that really there's nothing else like this on the market. But one of the really cool things here that I'm gonna show you is what's underneath here and that's going to be our brand new switches and these are optical RX RRG switches, so these are pretty sweet. So I can show you here a little bit of a closer shot there. So is that the only so and those switches, what kind of profile are those? Are they linear or tactile? How does, [CROSSTALK] So we watch different versions. Yeah, we'll have two different versions. So we'll have your your linear with your reds and then you've got your kind of your clicky with your blues. So I'm going to actually cut here to a second little shot so you can actually see something that's pretty interesting. And you can just see kind of a little bit of a difference in terms of how we've got this set up here. So here we've got the Claymore actually one and then we have here the Claymore two If I just pull up this cap right here, [BLANK_AUDIO] you can actually see a little bit of the difference, right? So sure here is going to be your cherry and there's going to be your RX. Right. And so the big difference is the LED lighting. So one is kind of a lot top heavy and the other one's much more centralized and diffused. The other big benefit that you have with the RX based switch is that we entirely redesigned the actual stem in the stabilizer. So there's a lot of actually key wobble that happens kind of like when you're you're pressing down on a on a normal key It's called key chattering key wobble and some people kind of get really bothered by it, you end up just kind of getting used to it. And even though mechanical keyboards have a much better feel than a membrane keyboard, although I'm not opposed to actually a good membrane keyboard, that's really the big benefit is that we are Found that when we created this hollow core and these four points stems and then we integrated the specialist stabilizer, we pretty much could eliminate the wobble so it's got a really nice smooth and quiet feel to it. And then the optical performance of course is super fast in terms of the actuation because you don't have this a debounce issue that happens kind of with your traditional switches. So overall, I think really, really cool that we've done this year with the with the clip fortune. Yeah. The thing that really stood out to me when I first saw the Claymore was the fact that, that num pad is modular in a way that you can sort of mount it, on either side of the TKL sort of standard. No core set. So for someone like me who I absolutely have to have a numpad when I'm doing my normal day to day quote unquote busy work, but when it comes to gaming, to be able to have that flexibility, where you can basically just mount that on the left side of the keyboard and have it just be this like amazing sort of whatever you want it to be this macro patter or however you want to customize it to me Having not seen something like that before, I think is is is definitely an added feature that people are going to be really jazzed about. Yeah know, we everybody that use the claim board was always super stoked about it. It was actually really complicated and expensive to produce here, this generation is going to be much better. So we're really happy about that. And like I said, we've improved all the aspects of the bond. Also, it's really nice smooth volume wheel. And then you've got four tactile, macro keys right here that are also available to you. So overall, I think really, really nice unit even supports actually A USB 2 pass-through on the back, and a USB quick charging. So, overall I think, really really exciting unity when you talk about what we're doing in terms of the peripheral spacing. Also, I think defines a lot what ASUS is bringing to the table. Where, when we're looking at what we're trying to to within our peripheral product is kind of really be innovative. And I think that brings us to The next guy, which is gonna be the gladius, which has really been our most popular mouse, and really kind of shook up a lot of things because the big focus that we want to introduce when we brought in the gladius was kind of looking at the community and what were they doing. And a lot of users actually in the community were kind of modding their mice and customizing the switches. So. We think about switches a lot of time on a keyboard, but we don't think about the actual switches that are actually present in a mouse, right. And so we were the first to really use these super high performance Oman switches. And then we kind of saw this as a trend. And this kind of continued to evolve amongst many other companies. But one of the cool things that's really kind of still exclusive is what's called our push fit design. And this feature is a new generation push fit to so just going to show you something it's pretty wild here. All I got to do is just pull out these two little rubber stops. From there. I'm good to go. I take a little screwdriver. Now you might be wondering, Well, why would you use a screwdriver? Well, the cool thing is you can actually customize the switches on here. And so all you need to do is just take out those two screws. And once you do that you pull off the shell And once you pull off the shell, we include another set. And you can of course, pick different ones online if you want, that have different characteristics. Some are really quiet, some are kind of smoother, but I can pull off the body. And now I can actually directly replace these switches right here. So this little guy right here that I'm showing you, this is the switch and so these all ready come with. Optical switches. So we kinda got this whole optical technology, kinda focus where it's all about very low latency. This mouse is an industry leader. It's between 0.5 to 1.5 milliseconds, it beats pretty much anything else out there. DPI sensor up to 21,000 which of course you're not going to use but just about the accuracy and performance. Just really, really cool that you even have that ability that you saw within less than 10 seconds. I can swap these out, customize it, to whatever I want, whether how smooth, how fast, how responsive, how quiet. I want to That's all available to you within the Claudius. That's very cool. I, I, I knew that was a thing, to see it done on this sort of scale is pretty cool. I've not dabbled in changing out the switches in my, a mouse, but now that you can, I probably will. Well, I think we might have time for maybe one or two other, Products real quick. You wanna talk about the new monitors that Asus is dropped? Yeah, sure. So we do have actually the brand new Rog Swift. So the Swift is our highest performing monitors, PG279QM. So this monitor i think is gonna be. The new sweet spot for the enthusiast segment so it's going to be 1440 P, and it's going to be 240 hertz fast IPS. So you're going to get that great kind of color quality experience that you have display HDR 400 standard and that g sync technology baked in there so that you've got, of course a super smooth tear free gaming experience. I think this is going to really be an exciting monitor for a lot of people that are out there. And then of course, on the other side, we've got a lot of HDMI 2.1 monitors that we're launching, we've got a 43 inch and we've also got a 32 inch which is 4k 244 hertz with that HDMI 2.1. So, while we're talking a lot about PCs here, the great thing is that this is also a great monitor that If you're looking to pair it with the latest generation consoles, you know, an Xbox or a PlayStation, it's also gonna make a great fit there to be able to really give you that that high resolution that you know immersive image, you know and gaming centric design, right where you've got things like on screen menus that you can see Timers, you know, your frame rate, right, a lot of kind of other elements that you wouldn't see traditionally within a TV, right. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's such a smart time. For that kind of stuff to come out especially like you said the the new generation consoles supporting that HDMI 2.1 and just being an all in one solution for that kind of stuff just to me makes a ton of sense. I wonder If, you know a lot of the monitors that that come out, you know, people usually have to, you know, make some sort of compromise, right, whether it's the resolution, whether it's the refresh rate, but it seems like things are starting to like come to a head a little bit, and definitely looking forward to seeing how that that 27 definitely performs for sure. Yeah, you definitely have hit a sweet spot. I think in a long course with the latest generation GPUs you saw right there in the beginning had that beautiful white 3080 card. So I think, especially with the latest generation of cards offering such strong performance dlss technologies for being able to render at high resolutions and still be able to drive, very good frame rates. These monitors are coming at a great time for like I said, regardless of whatever gamer experience you want, whether you're kind of on that console side of the fence around the PC side of the fence, that's also the evolution of what we're seeing with kind of RRG and we're really happy about it. The products that we're introducing right and then kind of last little one here and it just touch on is that we've also got a really cool headset Bluetooth enabled called the RG Strix BT, which will be wired and wireless but it's a noise cancelling for both the actual headphone and for the microphone. So if you're kind of in an environment you won't be able to take advantage that you'll be seeing that come in the not too distant future. Excellent. All right, JJ, so much fun stuff you got for us today. Really appreciate you coming on and hope to get all of that in my hands personally very soon. Indefinitely, man, it's been awesome talking. Thanks so much for having me.