Asus goes all out with its new ROG G1000 gaming PC: The 'world's first' to have a holographic fan system built into the case

If you browse through any list of prebuilt gaming PCs for sale, you'll notice that they typically all look very much alike. That's because vendors use basic items for cases and fans to cut costs wherever possible. But what happens when a PC manufacturer doesn't skimp on the goodies and goes all out to impress? Well, you get something like the new Asus ROG G1000: a hulking monster of a rig with three holographic fans.

Asus calls the setup AniMe Holo, claiming that it's the "world’s first holographic fan system in a prebuilt gaming PC". The G1000 boasts one 380 mm fan with 720 LEDs and two 215 mm fans with 404 lights.

These don't blast air around the PC; instead, they spin up to a point where you visually can't see the blades in motion and via a button on the top panel (or through Asus' Armoury Crate software), signals are sent to the lights to create patterns, animations, and so on before your eyes.

I'm doing a poor job of describing it, so watch Asus' video above to get the full picture (if you pardon the pun). Whether it looks as crisp as that in real life is anyone's guess, but the general consensus in the PC Gamer HW office is that it looks kinda neat.

Of course, having such big quad-bladed fans whizzing around, you might expect there to be a lot of noise or vibrations. But Asus reckons it has the problem sorted by housing them in self-contained and isolated panels. Mind you, that hinged side panel looks seriously thick, so you're probably wondering just how big the ROG G1000 is.

It stands almost 62 cm tall, a fraction over 58 cm long, and 29 cm wide. That's 10 cm taller and 8 cm longer than a Fractal Design North XL, so this is one seriously bulky gaming PC. The G1000 has those dimensions not just for the holographic fans, but also because it comes with a 420 mm AIO liquid cooler in a 'ROG Thermal Atrium'—basically a separate chamber at the top, with side ventilation for airflow.

I'm not convinced that the design is going to win any awards for efficient fluid dynamics, because the front holo panel is solid, so the air ingress points for the whole PC are on the sides (with one small one underneath). This is important because of what's inside the ROG G1000: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090, 64 GB DDR5, and a 2 TB SSD.

Admittedly, that's for the GM1000TY-XS999 variant, and Asus says the G1000 will be available with ROG Astral RTX 5080, ROG Strix RTX 5070 Ti, and Radeon RX 9070 XT options (no mention about CPU choices). But even so, whatever configuration you go with, there's going to be a decent amount of heat generated by the components that will need to be shifted.

That could mean that the ROG G1000 is a bit of a noisy beast when being worked hard, especially the RTX 5090 variant, but at least you'll be able to distract yourself from it all by having some funky animations going on via the holo fans.

Asus hasn't given us any indication of prices yet, though it's obvious that the top-tier variant is going to be many, many thousands of dollars. However, I reckon within a few months, we'll start to see new PC cases sporting holo fans, so if that's the only thing you're interested in with the ROG G1000, then you'll probably be able to get your hands on something by the summer.