Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Trump’s lawyer brought a gaming laptop to $250M fraud trial

By

We’ve seen gaming laptops in classrooms and out in the wild on public transportion, but we’ve never expected to spot an Asus ROG laptop in a courtroom — especially in the hands of an attorney representing former President Donald Trump. Still, there it was, with RGB lighting changing colors all throughout the first day of Trump’s $250 million fraud trial in New York.

The unidentified laptop in question belongs to Alina Habba, one of Trump’s attorneys, and it was first spotted by Ryan Rigney, a marketing director at a game development company called Odyssey Studio. Rigney took to Twitter to share his findings, claiming that we’re looking at an Asus laptop with an Nvidia RTX 2070 Ti inside. The RTX 2070 Ti doesn’t exist, so Rigney is most likely talking about the RTX 2070 Super.

gamer lawyer brought the 2070ti asus laptop with the blue underglow to the court hearing pic.twitter.com/0wDoSJKz3P

— Ryan K. Rigney (@RKRigney) October 2, 2023

This very well might be true. Kotaku pins the laptop as the Asus ROG Strix G17 G712, and although I’ve done a fair bit of digging, a lot of the Asus ROG lineup looks very similar from the back. One thing is for sure — this isn’t a workstation kind of laptop, like the Lenovo ThinkPad seen on the left side of the photograph. This is a gaming laptop with the fancy lighting to match, and Habba hasn’t even disabled the cyclical color changes, letting the Asus logo softly transition from blue to green, orange, red, and more.

Recommended Videos

If this is the 2021 ROG Strix G17 G712, it’ features a 17-inch 144Hz IPS display, a 10th-Gen Intel Core i7 processor with a boost clock of up to 5.1GHz and eight cores, an Nvidia RTX 2070 Super graphics card, and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. Not too shabby for a laptop being used in a courtroom.

Of course, this invites some speculation — is this a personal gaming laptop that doubles as a work machine, or did Habba simply pick out something that was powerful enough for her needs? It’s easy to buy a gaming laptop based on specs alone. Productivity-oriented laptops often don’t have a discrete graphics card, or are generally weaker in that department, and may prioritize a thin and light design over specifications. Sometimes, buying a gaming laptop is just a better deal.

With Nvidia’s RTX 40-series laptops, it’s hard these days to find a notebook that fits the quota of “reasonably priced” and “powerful.” Acer’s recent laptops come in at just under $1,000, but those are equipped with an RTX 4050. Habba’s equivalent would likely be more expensive; even now, it retails for $1,700. If you want to see how the current model performs, make sure to read our Asus ROG Strix G17 review.

One thing is for sure — Asus just received some unintended marketing in front of a whole new audience.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Monica J. White
Monica J. White
Computing Writer
Monica is a UK-based freelance writer and self-proclaimed geek. A firm believer in the "PC building is just like expensive…
I finally found a gaming laptop utility that’s actually worth using
The Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 sitting on a coffee table.

Nearly all gaming laptops come with bundled first-party software, and most of it isn't all that good. They tend to be poorly designed and riddled with bloatware and features that you'll never need. Armoury Crate is Asus' version of that, and while it isn't terrible, it suffers from many of those same problems.

A large number of users on Reddit have voiced their criticism of Armoury Crate, accusing it of being buggy, broken, and overly complex. Some of the most common issues include the software's cluttered user interface, promotional pop-ups, unnecessary bloatware, and the high usage of system resources. In my experience, I do find Armoury Crate's UI to be confusing, and I've also noticed that the software runs way too many background processes and services, some of which seem unnecessary.

Read more
Acer gets serious about 14-inch gaming laptops
Somebody playing a game on Acer Nitro 16

The 14-inch category of gaming notebooks is getting quite the traction. We recently saw the HP Omen Transcend 14, the company’s first attempt at making a compact yet premium gaming laptop, and a redesign of the popular Zephyrus G14 from Asus. Now, Acer is bringing two new models under its Predator and Nitro brandings.

The new Nitro 14 will be available with the latest AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS or the Ryzen 5 8645HS, which are the same chips as last year but with some added AI capabilities. The 14.5-inch display uses an IPS panel, and customers can choose between either a 1200p and a 1600p resolution model, both of which are capable of 100% sRGB coverage and a 120Hz refresh rate.

Read more
Playing PC games on a Snapdragon X Elite laptop made me a believer
A reference Snapdragon X Elite Laptop running Steam

There's a lot of promise with the upcoming wave of laptops powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip. I've already seen plenty of benchmarks that prove Qualcomm is onto something huge, with the GPU and NPU performance of the chip being quite powerful. Benchmarks have even shown that it can be double as fast as Intel's latest Arc graphics in the Core Ultra chips.

But those are just benchmarks in simulated scenarios. I really wanted to see it to believe it, and recently, at an event in New York, I did just that. I spent some hands-on time with reference laptops running the Snapdragon X Elite.

Read more