Asus ROG put a flipping hologram on the side of its beefiest gaming PC – and it looks bananas

I'm pretty sure I'm on firm ground when I say that it's not an easy time to make your gaming hardware stand out right now. While the days of flashy RGB light arrangements aren't truly behind us, it looks like more and more gamers want hardware that blends in and doesn't scream "gamer" from the rooftops.

Erm, well, nobody got that memo to Asus ROG this year, because its newly-announced G1000 PC, unveiled at CES, features just about the maddest design feature I've seen on a PC in years: a full-blown hologram on the side.

The ROG G1000 is a chunky desktop power aimed at providing just about the maximum amount of power as you could want in such a large footprint. It can be configured with up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, to match that aspiration, as well as an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D processor to match.

At a time when memory is becoming a truly scarce thing, you'll get a whopping 128GB of DDR5 RAM and a lovely Asus X870 motherboard with included Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, making it an all-around beast of a system. It's got cooling to match all of this, including a tall "thermal atrium" at the top to help pull in the coolest air possible for the whole fan system.

That's all by the by, though, since the real attention-grabber is very much that wild side-panel with a fully built-in hologram. Asus has come up with a suitably silly name for it, too: the ROG AniMe Holo. That presumably means the tech could come to other designs in the future, but, for now, you'll have to shell out in a big way to get it.

The hologram can display a range of animations and lighting that can sync up with what you're playing or not, as you like. It works by whirring a fan around and using light to give the impression of 3D imaging, like any hologram of this sort, but the effect is pretty impressive when you see it.

There are quick control keys on the case itself to toggle this and various fan modes easily, but I'd imagine the sort of gamer who wants a hologram in their case will go into a little more detail to customise it using Asus' ROG software. The sky will presumably be the limit, there.

Whether it's to your taste is another question, of course, but it's interesting to see Asus continuing to plough its own furrow and double down on the glitz and showiness of its gaming tech. I wasn't given pricing for the G1000, which will be a key variable, but it'll likely be an option for the most dedicated of gaming show-offs.