ASUS is finally bringing its gaming-centric ROG Phone 5 smartphone to the US market, following its debut in March this year. The very-overpowered smartphone with some eye-catching RGB effects to go with its gaming appeal is now up for grabs from the official ASUS store priced at a cool $1,000.

This is the vanilla ROG Phone 5 model that we’re talking about here. The more powerful Pro and Ultimate variants with a slightly different design will be up for grabs later this year. However, even the base model that is now available to purchase has top-of-the-line specs, including a whopping 16 gigs of fast LPDDR5 RAM.

Coming to the internal hardware, ROG Phone 5 features a 6.68-inch FHD+ AMOLED display with a 144Hz refresh rate, 300Hz touch sampling rate, and is protected by a layer of Gorilla Glass Victus on top. The HDR10+ certified panel offers a peak brightness of 1,200 nits and is flanked by thin bezels at the top and bottom, instead of going for a notch or hole-punch aesthetics.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 runs the show inside, ticking alongside 16 gigs of RAM and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage. The ROG Phone 5 supports dual-SIM (5G + 5G) connectivity and runs Android 11 on the software side. There are a ton of gaming-centric tweaks made to the UI such as a dedicated game enhancement app called Game Genie for controlling features like floating windows, haptics, sound effects, notification behavior, and a lot more.

In the imaging department, you will find a 64MP primary camera that relies on the Sony IMX686 sensor. It sits alongside a 13MP ultra-wide angle snapper and a 5MP macro shooter. For selfies and video calls, the ROG Phone 5 offers a 24MP front camera.

The phone has dual-front firing stereo speakers and comes equipped with a large 6,000mAh battery that supports 65W fast charging. It also features capacitive Air Triggers that double as shoulder buttons while gaming. ASUS offers a host of accessories such as a cooler attachment and gamepad for the ROG Phone 5, but you’ll have to fork out extra cash for them.