Asus unveiled a brand new fleet of ROG and TUF gaming laptops for 2023 at CES this January. The corporate the launched the primary wave of high-end gaming laptops in India in March, adopted by a second wave of mid-range fashions in Might. The laptop computer we’re reviewing at this time, the ROG Strix Scar 18 (2023), is from the sooner batch. This beastly gaming laptop computer is priced beginning at Rs. 2,79,990 in India however the variant we’re reviewing has Nvidia’s top-most present laptop computer GPU and prices Rs. 3,59,990.
Ought to the brand new Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 be in your listing if you happen to’re on the lookout for a no-holds-barred gaming laptop computer and cash is not any object? Learn on to search out out.
Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 (2023) design and options
The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 is gigantic and heavy, and is supposed for use on a desk in your house reasonably than in your lap. Within the few weeks that I have been testing it, I most likely solely moved it twice from its spot close to the facility outlet. Its design is fairly eye-catching and it’ll definitely enchantment to its supposed demographic.
The matte black end of the laptop computer seems slick and there is loads of RGB lighting sprinkled throughout the outside. There is a backlit ROG brand on the lid, one mild strip on the again simply above the exhaust vent and one other within the entrance, alongside the underside edge. The plastic on the perimeters across the ports is translucent and so is the higher portion of the keyboard deck. Total, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 seems intimidating and futuristic, which I am certain many avid gamers will recognize.
The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 (2023) is constructed nicely and appears intimidating
The laptop computer ships with a chunky 330W AC energy adapter which requires a 16A energy outlet. The latter is a little bit of a difficulty since we usually haven’t got many 16A wall sockets at house, and the few which can be there are usually utilized by heavy home equipment equivalent to air conditioners. This limits the variety of locations in your house the place you possibly can cost or use this laptop computer, so that you may wish to take into account putting in a further 16A wall socket if you happen to’re planning on getting it.
Additionally within the field is an additional cowl for the hinge portion which Asus calls Armour Caps. These snap on to the rear of the laptop computer magnetically and you’ll even 3D print your personal customized caps if wanted for a personalised look.
The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18’s show is one in all its highlights. It is an 18-inch QHD (2560×1600) IPS panel with a 16:10 facet ratio and a 240Hz refresh charge. The show has slim borders on three of the 4 sides and slightly lip on the highest for the webcam. The show additionally meets Asus’ ROG Nebula specification which is to say it has 500 nits of brightness, helps one hundred pc DCI-P3 color gamut copy, is Pantone validated, helps Nvidia’s G-Sync expertise, and might do Dolby Imaginative and prescient playback in video streaming OTT apps. The lower-priced Scar 18 variant in India would not get the ROG Nebula certification and as an alternative has a full-HD decision and 165Hz refresh charge.
You get per-key RGB LED backlighting for the keyboard
Because of the big dimension of the laptop computer, you get a full-sized keyboard with quantity pad and devoted buttons for controlling quantity, the microphone, and efficiency modes, plus one-touch entry to Asus’ Armoury Crate software program. These devoted buttons will be customised to carry out different capabilities or you possibly can even use them to program macros. Asus claims that the ROG Strix Scar 18 has a “skilled esports-grade” keyboard whose switches are designed to final over 20 million presses. You additionally get per-key RGB LED backlighting with Aura Sync, which syncs your lighting patterns with different ROG equipment. The trackpad is sort of massive too and monitoring and gestures work very nicely because of the glass coating.
All of the ports are situated on both facet of the laptop computer, leaving only a large exhaust vent on the again. They embrace two USB 3.2 (Gen2) Sort-A ports and one Sort-C port, a Thunderbolt 4 (Sort-C) port, full-sized HDMI 2.1, a headphone/microphone combo socket, Gigabit LAN, and an influence socket. There isn’t any SD card slot or safety lock slot.
Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 (2023) specs and software program
The highest-end variant that I am testing comes with an Intel Core i9-13980HX cell CPU with a complete of 24 cores (eight efficiency, 16 effectivity). The HX is for Intel’s excessive efficiency cell CPUs, which permit for straightforward overclocking if you happen to want much more efficiency. That is accompanied by 32GB (2x 16GB) of DDR5 4800MHz RAM, which occupies each RAM slots within the laptop computer. There’s additionally 2TB of PCIe 4.0 SSD storage (2x 1TB SSDs in RAID 0). Lastly, the center of any gaming laptop computer is the GPU, and we get an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 laptop computer GPU with 16GB of GDDR6 RAM.
The bundled charger is very large and is sort of the scale of a smartphone field
The lower-priced variant of the ROG Strix Scar 18 in India comes with the identical Intel CPU and quantity of RAM, however packs an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 GPU and 1TB of storage.
Protecting all of those high-power elements operating cool is not any straightforward feat and Asus claims it has redesigned the chassis and motherboard to suit a full-width heatsink with seven warmth pipes and three followers in complete. It has additionally used a liquid metallic compound as an alternative of thermal paste over the CPU and GPU, which needs to be more practical for warmth switch.
The laptop computer encompasses a 720p webcam, 4 audio system with Dolby Atmos enhancement, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, and a 90WHr battery. The latter will be charged by way of a USB Sort-C cable too offered the adapter is highly effective sufficient.
The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 ships with Home windows 11 preinstalled, together with the standard trial variations of Microsoft’s Workplace suite and McAfee anti-virus softwares. The MyAsus app gives fundamental capabilities equivalent to updating the firmware and switching between battery modes, however for all the things else there’s the Armoury Crate app.
The translucent sides of the laptop computer look cool, however will not be illuminated
That is your one-stop resolution for tweaking every kind of settings on the Strix Scar 18. The homescreen of the app reveals you real-time stats of the CPU, GPU utilization and frequencies, fan velocity, and a snapshot of different system settings. The panels on the homescreen may also be rearranged so you possibly can have probably the most related ones entrance and centre. The tabs on the left of the app help you customise particular person settings such because the default energy mode for the GPU, hotkeys, lighting patterns, microphone mode, and many others.
Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 (2023) efficiency and battery life
The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 is an absolute beast on the subject of efficiency and I’d anticipate nothing much less from this top-specced variant. There’s by no means any sense of hesitation or lag by any means, it doesn’t matter what activity is being carried out. The keyboard may be very comfy for typing and the keys themselves are quiet.
You get loads of room to comfortably relaxation your palms and the tall show is superb by way of color copy and brightness. I seen that that the laptop computer tends to run heat even within the ‘Silent’ energy mode and when operating on battery energy. With the discrete GPU disabled and simply utilizing Chrome, the portion above the keyboard and vents on both facet all the time felt heat to the contact.
This laptop computer is all about efficiency so let’s dive into that. Beginning with some artificial benchmarks, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 returned a hint time of simply 27 seconds in POV-Ray. Within the Cinebench R20 CPU benchmark, the laptop computer returned 778 factors in single-core and a formidable 8,227 factors within the multi-core check. PCMark 10, which measures your entire system efficiency for numerous duties equivalent to video conferencing, spreadsheets, and many others, returned an total rating of seven,803 factors.
The cooling system of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 (2023) is sort of efficient in ‘Turbo’ energy mode
Graphics benchmark 3DMark produced a rating of 13,753 factors within the Time-Spy check suite and 10,438 factors within the ray-tracing check of Port Royale. Because of the RAID 0 configuration of the SSDs, the learn and write speeds have been additionally equally spectacular. The laptop computer returned sequential and random learn speeds of over 12GBps, and sequential and random write speeds of over 7GBps.
Coming to real-world checks, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 compressed a 3.24GB folder of various information in simply 47 seconds utilizing 7-Zip. Rendering the BMW check scene in Blender took 2 minutes, 14 seconds, whereas encoding a 1.3GB AVI file to H.265 (MKV) wanted solely 27 seconds. These are all fairly robust numbers and a few of the lowest (a great factor) we have seen shortly.
Gaming efficiency is superb. A few of the keyboard keys do get heat throughout gaming however switching to ‘Turbo’ energy mode retains the principle contact factors of the laptop computer cool, on the expense of added fan noise. Should you use headphones then this should not be an issue. We begin off with the heavyweight title Cyberpunk 2077 which was a cakewalk for this variant of the Strix Scar 18. Utilizing the sport’s built-in benchmark, the laptop computer averaged 124fps on the show’s QHD decision and the ‘Ray Tracing: Medium’ high quality preset. What impressed me was that even when switching to the very best preset, Ray Tracing: Overdrive, which additionally allows a preview of the sport’s Path Tracing (totally ray traced lighting) characteristic, it nonetheless returned a median of 121fps.
In Dying Stranding, the ROG Strix Scar managed to common 140fps operating on the native decision, with all choices maxed out and with the DLSS choices set to ‘High quality’. Lastly, in Doom Everlasting, the laptop computer simply managed to common 200+fps on the native decision with ray tracing enabled. Suffice to say that with such a {hardware} configuration, it is best to be capable of simply play just about any trendy sport with ease.
The swappable Armour Caps helps you to add a contact of personalisation to your laptop computer
Gaming laptops will not be usually identified for nice battery life and this one is definitely not the exception. Utilizing the Battery Eater Professional benchmark, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 ran for 1 hour, 10 minutes utilizing simply the CPU’s onboard graphics and with the RGB lighting on. With regular use, I used to be in a position to get about 2-3 hours of runtime at greatest. I do not forsee many individuals complaining about this since most customers can have this laptop computer plugged in always.
Verdict
The 2023 Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 is an absolute beast of a gaming laptop computer and all this energy doesn’t come low cost, at Rs. 3,59,990. It is not precisely moveable both. Nonetheless, you might be getting the easiest cell CPU and GPU which can be at present obtainable for a Home windows laptop computer, and there is not any doubt that it ought to age nicely through the years. The one actual downsides to this laptop computer is the truth that it does run heat even once you aren’t doing a lot on battery energy. Aside from this stuff, it is a well-built pixel-destroying machine that is certain to place a smile on anybody’s face.