Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (G733P) Review

This year’s model of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 ($2,899.99; $3,499.99 as tested) gaming laptop is all about power, going all in on the latest silicon from AMD and Nvidia. Our review unit is rocking the blazing-fast Ryzen 9 7945HX (“Dragon Range”) CPU and a GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, delivering (as you’d expect) top-end frame rates for AAA and competitive titles alike. With its roomy 240Hz QHD display, plenty of RAM and storage, and obligatory RGB chassis lighting, this laptop provides a gaming experience laser-focused on enthusiasts. While value isn’t the main concern once you’ve reached this price range, it’s still super-expensive, and the build quality doesn’t feel quite up to the price. It’s a worthy consideration if you have the budget, but it’s difficult to to look past the recent Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 8 as the better deal.

The Design: The Same Scar Styling

Asus is making its 2023 update to the Scar 17 mostly about the new components, so this is much the same design we saw in the 2022 Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (G733). That’s mostly fine by me, because we didn’t have many complaints with the chassis or build in our review of the previous model. It’s fairly sleek-looking for a larger machine, with some eye-catching LED trim running along the front base of the laptop.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

If you could criticize something, it's that, while the build is decent, it's underwhelming for the price. It isn’t, for example, made of metal like some top-end competition (say, the Razer Blade 18), and you'll feel a bit of flex around the keyboard deck.

I mentioned that this laptop looks sleek, and models are often thicker than this in this power tier, but it is still a heavy system with a fairly big footprint. It measures 0.92 by 15.5 by 11.1 inches (HWD) and weighs 6.6 pounds—up a little from the 2022 model, thanks to the new components. Overall, this is not overly suitable to throw in your backpack with regularity, unless you have to. Adding to that is a sizable power brick, which is even thicker than the laptop itself and will further bulk up your bag.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Of course, one beneficiary of the larger size is the screen, which is a roomy 17-inch panel with a QHD resolution (2,560 by 1,440 pixels) in a 16:9 aspect ratio. It features a 240Hz refresh rate, a 3ms response time, and Nvidia G-Sync—all essential boxes to check off for discriminating gamers. This resolution is demanding for a laptop GPU to push, but, as we’ll get to, the components have the horsepower to power that many pixels at speed while gaming.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

As for the rest of the build, the keyboard experience is above average—typing has a forceful bounce, with plenty of key travel, and every key is individually backlit with customizable RGB lighting. I have less to say about the touchpad, but I also have no complaints. It does its job well.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Connectivity is a strong suit on this larger chassis, with most of it on the rear edge. You'll find nothing on the right flank, while the left edge holds two USB Type-A ports. The rear is home to two USB Type-C connections (both with USB4 support), an HDMI port, an Ethernet jack, and the power jack. The webcam is only 720p, which is a miss at this price, and the video quality is mediocre as a result.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Testing the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17: Nearly Peerless Performance

As you saw up top, this system has a high cost of entry. It’s a high-end gaming machine for enthusiasts, so its $2,899.99 starting price is a non-starter for many shoppers. If you’re still here, I can assume that hasn’t scared you off, which is good, because our review unit is even more expensive.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

For $3,499.99, this unit comes with an AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX CPU, 32GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, and a 1TB SSD. As you can probably surmise, that’s an incredibly high-end system, and one we already put through its processing paces in a separate testing story focused solely on the first example of the Drago Range line we got, the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX. This chip is a 16-core/32-thread beast that, in our testing, vaulted itself and AMD back to the top of the pile.

We tested the CPU aspects separately first because it was our first chance to check out AMD’s new mobile Ryzen 7000 Series. So, for that story, we compared it with a relevant range of mobile processors. We’ll run a different set of competitors here, focused more on relevant matchups for the Scar 17, not just the CPU. You can see the names and specs of the comparison laptops in the following table…

First off, we need the obvious comparison with last year’s Scar 17, which gives us a look at the generational leap and at how AMD fares over the previously dominant Intel 12th Gen CPUs. Of course, Intel has also released new chips this generation, so the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 8, the MSI Titan GT77, and the Razer Blade 18 are all compared to represent Core i9 13th Gen at 16, 17, and 18 inches. The Ryzen 9 7945HX impressed us in the standalone testing piece, but we’ll now also be taking a close look at graphics performance.

Productivity Tests

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

Three further benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Our final productivity test is PugetBench for Photoshop from workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

As far as the PCMark 10 productivity test, these systems all flew way past the bar for speed, proving to be more than proficient for everyday multitasking. The new Scar 17 landed in the middle of the pack in that test, but for this class of laptops, the other scores tell us more about performance ceiling.

To that end, this system performed incredibly well against tough competition, leading on Cinebench and Photosop, and helping to raise the bar with Intel’s 13th Gen Core i9 laptops (which had it slightly beat in a couple instances). That is to say, this is a super-fast system for media editing and creation, so creative pros who also want a gaming system will be satisfied.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We test Windows PC graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). We also try two OpenGL benchmarks from the cross-platform GFXBench, run offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions.

In addition, we run three real-world game tests using the built-in 1080p benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege. These represent simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive esports shooter games, respectively. Valhalla and Siege are run twice (the former at its Medium and Ultra quality presets, the latter at Low and Ultra quality), while F1 2021 is run twice at max settings with and without Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing turned on.

The processor is an exciting new component, but let’s not neglect the excitement of an RTX 4090, even though we’ve tested a few now. Given the other GPUs here, it’s as much about wattage implementation as thermal design or any other factor, hence the variance you see here. The new Scar 17 has its RTX 4090 configured at 175W total graphics power, or TGP (150W plus 25W dynamic boost), which is certainly at the higher end. This laptop also utilizes a dedicated MUX switch, which routs the GPU directly to the display to reduce latency and increase frame rates.

Generally speaking, it couldn't quite keep up with the other RTX 4090 system, the MSI Titan, but it outperformed the rest. It’s difficult to be critical, given how objectively high these results were, but compared with the other top-end systems, you perhaps won't see as much daylight between it and the competition as you’d like—seeing as the Legion hung quite close in a couple areas.

Still, that’s somewhat harsh: The frame rates in the real-world game tests are incredibly high, and averaging 154 frames per second (fps) in Valhalla at maximum settings is the kind of thing you pay big for. It’s worth noting that 1080p is not the native resolution of this panel even though it is what we test at, for comparison's sake. As such, I bumped the resolution to the native 1440p and ran the same Valhalla benchmarks—the system scored 169fps on medium settings, and 124fps on Ultra High settings, still well above playable at that much more demanding resolution.

I did the same on F1 2021, which actually also helps demonstrate how DLSS is more effective at higher resolutions. You can see the original 1080p results were virtually identical with DLSS off and on but, at 1440p, the results jumped from 137fps with DLSS off, to 150fps with DLSS on. That both proves how straining the higher resolution is, and how DLSS virtually mitigates the resolution difference. Overall, and especially with the RTX 40 Series being more proficient at DLSS (and ray tracing), this laptop provides an excellent gaming experience.

In general, across the processing and graphics testing, the fans do get loud under load, but it's nothing too out of the ordinary. To achieve sufficient cooling, this laptop uses Grizzly's liquid metal solution on the GPU and CPU, and a custom vapor chamber; these are the kind of hidden features that add to the cost.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptop battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

To benchmark displays, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The battery is extremely lackluster on this laptop, lasting only two and a half hours on our rundown test. Even in this field of big, power-hungry laptops, that is several hours less than the competition. No, this isn’t a portable system you’d bring with you or use at a café often anyway, but it won’t even last too long off the charger at home.

As far as the display, the color coverage falls right in line with the rest, decent results for any creative pros who are also after the processing power. The brightness doesn’t set any records, but it’s acceptable at maximum.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Verdict: Premium Performance, Not-So-Premium Build

Providing blazing-fast performance is the minimum expectation at this price point, as harsh as that may sound, but the Scar 17 does meet that bar. The processing and gaming performance here is, if not always chart-topping, among the fastest available right now. Again, you’d hope so for the price, but it does deliver on that front, in addition to the fast-refresh, high-resolution screen.

The build, while it looks appealing enough, doesn’t stack up to more premium designs in this price tier, most notably the Razer Blade 18. Battery life is also a major letdown, though for the category, that may not be a deal breaker since it will mostly stay put on your desk. Still, this is a deeply expensive proposition, and it’s difficult to not to see the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 8 as a much better deal; its performance hangs close despite the disparity in price, size, and GPU. If you prefer the larger screen, or simply have the extra budget to get as much power as possible from your next gaming laptop, this may be the option for you instead.