Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 Review

Asus releases products to fit every niche in computing, and its ROG Strix Scar 18 (starts at $2,499, $3,699 as tested) is built to be one of the most powerful gaming laptops the planet has seen to date. Equipped with the highest-end 13th Generation Intel Core processor and the top Nvidia mobile GPU for 2023, the GeForce RTX 4090, this Strix is nearly untouchable performance-wise. While beastly hardware like this comes at a steep price, it’s not unreasonable next to similarly equipped competitors, like the new Razer Blade 16 starting at $3,599 and the MacBook Pro 16 (M2 Max) starting at $3,499, though Asus’ plastic design is less elegant. This more economical approach lets the Strix Scar 18 stand apart as an ultra-high-end option if you want to maximize “value,” even if the word has a very different relative meaning in this part of the market.

Scar 18 Essentials: An All-In Design and Configuration

A special breed of gaming laptops exists that you can think of as a luxury kitchen sink for the gaming elite. Everything gets thrown into it—and that’s what the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 is. It’s loaded with the highest-end mobile hardware, and packed so full that its size is well beyond what you’d see from a normal laptop, a new form factor for 2023. Just looking at the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 makes it clear that it’s a monster.

Part of that impression comes from the domineering size but also from the styling. Asus has gone with some aggressive design language on top and bottom, with lots of faux and real grille areas along with RGB lighting across the keyboard and wrapping around the translucent edges of the laptop base. Even the keyboard deck blends between opaque black and a semi-transparent plastic. Asus’ ROG logo also cuts across at multiple points.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

If it sounds like I’m mentioning plastic a lot, it’s because there’s, indeed, a lot of plastic. While some high-end machines incorporate more metal, the ROG Strix Scar 18 is plastic about as far as the eye can see. Some of the only metal pieces visible are the robust hinges that hold up the display. Fortunately, the plastic here feels sturdy. There’s very little flex to the keyboard area, which also uses a pleasant soft-touch finish that feels pleasing on the skin, though it blemishes with skin oils very easily.

Asus is selling the ROG Strix Scar 18 in just two configurations, with the only difference being the GPU, and neither will come at the affordable end of the market with a peak price of $3,699. The laptop will either run with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 12GB or RTX 4090 16GB with a boosted TGP of 175 watts (W). It comes configured with an Intel Core i9-13980HX, the company’s newest flagship mobile processor with eight multi-threaded Performance cores, 16 single-threaded Efficient cores, and a max boost frequency of 5.6GHz. That’s fed by 32GB of DDR5-4800 memory. The laptop can be upgraded to 64GB, but reaching that peak would entail replacing both of the SO-DIMMs that come pre-installed.

This ROG Strix Scar 18 is listed as coming with a pair of 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs running in RAID 0, yet the unit sent for testing only has 2TB of storage. Whether it’s using two 1TB drives in RAID 0 or two 2TB drives in RAID 1—with one 2TB drive cloned—is unclear, but testing confirms the drives are exceeding the usual PCIe 4.0 x4 bandwidth cap, hitting a sequential read speed of 11,172MBps in a quick CrystalDiskMark test. This variance from official configurations may account for how our test unit is actually a fraction lighter than Asus’ listed specifications.

Speaking of weight, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 is a testament to how far we’ve come in the last few years for making powerful gaming machines lighter and more svelte. The Lenovo IdeaPad Y900 I tested in 2016 was a monster in its day, weighing 9.8 pounds and measuring 16.7 by 12.4 by 1.4 inches to fit in a 17.3-inch display and the high-end gaming hardware of the time. To be fair, it also had a mechanical keyboard.

By contrast, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 weighs only 6.77 pounds, and it is smaller in every dimension, at 1.21 by 15.71 by 11.57 inches (HWD), while managing to pack in an 18-inch screen. The nearly 2.5-pound power brick doesn’t help the portability, though.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Asus does some good with the size, fitting in a number pad next to the main keyboard and giving the whole thing per-key-programmable RGB lighting. Alas, Asus employed an irksome arrangement of arrow keys: shrinking the right Shift key to make room for a full-size Up arrow key (more on this later). While the RGB lighting can produce some stunning effects and help divide the keyboard into sections, it does an only so-so job of lighting each keycap fully, leaving secondary characters barely illuminated and giving a part-lit, part-dim appearance.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

A big laptop like the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 can’t skimp on ports. While this laptop has plenty compared with most modern-day ultraportable laptops, it doesn’t feel like the machine takes advantage of all the edge space it has available. The right side of the base has a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports. The left side has a pair of USB-C ports, but they’re not both Thunderbolt 4. One supports that superior standard, while the other is USB 3.2 Gen 2—at least both can be used for DisplayPort output. Power delivery is also supported via USB-C, though the 100W limit won’t be a match for the needs of this machine under heavy gaming, which calls for the 330W power brick that plugs into the left side of the machine with a barrel port.

As for more wired connectivity, a 2.5Gbps Ethernet port is also included on that side, along with an audio combo jack and an HDMI 2.1 port that’s happy to spit out a 4K/144Hz signal to an external monitor. Fortunately, Asus at least has a decent excuse for not including more ports, as it used the available space on the back edge of the laptop for something perhaps even more important: a huge vent that spans most of the rear.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Of course, the ports may matter a little less when taking into account the wireless connections available. Bluetooth 5.2 can connect the machine to wireless headphones and speakers. Meanwhile Wi-Fi 6E provides leading-edge bandwidth for your internet connection, crucial in our case for quickly downloading the hundreds of gigabytes of data required to run the benchmark games necessary for testing.

The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 has a webcam…but that’s about as much as I can say positively about it. It’s no worse than the lot frequently seen on run-of-the-mill laptops. It struggles with anything but ideal lighting conditions, isn’t terribly sharp, and could certainly be better for a device that might be used for video calls or online broadcasts on the go. A $3,000-plus laptop certainly deserves better.

Unlike the webcam, Asus' speakers on the ROG Strix Scar 18 are pleasant. They’re impressively bass-filled for laptop speakers, adding a lot more depth to music and boom to video games. However, they’re not as loud as I’d expect from a machine this large, especially considering how loud the fans can get when they really spin up. The speakers can mostly play over the fans, but quieter moments in games or videos may be drowned out.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Using the ROG Strix Scar 18: The Hands-On Experience

Despite the plastic construction, the sturdy build of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 gives it a pleasant enough feel in use. It’s not flimsy, though it can flex a little. Meanwhile, the laptop’s size presents some comfort issues, with my wrists having to rest a bit more on the hard lip of the laptop than I’d like. Asus' keyboard helps with this somewhat. Typing feels deeply satisfying, with keys that have just enough dish to them, very little wiggle, and an even stroke. Only shortly into testing, I am comfortable enough to type along at 108 words per minute with a 98% accuracy rate, as measured in Monkeytype(Opens in a new window).

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Though typing is pleasant, using the keyboard to edit text is a bit more of a pain because of the aforementioned shared space between the Up arrow key and right Shift key. It leads to a lot of accidental jumping around, missed capitalizations, and erroneously selected or overwritten text. Similarly, the right arrow key cuts into the space of the number pad, which can also make for accidents during data entry. It’s not like Asus was hurting for space, as there’s a full inch of emptiness on either side of the keyboard. Asus could have shifted the arrow keys down to sit apart from the rest of the keys slightly, solving all of these issues.

While Asus provides a decently large touchpad with a smooth surface, it’s centered under the letter keys, which puts it well to the left side of the laptop. This is all well and good if you use a touchpad with your left hand, but for righties, it will likely mean a lot of reaching your arm over or accidentally clicking on the right-click side of the trackpad when you meant to hit the left. Asus could certainly have gone wider with the pad, or at least nudged it to the right some, which would have also kept it clear of palms when gamers use the WASD keys.

A big perk of Asus’ design is the huge display. At 18 inches, it’s larger than you’ll find on the vast majority of laptops, and yet I could still fit the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 into my Osprey Nebula backpack (though not another smaller everyday bag I have handy). The large display has a 16:10 aspect ratio to provide extra vertical screen real estate. This screen also has a crisp 2,560 by 1,600 resolution that keeps everything satisfyingly sharp. With a blazing 240Hz refresh rate, avoiding tearing with G-Sync, even ghosting is hard to notice. Pair all that with gorgeous color, and you’ve got a stellar on-the-go monitor.

(Credit: Kyle Cobian)

Able to shine sufficiently bright for most uses, aside from outdoor use in direct sunlight, the screen has an anti-glare coating to mitigate that blinding effect. Thanks to the sturdy hinge, the display also avoids wobbling in ordinary use.

One perk of the machine is that it has an MUX switch, allowing you to switch between sending discrete GPU output directly to the internal or external monitor without having to pass through the CPU first, which can improve performance. You also can control whether the integrated or discrete GPU is used to boost speed or save power. However, switching back and forth entails a number of different toggles in different apps to ensure the settings you want actually take hold. And when the GPUs switch, it temporarily freezes up the display, can require quitting apps, and can see display scaling shift as the different GPUs have different settings. It’s far from seamless, but still likely worth having for gamers who want a beastly machine at home, but one with any sort of battery life when they’re away from a plug.

Testing the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18: A New Generation of Power

Asus' ROG Strix Scar 18 is a new breed of machines for 2023, with the latest hardware that’s not facing much competition just yet. While this model is priced at the high end of the market, Asus can get away with that because its only closest competitors are equally costly. And, unless some of those previous flagship laptops see discounts, they’ll have no room to stand apart from the dominance the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 displays in performance. The only similarly kitted machine we’ve tested so far is the new MSI Titan GT77 running the same CPU and GPU combo as the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 but costing $4,599 for the privilege, thanks in large part to a 4K, mini LED display.

Until we receive more of the latest machines to test against it, we’re left with the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 mostly squaring off against models housing 12th Gen Intel Core processors and RTX 30-series GPUs, like the HP ZBook Studio G9 and the Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 7. We’ve also brought in the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 running a AMD Ryzen 9 6980HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and the Corsair Voyager a1600 with a AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS and AMD Radeon RX 6800M (12GB). To further put the latest Intel and Nvidia hardware into perspective, we’re bringing in the Apple MacBook Pro 16 running an M2 Max chipset.

Part of the way the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 is built to stay ahead of the crowd comes from its cooling. With substantial radiators venting out the sides and rear of the laptop, this Strix manages to pull a lot of heat away from its CPU and GPU. Stunningly, almost none of this heat ends up somewhere I feel it in use. While stress-testing the machine, the center of the base just below the screen measures a very toasty 115 degrees F, but the entire keyboard area doesn't see a single spot measure more than 94 degrees, and the WASD keys sit close to the high 80s.

Of course, to keep its cool, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 has to spin up its fans, and they’re loud enough to be annoying. Sometimes, the system has an easy time spitting out wildly high frame rates (like when it’s displaying a menu), and it will present a stark coil whine that sounds like a large housefly trapped in a fan. This is something I’ve run into on several high-performance laptops, though. Capping the game’s frame rate is a simple solution for that. Fortunately, outside of gaming and heavy tasks, the system is capable of running quietly.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 Productivity Tests

To collect a comparable measure of how laptops can perform in real-world productivity, we run UL's PCMark 10 benchmark to simulate office and content-creation workflows and 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.

We also test the CPU alone with three additional benchmarks 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 Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro 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 Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop, 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.

At PCMag, any score above 4,000 points in PCMark 10’s productivity benchmark is viewed as respectable and a sign that the machine will hold up well in everyday office work. Scores above 5,000 points are a mark of excellence. While every machine in this comparison scores above that 5,000 point threshold, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 simply reshapes the entire field, pulling off a 9,129-point score. No other machine breaks even 8,000—save for the Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 7. Most systems here fall between 7,000 and 8,000 points, including the MSI Titan GT77 in an underwhelming performance for the hardware. Only the HP ZBook Studio G9 falls short of the 7,000 mark, but it’s a svelte workstation operating with more thermal constraint than the gaming laptops it’s stacking up against.

The lead that the Strix Scar 18 takes in PCMark 10 carries across most of the rest of our benchmarks with a few odd misses. In HandBrake, it beats every laptop tested before it with a time of 3:35, encoding almost 30 seconds faster than even the M2 Max-powered MacBook Pro 16. The rest of the pack hovers between 5 and 6 minutes to compress the video. Only the MSI Titan GT77 outpaces the Asus, hitting 3:28 for a small lead. 

Intel's Core i9-13980HX comes out overpowering in Cinebench and Geekbench, with the Strix Scar 18 and Titan GT77 trading wins. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 scores 28,713 to MSI’s 28,169 in Cinebench R23, while the Titan GT77 scores 20,513 to the Scar 18’s 20,402 in Geekbench. These results outstrip the rest of the crowd by several thousand points, including the MacBook Pro. The rest fall between 12,000 and 16,000 points in Cinebench, with none breaking that 16,000-point mark. Lenovo and Apple come closest in Geekbench with 15,005 and 15,269, respectively. The HP ZBook Studio G9 musters 13,625, while the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 and Corsair Voyager 16 don't manage to break 10,000 points.

Our Photoshop 22 PugetBench test is one big outlier for the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18. It scored only 977.5. That’s the second lowest score with only the Corsair Voyager a1600 going lower at 951 points. It’s a curiously weak showing for the modern hardware, as the MSI Titan GT77 also trails behind at 1,003 points. The rest don't score much more, but it’s odd to see the HP ZBook Studio G9 with 1,107 and Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 7 with 1,200 points leading the pack.

While the PCMark 10 storage test hardly tells the whole story of a machine, it’s worth pointing out that the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18's score is surprisingly low here, earning just 1,523 points. That's below the rest of the fleet and a good many other laptops PCMag has tested. This may be an outlier though, as I am able to measure sequential transfer speeds more than 11,000MBps in Crystal DiskMark. The drive arrangement likely does not play nice with the benchmarking software.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 Synthetic Graphics Tests

Gaming systems rely heavily on their graphics processors, or GPUs, and no GPU is more under the microscope at the moment than the new GeForce RTX 4090 and 4080. So, to assess the new graphical horsepower on offer, we test Windows PCs' graphics with a pair of DirectX 12 gaming simulations using UL's 3DMark Night Raid (low-intensity) and Time Spy (high-intensity) tests. For hardware capable of ray tracing, we also run the Port Royal test. 

To allow for comparisons across platforms, we also run two tests from the OpenGL benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

Finally, to assess real-world gaming performance, we run a suite of in-game benchmarks, including the built-in 1080p benchmarks of three real-world games, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, F1 2021, and Rainbow Six Siege. We run Valhalla and Rainbow twice with different image-quality presets, and F1 with and without Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing activated.

While we find some interesting trades in the productivity tests, Asus and MSI give no quarter to their competition in graphics and gaming benchmarks. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 and MSI Titan GT77 trade wins across our 3DMark, GFXBench, and game benchmarks—all while maintaining a considerable lead against the rest of the pack.

In Time Spy, the Strix Scar 18 hits 20,283 points and the Titan GT77 scores 20,422. The rest of the pack can't even break 12,000 points. In Night Raid, the Strix Scar 18 hits 73,509 and the MSI Titan GT77 scores 66,153. The Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 7 comes surprisingly close at 62,164, but the rest fail to break 60,000 points, and the HP ZBook Studio G9 lags well behind at only 35,836 points. 

In GFXBench 5.0’s Aztec Ruins off-screen test, the Strix Scar 18 hits 505 and the Titan GT77 scores 530. Apple’s MacBook Pro 16 is the only other machine that can break 300 points, hitting 397. For the Car Chase off-screen test, the Strix Scar 18 earns 901 points and the Titan GT77 scores 897. Meanwhile, the rest of the pack can’t break 600 points, with the MacBook Pro 16 again coming closest with 587 points.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 Gaming Tests

The synthetic benchmark results carry over well into gaming tests, where the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 has a fantastic showing. The only machine that comes close is, naturally, the MSI Titan GT77. 

In F1 2021, the Strix Scar 18 can run at 169fps with DLSS off and bumps up to 173fps with DLSS on, while the Titan GT77 lags only a few frames behind. For Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Asus manages 194fps at 1080p Medium and 159fps at 1080p Ultra. And, in Rainbow Six Siege, it manages 456fps at 1080p Low and 390fps at 1080p Ultra. These scores make the rest of the competition look truly last-gen, with the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 delivering at least 50% more speed in many cases and sometimes more than double.

Of course, this isn’t a machine that needs to be chained to lower resolutions. We also put it through its paces at higher resolutions, including the built-in display’s native 2,560 by 1,600. The system plays most of the titles excellently at its native resolution, hitting 164fps in F1 2022 with DLSS on, 116fps in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla with the Ultra preset, and 422fps in Rainbow Six Siege with the Ultra preset (a curious leap above 1080p performance, where the game may have been CPU-limited).

Even the bane of high-end machines, Cyberpunk 2077, isn't a complete disaster. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 can run it at native resolution with the Ultra preset (which includes ray tracing) at 40fps with DLSS off—turning the DLSS setting to Auto boosts that to 84.3fps. Better still, toggling on DLSS 3’s frame generation technology sees that bump all the way to a smooth 131fps. That's a huge leap.

If you want to take the Strix Scar 18 and run it with an external 4K monitor, you can expect impressive performance there as well. Running the same trio of games over again in 4K, the Strix Scar 18 manages 79fps in F1 2021 with DLSS off and 114fps with DLSS on. In Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, it hits 103fps at 4K Medium and 75fps at 4K Ultra. And, in Rainbow Six Siege, it manages 269fps at 4K Low and 194fps at 4K Ultra. However, in each case, the MSI Titan GT77 manages just a few frames per second more.

While the performance is staggering in mobile, it’s a valid point of reference to look at the desktop space, where components aren’t under the same power and thermal constraints. The hardware in the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 lags well behind the desktop Intel Core i9-13900K and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 in the Corsair Vengeance i7400, and often falls more in line with (if not even below) the performance of a previous-gen Core i9-12900KS and RTX 3090 as seen in the Origin PC Millennium 5000T. Of course, unlike these desktops, the Strix Scar 18 runs at just 330W and can slide into a backpack.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 Battery and Display Tests

We evaluate the battery life of laptops by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) 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.

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

Asus' ROG Strix Scar 18 screen doesn’t just have gaming chops: It also has some valid applications for content creation. That’s because it’s able to achieve 100% coverage of the sRGB and DCI-P3 color spaces. It falls a little shorter at 89% of the Adobe RGB space, but it’s still an impressive result for a non-OLED display, and it even matches the results of the MacBook Pro 16. Better still, it delivers that color accurately with a measured average dE of just 1.37. Only a single color had a measured dE above 3, and it was just 3.04.

Asus's screen provides this all alongside a satisfyingly bright, 438-nit backlight. Notably, the Strix Scar 18 falls behind on brightness compared with the 500 nits Asus advertises. No matter the test, we cannot make it hit that level. Since the laptop supports HDR streaming but not a system-wide HDR mode, it's also spotty in when it will provide HDR visuals. With under 500 nits of brightness and a contrast ratio around 1,000:1, the system will hardly provide the Dolby Vision experience you might expect from a high-end TV.

As for battery life, the Strix Scar 18 can go from brutishly short to surprisingly decent with the flick of a few switches. Unfortunately, it can be tricky to remember which switches and make sure they’re all switched when going back and forth between AC and battery power. In PCMag’s video playback test, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 ran for an impressive 8 hours and 14 minutes (8:14). Since the laptop supports switching between integrated and discrete graphics, this test was performed on the less power-hungry integrated graphics. Given the laptop has a 90WHr battery, you should expect decent battery life in low-power situations. In regular use, we could see about four hours of battery life.

Unless the power is really wrangled, the Strix Scar 18 will simply burn through its battery. Basically, the system has to have the discrete GPU disabled, Windows's power mode set to best efficiency, and Asus Armoury Crate’s operating mode set to Eco mode to last for long. Just about every minute that these settings are left unchanged will cost 1% of the battery. Given how many different tools are managing the power, it’s easy to mix up, and going just a little while thinking it’s set right can cost you big on battery life.

Short as the battery life may seem next to ultraportables and Apple-silicon MacBooks, 8 hours is impressive compared with the fleet of high-power gaming laptops and workstations that the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 competes with. The HP ZBook Studio G9 comes close at 6:47 in our battery test, but the Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 7 hits just 3:00, and even the Ryzen-powered Corsair Voyager a1600 only manages 5:27. Of course, the MacBook Pro 16 with M2 Max obliterates the field with nearly three hours more than an entire day.

Verdict: A Surprisingly Balanced High-End Gaming Laptop

You’ll find few more powerful laptops than the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 on the market right now. It packs in the power and does an excellent job cooling it for sustained performance. While the laptop costs a lot, its prices are reasonable compared with its competition, like the Razer Blade 16 and MSI Titan GT77, which have higher starting prices and cost more for similar configurations, though these two machines feature more premium materials and designs.

Those who want the most power they can get their hands on today will still want to go with desktop computers, as the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 performs more in line with a top-spec desktop running last-gen hardware. But, for a powerful blend of extreme performance, moderate portability, and efficiency, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 provides a surprisingly compelling value.