Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (2022) Review

The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (2022) is a true beast of a gaming laptop, but at a pretty steep price. With an MSRP of around $2500 / £2800, this is definitely the most expensive kit I’ve ever tried. At first glance, paying that much for a laptop with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti seems like overkill, especially when you consider that spending that much on a laptop usually gets you something with a more powerful GPU inside.

However, the rest of the Strix Scar 17 (2022) spec sheet makes it a particularly attractive option. It’s powered by an Intel Core i9-12900H processor and also comes with 32GB of 4800MHz DDR5 RAM, along with a solid 2TB SSD to store all your games. The most important part of this laptop, though, is its screen: a 17.3-inch 240Hz WQHD display, which is big enough, of course. Whether it’s worth claiming the title of best gaming laptop remains to be seen, but nothing will come of it!

Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (2022) Features and Design

If you were hoping for an ultralight ultrabook, you might want to reconsider. It’s a particularly robust and heavy beast with a total weight of 2.9kg and a strong chassis that can take a few drops; not that you want to risk ruining its excellent appearance.

It’s a modern gaming laptop, too, with particularly slim bezels around the sides and top of the Scar 17’s massive display. It’s usually 720p. This can be a painful drawback for some, but overall it’s a lesser feature for a gaming laptop.

Although the ROG brand usually presents products with a typical gaming aesthetic, with sharp edges and aggressive styling, the Scar 17 is tastefully done. It is packaged in a gray plastic box with the ROG logo and bright RGB lighting at the bottom. This light will flash red when the laptop goes to sleep, which can be a bit annoying, but other than that, nothing special.

The confident vibrancy of the Strix Scar 17 also extends to its chiclet keyboard with a sea of ​​RGB lighting. This is where things get a bit overdone, although I will say that the coverage is tight and even. The keys themselves aren’t soft and you can use a decent amount of travel. Unlike other gaming laptops, you also get a full-size number pad for entering numbers and more.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (2022) specifications

Perhaps the biggest selling point of this Asus laptop is its large 17.3-inch display with a 240Hz refresh rate. 144Hz is arguably the usual refresh rate most people go for, but a higher one is preferable. higher for competitive gamers, and 240Hz is where things get tastier. .

I have to say that it’s an absolutely stunning screen, and the QHD resolution strikes the perfect balance between detail and price. Achieving 4K output at such a high frame rate would require far more power than the Strix Scar 17 can deliver, so a 1440p 240Hz display is arguably the perfect fit for a laptop with those specs. . It handles movements particularly well and the games are clear and dynamic. The addition of Dolby Vision HDR adds dynamism to the action, bringing out detail and providing solid contrast. Meanwhile, the IPS screen helps colors look accurate and viewing angles are sharp.

Under the hood, the inclusion of an Intel Core i9-12900H processor with its 14 cores and 20 threads is a real giant processor with a frequency of up to 5 GHz. It provides convenient support for next-generation memory using Strix Scar 17 with 32 GB of DDR5 4800MHz RAM inside. You also get a 2TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD that offers the benefits of high capacity and blazing speed for storing your games. It has to be said that everything seems to be particularly fast, and you’ll have to go a long way to find the best combination of processor, RAM and SSD inside a laptop at this price.

Asus also doesn’t seem to have spared any expense when it comes to connectivity options for the Strix Scar 17. Ports include DisplayPort with Thunderbolt 4 support, a pair of USB 3.2 Type-A inputs, a USB-A port, an HDMI 2.1 and 2.5 output. G Ethernet for a reliable wired network. WiFi 6E ensures reliable and particularly fast wireless Internet access, while Bluetooth 5.2 also ensures that the Strix Scar 17 is state-of-the-art.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (2022) Benchmarks and Performance

Of course, the real indicator of whether or not a gaming laptop is worth the money is simply its speed and the performance it can give you for the price you pay. I’m happy to report that the Strix Scar 17 is a particularly fast laptop and a powerful 1440p machine, delivering more than repeatable frame rates across a variety of games at peak usage, as you’ll see in the graph below.

In addition to excellent gaming performance, mainstream synthetic benchmarks like the PC Mark 10 also show the Strix Scar 17 to be a versatile and comfortable laptop. This includes tasks as simple as browsing the web, as well as intense creative tasks like rendering and editing, scoring particularly highly.

The RTX 3070 Ti inside this laptop turned out to be an excellent GPU with a wide range of resolutions, with incredible 1080p performance upscaling up to 1440p in many games. However, it can be difficult to get the Strix Scar 17 (2022) to hit its maximum refresh rate of 240Hz on the highest settings. Lowering the quality a bit will give you a higher frame rate, but of course at the cost of overall on-screen visual fidelity. If you need even more performance, Asus offers a way to overclock with ROG Boost so you can get more frames.

It’s not the world’s quietest laptop under load, but the Strix Scar 17 doesn’t feel like a fighter jet taking off. Things get very hot when you use it on your lap for its intended purpose, but it’s otherwise comfortable to wear. Most people will probably want to tether it to a desk or laptop for use with a mouse, because no one wants to game on a trackpad.

It has to do with battery life, where things fall short, as this laptop only scored 3 hours and 12 minutes in the Mark 10 Modern Office PC test, which I ran with screen brightness and RGB keyboard at 50%, despite Asus’ claims. up to 10 hours. with video looping and a total battery capacity of 90 Wh. On top of that, the power supply that comes with this laptop is also quite bulky.

Of course, with all that, it’s hard to ignore the RTX 3070 Ti laptop’s $2,500 / £2,800 price tag, but looking at the big picture, it’s a powerful machine with a particularly solid display with good detail and incredible motion, as well as a great frame to look and feel. .

You’re basically buying this laptop for its screen as well as this level of power, and if you can afford the asking price, it might be worth it.