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I’ve now reviewed my second laptop built around Intel’s newest Arrow Lake-HX chipset and Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU architecture. The first, theLenovo Legion Pro 7i, was very fast and lived up to the hype, while being a very large 16-inchgaming laptopwith some nice aesthetic flair.
The second is the Asus ROG Strix SCAR 18, and it’s even larger, with a spectacular 18-inch mini-LED display that’s the best one I’ve reviewed yet. It’s also very fast, although a tiny bit behind, and it, too, offers up a lot to gamers looking for a great, kind of portable gaming machine.
Specs and configurations
The ROG Strix SCAR 18 will be available in a few configurations, only some of which are available as this review is being written. The base model will include an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX chipset, which is common to all configurations, along with 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, a 16.0-inch QHD+ mini-LED display (the only option), and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Upgrading to an RTX 5080 and a 2TB SSD brings the price to $3,400, while an RTX 5090 boosts the price to $4,500.
Those are expensive prices, but of course, you get a lot of gaming laptop. It’s a lot more expensive than the Legion Pro 7i, which comes in at $3,399 with a Core Ultra 9 275HX, 32GB of RAM, two 1TB SSDs, the RTX 5080, and a 16.0-inch QHD+ OLED display. But I imagine much of that price difference is down to the larger and very good mini-LED panel that Asus is using with the ROG Strix SCAR 18.
There’s no way around it: the ROG Strix SCAR 18 is a very large laptop. Of course, packing so much power into a chassis that also needs to house an 18.0-inch display would be pretty hard to do and keep things svelte at the same time. TheRazer Blade 18is a little thinner at 1.1 inches versus 1.26 inches, and lighter at 7.06 pounds versus 7.28 pounds. But these 18-inch gaming laptops are just big. You’ll have to deal with it if you want such a large display that can be carried around in one piece.
The ROG Strix SCAR 18 is constructed of a mix of materials, including aluminum in the keyboard deck and plastic in the bottom chassis and lid. It’s solid enough, with no bending, flexing, or twisting. I’m sure the Razer Blade 18 might come across as better made, given Razer’s devotion to make the mostMacBook Pro-like gaming laptops. But there’s nothing wrong with Asus’s construction.
In terms of its aesthetics, the ROG Strix SCAR 18 incorporates most of the things gamers want to see in their machines. First, there’s plenty of RGB lighting, including the per-key RGB lighting on the keyboard, the full-surround RGB LEDs lining the underside of the chassis all the way around, and the large ROG logo on the lid that pulses according to what’s set up in the Armoury Crate utility.
And the white Asus AniMe Vision LEDs on the lid are quite striking, showing a variety of present and custom messages that flow like a high-tech ticker tape.One of the biggest hardware-side changes on the ROG Strix Scar is the focus on easy upgrades. The rear panel can be opened without any screws, thanks to a slider mechanism, providing easy access to the RAM, SSD, and other parts.
Removing and replacing the SDD modules is also a screw-free affair owing to the convenient Q-latch system for both storage sticks. There are also a pair of SO-DIMM slots, and once again, they can be accessed to upgrade the RAM without using any tools.
At the same time, the overall design doesn’t include some of the more aggressive gamer touches like jet fighter exhaust venting on the back. The vents on the ROG Strix SCAR 18 are more pedestrian and functional, and neither add to nor detract from the overall gamer aesthetic. The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i has RGB LED lighting around its fighter jet exhausts and it looks pretty cool. The ROG Strix SCAR 18 lacks those kinds of touches. Whether that matters will be down to individual tastes.
Overall, I like the design. Yes, it’s large and bulky, but like I said, that’s really unavoidable.
Keyboard and touchpad
The ROG Strix SCAR 18 keyboard is a bit of a mixed bag. As mentioned above, it has per-key RGB lighting that looks great. And it’s pretty expansive, even with the numeric keypad for macro binding in various games. I found the keycaps oddly small, though, which made it harder than necessary to keep my fingers on home row. And the switches are deep and springy enough for gaming, but not quite as satisfying as I like. I didn’t really enjoy typing this review on the keyboard, but gamers will probably find it good enough, if not the best they’ve used.
The touchpad was disappointing. It’s large, but the buttons weren’t very responsive. I took to using an external mouse because I found myself repeatedly trying to click to get things done, and it was frustrating. Most gamers will use gaming mice, so that’s probably not as much of an issue. But it’s certainly not a strength.
Connectivity and webcam
There’s plenty of connectivity, with a mix of ultramodern Thunderbolt 5 ports and legacy connections. That includes a 2.5G RJ45 Ethernet port, which will be appreciated for those who don’t want to game wirelessly. My biggest complaint is that all the ports are on the side, where putting them on the back would keep them out of the way. Wireless connectivity is fully up-to-date.
The webcam is a 1080p version, and it’s fine. It has an infrared camera for Windows 11 Hello facial recognition, which I appreciate. The Arrow Lake-HX chipset doesn’t have a fast Neural Processing Unit (NPU), and so the ROG Strix SCAR 18 isn’t a Microsoft Copilot+ PC laptop. That’s probably fine, because if you want to use this laptop for AI processing, you’ll want to use the incredibly fast Nvidia Blackwell GPU.
Performance
This is just the second laptop I’ve reviewed with Intel’s Arrow Lake-HX chipset, the Core Ultra 9 275HX. It has 24 cores (eight Performance and 16 Efficient), running at up to 5.4 GHz and consuming 55 watts of power, boosting to a maximum of 160 watts. Asus gives it up to 65 watts in its configuration. The Core Ultra 9 275HX is a very fast chipset, with slightly faster cores that result in slightly faster multi-core scores over the previous generation Core i9-14900HX with around the same basic specs. I noticed a discrepancy between Asus’s website where it says the CPU can get up to 80 watts, while my press materials say it’s 65 watts.
The Strix SCAR 18 is also the second I’ve reviewed with an Nvidia Blackwell 5000-series GPU, the GeForce RTX 5080. It has Nvidia’s newest CUDA cores, streaming multiprocessors, and RT and tensor cores, and it powers Nvidia’s DLSS 4 that leverages on-device AI processing speeds for much faster scaling and frame generation with an eye toward dramatically improving visual quality while running at similar framerates to the previous generation. It also boosts performance in tasks like video editing with advanced encoding/decoding engines. Asus gives the RTX 175 up to 175 watts, totaling 240 watts — just a bit less than the 250 watts Lenovo gives to the Legion Pro 7i. Again, that’s per my press materials, while the Asus website says it’s up to 255 watts. If I can get that clarified, I’ll update the review.
Asus includes its Armoury Crate utility that provides finder control over performance than Lenovo’s LegionSpace utility in the Legion Pro 7i. In addition to several performance-based presets, you can enter a manual mode where you can get more granular in configuring the CPU and GPU. I didn’t dig into the settings, but they are there for anyone who wants to fully optimize performance. In our benchmarks, I used the Windows, Performance, and Turbo settings and reported the latter in the table below.
The Asus ROG Intelligent Cooling system makes great use of all that interior space, with an end-to-end vapor chamber, triple fans, and Liquid Metal helping to keep things cool. The fans spun up during intense sessions, especially in Turbo mode, but they were slightly quieter than with the Legion Pro 7i. I’ve used gaming laptops that were a lot louder and where the fan noise was harsher.
The end-to-end vapor chamber, triple fan layout, and the liquid cooling fan do an acceptable job of keeping things cool under stress. Notably, the tactic of pulling in air through the keyboard deck yields tangible improvements in keeping the rising temperatures under control.For regular workloads, especially if you have selected a Windows profile from the pre-installed Armory Create tuning software, the external chassis doesn’t run hot. Compared to a bunch of gaming laptops that have recently passed our test labs, the heat localization is better and comparatively restrained.
While working, I measured the temperature levels within the 41-43 degrees Celsius range in the area above the keyboard deck. Talking about the innards, the CPU temperatures usually hovered in the 65-68 degrees Celsius ballpark, while the discrete graphics engine remained under 80 degrees Celsius while pushing the machine at AAA games.
The noise situation is somewhat of a mixed bag. As long as you stick with the Windows or Silent performance profiles, this is one of the quietest gaming laptops out there. But as you dial things up a notch and move to the Turbo profile, the fan noise is harsh and can only be drowned out by a decent pair of noise-cancelling earbuds or headphones.
In our standard suite of benchmarks, the two Arrow Lake-HX/Blackwell laptops perform similarly, with the Lenovo machine being slightly faster across the board. That might be down to either the slight increase in power or more aggressive tuning. Both are much faster than previous-generation Windows laptops in most of our benchmarks, with only the Asus ROG Flow Z13 (a very diminutive machine) being faster in Geekbench 6 multi-core with its AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 935 chipset. But there’s no doubt that the Strix SCAR 18 will be very fast for the most demanding productivity tasks.
Creative professionals looking for a fast Windows laptop for photo editing and video editing, along with users who use 3D design and rendering software, often look to gaming laptops, given their high-end components and focus on pure performance. The Pugetbench Premiere Pro and Photoshop benchmarks run in the live versions of each Adobe app and give a good indication of a laptop’s performance for demanding creators. The Strix SCAR 18 is very fast in both, even beating out the Apple MacBook Pro 16 in the Premiere Pro benchmark, where the M4 Max chipset benefits from fast encoding/decoding circuitry. Again, the Legion Pro 7i was faster.
As mentioned above, the Nvidia Blackwell 5000-series is aimed at providing comparable framerates to the previous 4000-series GPUs, but dramatically enhancing visual quality. It does this by using various AI-powered processes for upscaling and frame generation, using Blackwell’s very fast AI performance. The visual improvements are striking, for sure, but we don’t currently benchmark performance using any games that fully support DLSS 4 and so will show off the visual impact.
So far, the two RTX 5080 laptops I’ve reviewed have been very fast, but not necessarily much faster in various games than previous 4000-series laptops. Which is to say, you’re not giving up performance across the board, you’re getting much better visual quality, and you’ll see performance increases as games become more optimized. There’s nothing wrong with that. Note that I ran some benchmarks with the Strix SCAR 18 GPU set at the highest setting, but it made no difference in the benchmarks.
In the synthetic 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, the ROG Strix SCAR 18 was slightly behind the Legion Pro 7i, and we’ll see that this pattern held in all of our benchmarks. As with our non-gaming benchmarks, the Asus is just a little slower than the Lenovo. That’s likely down to tuning, but the differences likely won’t be enough to force a decision.
Breaking down by individual games — and all listed results are in each laptop’s highest performance mode — we’ll start withCivilization VI. This title benefits from both very fast CPU and very fast GPU performance, and like the Legion Pro 7i, the Strix SCAR 18 was very fast at running it.
InCyberpunk 2077, the Strix SCAR 18 was slightly behind the Legion Pro 7i, while theLenovo Legion 9i Gen 9with an RTX 4090 was the fastest in this comparison group. I suspect that the RTX 5090 will take the top spot in this game, although again, I wouldn’t expect a massive increase.
InRed Dead Redemption, the Asus was actually the second-slowest laptop. For whatever reason, it fell further behind than in the other titles. It’s still quite playable at 1600p and Ultra graphics, but this game wasn’t its best showing.
Finally,Assassin’s Creed Valhallashowed that the laptops we’ve tested have been around the same level of performance. And it’s very fast.
Overall, once again, the ROG Strix SCAR 18 didn’t break any records, and in fact didn’t keep up with some RTX 4000-series laptops, but it was more than fast enough for most gamers in these older titles. I suspect that these results will only improve.
So, you must be intrigued about the performance gulf between the ROG Strix Scar 18 variants with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 and 5090 GPUs, right? Well, there is both good and bad news. First, the latter is an absolute monster, but if we go by granular measures such as cost-per-FPS, you are essentially paying an Nvidia tax. Across simulated workflows and gaming tests, the two models are only separated by a margin of 5%.
The biggest difference I saw was on 3DMark, where the flagship Nvidia GPU helped score a 17% lead. Moving over to games, I ran Cyberpunk 2077 with ray-tracing and Forza Horizon 5, and only noticed a 10% lift in the raw FPS output, with DLSS4 and frame generation enabled.
On its own, the RTX 5090 variant of the ROG Strix Scar 18 offers an astounding performance in games, as long as you are plugged in to a charging port and running the show at Turbo or Manual mode. Running CyberPunk 2077 with ray-tracing enabled, I consistently saw 120fps output. As you jump to the top Ultra preset, you can still enjoy the game comfortably at over 80fps.
Playing Black Myth: Wukong at a similar 1600p resolution with ray-tracing and the highest graphics preset, the outing was no different. But enabling DLSS4 and frame generation is where you see the machine really shine. Cyberpunk 2077 climbs over 200fps, Monster Hunter Wilds ran above 140fps, Horizon Zero Dawn fell close to the 120fps bracket, while Doom: The Dark Ages touched the 280-300fps range.
But speaking purely from a raw firepower perspective, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 is as future-proof as a laptop can get. If running the most graphics-intensive games is your key criterion, this machine will deliver top-of-the-chart results for at least the next couple of years. And as far as longevity goes, you may expect it to handle gaming titles above the 90fps mark for an even longer spell with all the ray-tracing pizzazz thrown into the mix.
However, you must also ask whether the slight lift above the RTX 5080 variant is worth the $1,100 premium you pay. If you intend to stick with this machine for a long innings, the splurge is justified. But if you’re concerned about the FOMO of next-gen silicon will eventually occupy your mind, the RTX 5080 model is significantly cheaper without any major performance hits.
Battery life
We test battery life with gaming laptops, and invariably, we reach the same conclusion. These aren’t laptops that you should plan to carry around and use without being plugged in, especially for their primary purpose of gaming which pushes every component to its limits. And then considering the size and weight of the ROG Strix SCAR 18, this isn’t really meant to be carried around all that much at all. you’re able to move it from place to place for gaming sessions, but you’ll be carrying the very large and heavy power brick along with you regardless.
In our web browsing and video looping battery tests, the laptop barely made it to two hours, and in our more demanding Cinebench R24 test, it didn’t make it to an hour. A 90 watt-hour battery just can’t keep up with powerful components and a very power-hungry 18-inch mini-LED display. Just plan on keeping the thing plugged in.
Display and audio
I’ve reviewed a few mini-LED displays, and they all been pretty good. That includes the MacBook Pro 16, which until now has had the best example. The Strix SCAR 18, though, might beat them all in some very important metrics. It’s an 18.0-inch 16:10 QHD+ (2560 x 1600) mini-LED panel running at up to 240Hz. It’s incredibly bright and has brilliant colors. It’s not as sharp as the MacBook Pro 16’s display, being both lower resolution and much larger. But for gamers, it promises outstanding high dynamic range (HDR) performance along with a super fast refresh rate that supports Nvidia G-Sync for tear-free gaming.
My Datacolor SpyderPro colorimeter captured the objective excellence of this panel. It’s incredibly bright at 1,084 nits, which is brighter than the MacBook Pro 16’s 585 nits with SDR content. Apple’s panel can peak as high at 1,600 nits with HDR, but in terms of sustained SDR brightness, the Asus comes out on top. And, its contrast ratio is incredibly high at 16,310:1, beating out the MacBook Pro 16’s 12,940:1. Both have deep blacks, but the Strix SCAR 18 is a bit deeper. The colors are also wide at 100% sRGB, 89% AdobeRGB, and 100% DCI-P3, with excellent color accuracy at DeltaE 1.05 (less than 1.0 is indistinguishable to the human eye). The MacBook Pro 16 comes in at 100%, 87%, and 99%, respectively, along with DeltaE 1.18.
The one negative of mini-LED versus, say, OLED displays, is that there can be some blooming on bright objects against black backgrounds. I didn’t notice anything significant, and unless you’re in a very dark environment, you may not notice it either. Instead, everything looked spectacular, and HDR content was great. That’s for both gaming and HDR media content. This is a very good display that will show off every game you play, and will take advantage of all the power this laptop provides.
Audio is provided by dual tweeters and downward-firing speakers, and quite frankly, it’s not all that impressive. It gets loud, but there’s some distortion at full volume, and bass was noticeably lacking. I strongly suggest a good pair of gaming headphones — which you’ll probably already plan on using.
A very large, and very awesome, gaming laptop
If you want a gaming machine that you can lug around with you and don’t might the girth and weight, the ROG Strix SCAR 18 will reward you even while it gives you a little exercise. To begin with, the large size is necessary to gain access to that awesome mini-LED display that’s as bright and colorful as any I’ve reviewed — and even better than most.
And then the performance is also excellent, even if it’s not the fastest I’ve reviewed. It will keep up with everything you throw at it, from gaming to creative workflows, without breaking a sweat. It’s not inexpensive, but that’s not to be expected with such a well-designed gaming machine.
