this is a very fast gaming laptop people one of the passes that i’ve tested and it’s actually one of the cheapest time gaming laptops i’ve tested as well sounds crazy right but if anything this strix scar 17 had us really wondering what the difference really is between cheap and simply less expensive than i thought it would be and with that let’s kick things off with the price it starts at 2300 and for that you get some pretty impressive specs which includes a core i9 12 900h with 16 gigabytes of ddr5 memory at 4 800 megahertz a terabyte of storage an rtx 3070 ti and a full hd 360 hertz display the sample that we have in hand costs an extra 200 and that doubles the memory and upgrades the screen to quad hd at 240hz the top-of-the-line spec costs about three g’s which oddly reduces the memory size and gets you an rtx 3080 ti with 16 gigabytes of vram now that’s not too bad especially if you’re compared to something like the blade 17 from razer that costs way over 4 000 so from a value standpoint if you’re looking for the best specs without breaking the bank the scar 17 is certainly an attractive option now as for availability here in north america give it about
one or two weeks to hit retail shelves like b h newegg micro center and of course the asus store as well the design of the scar series has pretty much remained the same compared to last year other than a few tweaks here and there this is very much a gamer-focused laptop because the whole chassis comes in this matte black finish with a lot of rgb accents that i’ll go over in a bit the front lid is made out of aluminum and it’s pretty thick i do like the somewhat minimal styling with the rgb logo and that can also be customized to software which is cool i also like the laser etched strip that’s filled with tiny logos it adds a little bit of character to the laptop it shares a similar hinge design like the legion series with the extension housing all the i o and by the way you can also swap out the armor caps located above the hinge with a few other options i personally like the translucent finish because uh that theme continues with the rest of the chassis the hinge is pretty strong with very minimal wobble and you can open the lid with one hand which is great now given that this is a 17 inch laptop portability is not its forte because it’s over an inch thick and it weighs over six pounds or close to three kilos and that’s a little bit heavier than the blade 17 from razer but that laptop is in its own class if you look at design and build quality now to add to that lack of portability factor the included power brick is massive guys i mean it’s almost as big as my face it’s a 280 watt beast with a barrel stock connector i mean just looking at this thing alone four shadows into what this laptop can do speaking of foreshadowing if you click this video you knew that there was going to be a sponsor segment so let’s roll that quickly and come back to the scar 17.
What makes a cpu cooler different well it starts with the basics like a direct touch base plate along with nickel plated heat pipes for maximum heat dissipation a fan that respects your environment without sounding like a jet an easy installation procedure for both intel and amd platforms and the flexibility to work with different memory modules but the real deal comes with the presentation of his tpu cooler and iceberg thermal took a completely different direction with their ice lead g3 and g4 series by offering this unique multi-faceted design on the exterior shell that looks absolutely sleek especially in this teal version these air coolers come in different flavors to fit your style learn more about the isolate series down below alright taking a look at the interior space and right away you’ll notice a few things the palm rest cover features a split semi-translucent design and it looks so cool it peeks over the back plate holding the keyboard along with screws and the rest of the hardware that’s jammed inside this laptop i’ve never seen anything like this before so asus thank you now the keyboard itself is a full-size layout with dedicated numpad i’m sure this will be a bonus for anyone working with numbers um asus still gives you dedicated access to volume controls and armory crate at this point it’s an rog staple and i like that the keys are excellent in fact i would go on record and say that it’s probably one of the best keyboards that you can find for a gaming laptop the switches feature 1.9 millimeters of key travel and when you pair that with keys that don’t wobble around you get an amazing experience when typing and gaming now right by the numpad you’ll notice a little cool accessory called the keystone 2.
it’s essentially an nfc drive that unlocks access to personalized settings for this laptop for instance when you insert it you can configure it to operate at a certain mode whether if it’s silent performance or turbo or launch an app when removed you can choose to either hide all the windows mute the audio or enter windows lock screen you can also activate something called shadow drive which is a hidden storage partition that you can create on your own so when you dock the keystone the partition actually reveals itself and the data becomes accessible now don’t get me wrong this is pretty cool i mean it even creates a cool sound effect with some rgb bling and i mean you guys can come up with your own use case scenarios but yeah i think this is uh it’s a unique feature now speaking of rgb there is a lot going on with the scar 17.
Let’s start with the keyboard it’s bright and uniform plus you can customize the effects to armory crate uh there is a light bar wrapped around the perimeter of the laptop that adds more ambience and it looks really nice guys i will say that the uniformity is not as good as legion 7i but for the price i can’t really complain but it doesn’t end here because if you look closely between the hinge and the screen there is an other light bar that looks really cool if you plug it in there’s a charging effect to get your excitement going however i wasn’t really excited to use the trackpad because it does exhibit a lot of lag when you’re dragging icons or just moving stuff around windows the level of comfort is just not on par with precision glass surface like what you’ll find on zephyrus laptops also on my sample i noticed that the integrated left and right buttons get stuck like once in a while which uh forced myself to basically use an external mouse which is what i would recommend if you plan to get this as for ports the majority of them are located at the back for easier cable management so you get power in 2.5 g lan hdmi 2.1 a type c 3.2 gen 2 port with displayport pass-through and power delivery and a thunderbolt 4 port you also get a few more usb type-a 3.1 gen 1 ports and an audio jack on the left-hand side i’m actually surprised to see 5 gigabits per second ports on a 2022 laptop i mean asus just give us gen 2.
now the built-in dac sounds pretty good i will say that it is a little bit more bass heavy and you can’t adjust the eqs or there are no eqs to play around with the profile to make it sound more balanced but overall it’ll get the job done and by now i should be showcasing what the webcam quality should look like but i can’t because this laptop doesn’t have one in fact asus will happily sell you this 100 external webcam that clips onto the lid of the laptop does it suck to not have a webcam yes but i do know people on the other side of the fence as well so i’ll leave it at that the speakers are satisfactory they are bottom facing so don’t expect the best fidelity or resolution for your multimedia needs the base does get distorted trebles are muffled i would highly recommend using a pair of headphones shifting gears to the display what we have over here is a 17 inch quad hd 240hz ips panel this is a perfect resolution for this form factor because i can comfortably scale this to 100 which automatically gives me a ton of screen real estate to work with the color reproduction is excellent as you can see it covers 100 srgb 86 adobe rgb and 98 p3 it’s going to be ideal for your content creation needs whether if it’s video editing or photo editing and the icing on top of that is the 240hz refresh rate for gaming it’s just a wonderful experience overall for brightness levels it falls behind some of the other laptops that we reviewed this year we’re talking a little over 300 nits of sustainable peak level which wouldn’t be ideal for outdoor use but if you plan to use this thing as a desktop replacement you don’t really have to worry about that much as for upgradability the scar 17 is very flexible once you open the hood pay close attention to the cables powering the light bar they are connected to the pcb so you need to be careful uh but past that you’re greeted with two pre-installed ram modules maximum supported memory is 64 gigabytes the primary gen 4 nvme ssd is right over here and the performance is through the roof we got 6.5 gigabytes per second on
read and close to 5 gs on the right side that’s one of the fastest that we’ve seen on laptop within this price range now one of the main issues with larger 17-inch laptops is that their size tends to negatively impact battery life versus smaller models because if you look at them there’s just more screen to run in the scars case the resolution is running at quad hd at 240hz and that means yeah things aren’t that great but then again these larger heavier gaming laptops are usually used as desktop replacements rather than getting you all-day battery life at starbucks also remember when all the lake first launched i said about msi laptops typically having terrible battery life well that still holds true since even with a smaller battery the scar still able to beat the ge 76 raider switching over to heavy load and it doesn’t get any better either but that’s pretty much to be expected since this thing can suck back an epic amount of power under full load even when it’s on battery mode how much you may ask when the scar is plugged in its turbo mode gets the 12900h pegged at an average of 113 watts and it does that all day every day meanwhile standard mode feels a lot more like intel’s default power levels with a short 40 second burst to 90 watts and then it levels out to a constant 70 watts now when you choose to run this thing in silent mode well like every other rg gaming laptop that ends up completely kneecapping things by running it around 30 watts most of the time with a few bursts to higher levels every now and then frequencies always follow power input but it’s still interesting to see that a bump of about 20 watts gives the 12900h a pretty massive increase of about 500 megahertz between performance and turbo modes these auto leg chips obviously love more power i also think that running this laptop in silent mode is absolutely pointless this is a high-end gaming laptop and its performance just gets killed with that setting temperatures are relatively well managed right across the board when you consider all the lake’s maximum is 100 degrees that’s a lot different from what i’ve seen on some amd laptops lately because for whatever reason laptop manufacturers have started running the ryzen cpus right at the maximum allowable heat
level and i believe they do this to compete better against intel devices but it’s still worrying but what about the gpu well that’s where things get really interesting with these new laptops because remember the blade 15 that used a powerful 3080 ti that got chopped down to just 80 watts it actually got beaten by some of the lower end gpus so what did asus do well they definitely didn’t pull a razor here guys because in performance mode the rtx 3070 ti in this thing has access to 130 watts and turbo pushes it even further to 150 watts a lot of that extra overhead’s there because an additional 25 watts is now available through nvidia’s cpu optimizer algorithm and when it comes to actual gpu speeds in performance mode asus has been able to push the 3070 ti right up to envious maximum boost spec turbo even goes beyond that to 1650 megahertz and while i haven’t reviewed any of the laptops with this card i’m sure this one’s going to be the fastest that i’ve seen this year now those speeds do come with some trade-offs and one of those is heat i mean the scar 17’s cooling system has been upgraded since the last generation so things stay manageable plus none of the settings hit the unofficial cap of nvidia’s boost algorithm which is about 85 degrees the only minor concern is performance mode which is rising after 10 minutes of continual gaming so at this point we know that at least asus includes three very distinct modes turbo goes absolute ball to the wall silent destroys pretty much every point of owning a gaming laptop and performance seems to strike a balance between those two modes the main issue here is that turbo also turns the fan speeds to 11 as it tries to cool down two components that are running at over a hundred watts i mean this thing is super loud guys it just screams and i never want to use this for longer periods of time in that setting but does it even give you a noticeable improvement well the answer to that depends on how you look at things if
you’re someone who uses cpu heavy programs all the time then yes it can be beneficial but the effects on gaming are minimal at most even in a game like doom which absolutely loves higher clock speeds from the processor and graphics engine so like usual we decided to test in performance mode since it offers the best balance of performance and noise that also means that it lines up really well with some of the other laptops that we reviewed in the last few months like the g76 raider and also remember the blade 15 from razer that cost a cool 4 grand yeah this comparison is going to be really interesting guys so in real world benchmarks the scar 17 is pretty darn impressive it’s actually the fastest laptop we’ve tested since it runs at a higher frequency more consistently than the g76 raider but the difference between the two is completely unnoticeable in real world since we’re only talking about a few seconds here and there over some pretty long tests and i think the bigger question here is how all this aligns once we start getting in some higher end amd laptops up to now we just haven’t seen one with the 6900hx but those are coming very soon will it make a difference i really don’t think so because the scar 17 is so ridiculously fast that i think it’ll stick to the top of the charts for a while one of the biggest wins is in premiere where intel’s quick sync can be used in parallel with cuda’s co-processing and the result well it’s pretty crazy now what about gaming well this is what the scar 17 is built for and here you can really see the benefits of pumping more power into a gpu since the rtx 3070 ti runs that around 130 watts in most situations it competes directly with the lower power rtx 380 dti in the razer blade 15.
that’s also the reason why last year’s legion 7i competes so well too i mean that thing with the rtx 3080 chugged down a massive 150 watts but overall though while the scar 17 was the fastest round in cpu focused tasks like rendering it isn’t the same situation in gaming because it’s still a beast in 1440p and here it actually beats the blade 15 more often than not the only laptop that comes ahead is you guessed it that legion 7i man because it just takes the crown as the fastest one we’ve tested in this resolution either way though it’s also important to take the scarce price into this equation because at around 2500 it’s actually a good value when you consider the semi which was launched for just over 3 300 and the blade 15 i’m talking about here it goes for even more than that so it’s pretty clear that this is a fast gaming laptop the specs certainly held up to our expectations and for the price i think it’s a bargain guys but there are a few things to keep in mind this isn’t something that you would carry around every single day between classes or meetings because the battery life is just not that great but that’s to be expected considering that these new alder league chips consume so much power i would actually direct you to the scar 15 if you were picky about that but the first question needs to be answered is this laptop cheap or just inexpensive well i think it’s a bit of both since you pay less but build quality suffers a little bit it’s not really that bad personally i’d buy this thing hook it up to a monitor keyboard mouse and a good set of speakers and build a kick-ass gaming setup that would run circles around 80 of the custom built pcs out there this is very much a performance first laptop second type of device on that note thank you so much for watching i hope you’re able to take away everything that you needed to know about the rog strix scarf 17.
it’s not a 15 it’s a 17. uh let me know what you guys think about this laptop in the comments i’m eber with hardware canucks thank you so much for watching and i’ll talk to you guys in the next one oh and don’t forget to spend responsibly you .
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