ASUS ROG Strix Scar 16 (2023) Gaming Laptop, 16” Nebula HDR QHD 240Hz/3ms, 1100 nits, Mini LED, GeForce RTX 4090, Intel Core i9-13980HX, 32GB DDR5, 2TB PCIe, Wi-Fi 6E, Windows 11 Pro, G634JY-XS97

This is my second ASUS gaming laptop. I switched from the overpriced Alienware. I think ASUS has provided the best value for gaming laptops for at least the last 5 years. I also like how the styling is subdued, so you can use it as a regular laptop without people thinking you're weird. The best features are the screen, the speed, and the relative low temperature. The fan noise can get very high. Top tip: If you put some lego bricks or similar sized items under the back to keep it off the desk, the laptop stays much cooler. I found that works far better than any of those cooling laptop stands. The image quality and brightness of the screen is very good, although I almost always hook it up to my TV. I don't think the battery life is great, but it never is with a gaming laptop. Overall, I would definitely look at ASUS first when I come to buy another laptop.

My only drawback on this computer would be the loud noise it emits but that's a given considering it is a gaming computer. The screen is nice, looks really nice and is of great quality. It runs very smoothly and gaming with it was really fast. Overall, the best laptop I have ever brought.

EDIT: laptop GPU is dead just after 1.5 years of usage. Whole motherboard needs to be replaced for $2900. Absolutely unacceptable. I love this laptop, it is great. I'm gonna list its goods and bads: - The good: 1- Beautiful screen. 2- Relatively portable. 3- Great performance. 4- Faily queit. 5- The audio quality is great for those who prefer to use laptop speakrs (however, it is not flawlessly amazing, it still could get a little better). 6- I like the laptop design. - The bad: 1- The coil noise is there. I have around 4 different coil whines in my machine. Bios updates seem to sometimes increase the whine and sometimes it reduces it. 2- Since this is a mini-led display, there is a clear halo around the mouse when the creen in a darkeer tone. You can literally see your mouse jump from one LED zone to another. 3- There are numerous issues with Advanced Optimus. It takes time to switch. When I close a game, if I quickly eopn the browzer before the switch switches to the iGPU, it will feeeze my screen indefinitely. Also just recently, It apparently stopped switching to dGPU. I no longer see the NVIDIA container pop up in the bottom right corner. The switch sometimes swithes to back to the iGPU (apparently), but the system tray shows the DGPU still running, sometimes it won't stop unless I change the power settings in Armoury Crate (to silent, for example). 4- I hate one design issue, which is the heat exasuts to the sides. Because of this, I get too much heat on my right hand that uses the mouse while playing. 5- The Ethernet an DC charging ports are just next to the left exaust, making them become too much hot while gaming. - The ugly: 1- And it is the reason why I took a star away, the battery life. With power set to battery saving, Armoury Crate set to Silent and Standard, PC on night mode, and screen brightness around 70 and RGB only for the keyboard on the lowest brightness settings, I get around 90 minutes only while browsing or even leaving the laptop idle. This is not acceptable, sice I'm seeing reviews saying this laptop should provide up to 7 hours of browsing experience. Discloser: I'm writing this review to get the 90 days warranty extension by ASUS.

I will update over time. First impression is it’s a beast and screen is super bright and beautiful. Also big shoutout to Ted at HiD. I bungled my order and he rushed to get it to me before I flew. Great customer care and communication. Thank you! UPDATE AFTER 1 DAY: out of the box had terrible coil whine and mini led whine, but after updating bios to v 306 it went away almost completely. Timespy result 18759. Thermals are great. This was a big worry w gaming laptop, so hopefully low temps will help longevity. Will update over time. UPDATE AFTER 2 WEEKS: I mostly gave up using this thing on the go. Battery life is too short, even for web browsing/YT. I'm a programmer and it breaks my concentration after an hour warning about battery life. So now I treat this as a "portable desktop" -- it must always be plugged in. And no, USB-C is not a good solution because it reduces performance and battery life (the USB-C just charges the battery, which is then used to power the laptop). I knew battery life was bad on gaming laptops, but this really surprised me. Another issue is the software. As reported by many users on reddit (r/gaminglaptops shoutout), Nvidia drivers are causing constant black screen freezing. Seems related to iGPU/dGPU switching. I guess that will be fixed eventually, but for now I downgraded to 528.66 provided by ASUS directly which are stable no crashes. With BIOS 307 you are able to undervolt the CPU. I'm running stable at -100 now. Very nice. Combined with PL limit to 60W, my CPU stays 70-90 C temp range with no thermal throttle and still v good perf. Altho this laptop has a good cooling system, the 13th gen intel gets very hot in this smaller chassis so I found these steps necessary. Overall, I'm still satisfied w the system because of beast performance. I will update again, but hopefully ASUS and Nvidia sort out stability issues. For now lowered to 4 stars due to software issues, coil whine, and extremely short battery life. UPDATE AFTER 4 WEEKS: All good basically just waiting for software updates. Once you learn to work around the issues it's a beast. BTW, I registered this review to get a warranty extension. So disclosing that I am receiving a warranty extension from ASUS for this feedback. Will keep updating this review over time... UPDATE AFTER 3 MONTHS: New BIOS upgrades have brought stability and support for 5600mhz memory sticks. Also coil whine mostly went away. Not sure if it's from new BIOS or laptop finally "wearing in" as I read. I still hear it momentarily when loading stuff up, but it's 95% less than before. Feels great cuz this laptop is a beast. Rendering videos and reloading assemblies like a champ. HOWEVER, graphical problems still persist like flickering and black screen. ASUS recommended using 4 month-old Nvidia drivers to fix this. Those old drivers do solve some problems, but performance drops in some games (I get 45 FPS in C2077 Overdrive using old drivers vs 75 FPS w new). And if you use latest Nvidia drivers you get a perf boost but then screen flickers returns. Lastly, maybe related but I noticed some old games run hot as hell. My CPU hit 110 C (!!!) momentarily playing Phantom Doctrine. But most new games don't go above 95 C hmm... One big takeaway from this whole experience is that gaming laptops are still niche. # of users is prob 1/10 of desktops, so drivers and software are not tested as well and bugs not caught quickly and treat w urgency. And importantly there's less info out there to help you solve your problems. So if you don't like tinkering, stick w desktop for your workhorse.

This gaming laptop is one of the best purchases I have ever made, the screen quality is great, it's very fluid, and runs smoothly. As for all gaming laptops, they do tend to get warm so secure yourself a cooling pad and update your drivers. It has run most every game I have thrown at it at the highest graphical settings. Asus really puts out quality work, I highly recommend this product to anyone. Battery life can be adjusted but unplugged and depending on what you're doing you'll have a decent amount of gaming time or if you're doing work, school assignments, etc.

Phenomenal laptop. I got the 4080 graphics card and tried Cyberpunk & Horizon Zero Dawn on the highest graphics setting and it performs like a beast! If you can workaround the common drawbacks to a gaming laptop - heats up, short battery life per charge, etc… then I highly recommend this. Just need to know how to work the settings to reserve the battery life. I think of it as more of a portable gaming desktop. I’ve only have it for about 2 weeks, so I have yet to see the durability. Love it sit far tho!! *Disclaimer: I am writing a review to receive a warranty extension from ASUS.

I researched gaming laptops for months before making my decision. The Strix Scar 16 checked all the boxes. Battery life is very short but this is not an issue for me- if you do have need of extended use on battery you probably need to keep looking; in my gaming tests the charge lasted an average of one hour. My concern when ordering was the reports of coil whine. I have been using it daily and now have 100+ hours logged on this machine. No whine and no issues. Flawless machine and I could not be more pleased.

I bought this laptop to program games with using Unreal Engine and Godot. I was disappointed that when running my creations the laptop would begin to "hitch" every second or two. It could not even handle the lightweight Godot engine, and simple 2D games created by it. I thought it was me, my programming, but I ran the exact same code on an older and less powerful laptop and desktop (Macbook Pro and an Alienware Desktop), and they had no hitching issues, and ran the programs I wrote just fine. I also had some trouble running games with this laptop. I noticed the hitching when playing Fortnite once I was online. I let the app choose the optimal settings. Please note that in my opinion this very powerful GPU and CPU should have been able to have handled the settings. The "hitching" went away if I reduced the graphical quality of the game and reduced the FPS from 60 FPS down to 30 FPS. I only tried one other game on the laptop, Bioshock Remastered, and it hitched as well, using the settings the game set itself to. I admit that I did not reduce the graphics quality and FPS, but that may have fixed the hitching I suspect. A few more things about the laptop that may or may not be an issue for others. Asus puts a lot of Asus software (you might call bloatware if you don't want it). I am attaching a picture that shows the list. Armoury Crate is Asus' software too, as well as AuraWallpaperService. (note that Antimalware at the top of the list is Windows, not Asus). This is the list of Asus software that the laptop comes with. You can uninstall them, and I recommend that you search for alternatives to ARMOURY Crate, better software exists for these Asus gaming laptops that is free, and better than the Asus software. Sadly, uninstalling the Asus software did not help me to use the laptop as a game development laptop, nor in playing the games at higher specs. At this point, I will not buy another Asus laptop again. I have owned two. This gaming laptop, and another non-gaming laptop. I have performance issues using both, although the performance of the non-gaming laptop is of a different nature. It's just slow to boot, and slow in general. I'll be looking to purchase from other manufacturers from now on. One more thing worth mentioning is that Asus support will not go above and beyond to help fix issues. While this hitching issue may be unique, they simply returned it with "could not reproduce". Very disappointed, very lackluster effort to ensure customer satisfaction.