ASUS ROG Strix Scar 18 Review: RTX 5090 Infused Powerhouse

Just like with the ROG Flow Z13 that we reviewed awhile back, this system remains completely silent in Silent mode, and yet it's still surprisingly quick. If you need to use your PC in silence in a meeting or other socially-constrained environment, just flip it over to Silent mode and you're good to go.


On the other hand, in Performance and especially in Turbo mode, the ROG Strix Scar is definitely audible, but not shrill or particularly bothersome unless you're in a library, or someone's watching a movie nearby. While gaming, you will probably want headphones for the best experience, although the system's speakers get plenty loud enough to hear them over the fans.


Fortunately, all that fan noise does the job. Even while running F1 24 at over 200 FPS, the system remains cool. Surprisingly so, in fact, as you can see above (look at the third column for the "Maximum" values.) We've seen 18" laptops that struggled to avoid thermal throttling, so size isn't an automatic solution, but ASUS' engineering and Thermal Grizzly's liquid metal TIM are getting it done on the ROG Strix Scar 18.

ASUS ROG Strix Scar 18 Battery Life Benchmarks

Large, powerful desktop replacement machines with massive screens and gargantuan graphics cards generally don't do well when it comes to battery life. But, as the old saying goes, all things are relative.


9 hours and 8 minutes isn't an outstanding battery life result for a mainstream laptopm but for a laptop with a 24-core CPU and a powerful 24GB GPU, it's incredible. To be clear, this result was achieved in "Dynamic" mode, which intelligently enables and disables the two different graphics adapters on the fly. Also, video decoding isn't a particularly difficult task when you have advanced fixed-function hardware for this purpose, as you do with the Core Ultra's advanced Arc integrated GPU.

Even still, remember that this is an 18" laptop with a bodacious screen and quad-speaker audio array. We didn't disconnect the Wi-Fi for this test, either. 548 minutes is just ten minutes shy of the entire Lord of the Rings film trilogy (in their theatrical cuts.) That's awesome battery life for a desktop replacement, and anecdotally, you can easily pull out at least four to five hours of office work on battery; the integrated GPU is more than fast enough for that kind of use.


Even though it won't fare that well compared to the other machines on our list, we went ahead and did the "minutes per watt-hour of battery" math for the Strix Scar 18. Is it excellent? No. But is it completely acceptable for this class of machine? Very much yes. This system achieves more than double the battery life per watt-hour of the previous-generation machine with a Ryzen 9 7945HX processor, and it's faster while doing it, too.


Finally, we also did the PCMark Battery Gaming test, which uses 3DMark on a loop to see how long you could game on this system. It achieves basically the same results as the MSI Raider A18 HX, which also has a GeForce RTX 5090, although both pale in comparison to Razer's Blade 16 with the RTX 5090. That's probably down in part to the much smaller screen on the Razer as well as its lower performance profile. 90 minutes of gaming on battery with a GeForce RTX 5090 is acceptable, and a huge improvement over gaming laptops of yesteryear.

The ASUS ROG Strix Scar 18 Is One Of The Fastest Gaming Laptops Ever

It's always hard to write conclusions about systems like this because most people will never, ever have a machine this powerful. To put it bluntly, the ASUS ROG Strix Scar 18 excellent. The CPU is lightning fast in productivity tasks, the GPU is currently the fatest mobile graphics solution on the market, the screen is beautiful and vibrant, the keyboard is joyous to use, and the machine is easily upgradeable thanks to toolless internal bay access.

The few quibbles we could make come down to a some design decisions that are completely justifiable. ASUS picked a proprietary power connector because you can't slam 380W through a USB Type-C port. The excess of decorative lighting on the machine is a bonus feature to a lot of users, even if it isn't everyone's taste. Some of the bundled software is rather questionable too, but that's very easily resolved.


There is a valid argument that, if you're paying roughly five thousand US dollars for a gaming laptop, you want the absolute best experience all around, and in gaming, that technically isn't this machine. A system with a Ryzen X3D processor is going to offer you a marginally better overall gaming experience. That margin isn't always very big, though, especially when you're gaming at the native QHD+ resolution of this laptop, and the integrated graphics of AMD's X3D chips are not nearly as capable as the IGPs of Intel's Arrow Lake. That matters if you're going to be using the machine on battery, expecially for non-gaming tasks.

Ultimately, after careful consideration, we're going to award this machine our Editor's Choice award. That may surprise you given that it isn't the absolute fastest laptop we've ever tested in games. There are so many other qualities that add up to make this a truly awesome product, though -- versatile visual design, extremely high performance, a stunning screen, and impressive repairability are just the beginning of what we like about the ROG Strix Scar 18.

If you're as enamored by this system as we are, and you don't need the awesome power of the GeForce RTX 5090, the G835LR-XS96 is the exact same machine in every way except that it comes with half the RAM, half the storage, and a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, which is still quite a potent GPU. That configuration starts at a more palatable $2699—still quite pricey, but a hell of a laptop for the money, and if you want more RAM or storage, you can easily swap it out. You can pick up that machine over at B&H. As for this configuration? It's a Micro Center exclusive, but a handful of similar configurations are available on Amazon as well.