This scar cuts a separate pattern

The bulky, nervous frame of the ROG Strix Scar 17 defines it as an archetypal gaming laptop. Traveling with this beast — it weighs 6.4 kilograms and measures 1.1 by 15.6 by 11.1 inches (HWD) —is not something you will want to do every day and do not forget to consider two more pounds for the power of the 280 watt adapter. That said, its size is not necessarily a disadvantage. This laptop finally has enough space for an expanded 17.3-inch screen. It’s just something you have to realize to get inside. Our experts have tested 133 products in the laptop category last year Since 1982, PCMag has tested and evaluated thousands of products to help you make better purchasing decisions. (See how we try.) (Photo: Molly Flores) RGB effects on the front and sides, and another strip below the bottom edge of the screen, essentially guarantee that the ROG Strix Scar 17. The ROG lid logo and backlit keyboard are also integrated with RGB. You can choose from predefined lighting effects in the Asus Armory Crate app or combine your own in Aura Creator. All the lighting can, of course, be turned off, but where is the fun in that? (Photo: Molly Flores) The quality of construction meets expectations. The lid is metal while the rest is thick and sturdy plastic. The frame is full of details, including a transparent diagonal in the right half showing the inner frame. There’s also what Asus calls the customizable “armor cover”, the gray, embossed ROG piece in the back left corner of our unit. Turns off and can be turned off for other designs. Two armor covers are included, one opaque and one dark. The keyboard includes a numeric keypad and even with these additional keys, it still does not extend the full width of the frame. The keys have a light, linear feel and plenty of travel. (Photo: Molly Flores) This laptop contains unusually unique macro keys. Five are located in the upper left part of the keyboard. can be assigned to the Armory Crate. Meanwhile, the touchpad is quite large and clicks well.

The screen: Not just another 1080p screen

Movie gaming is the burden of the ROG Strix Scar 17. The 17.3-inch widescreen display has an inherent 16: 9 QHD screen resolution (2,560 by 1,440 pixels), which shows 50% more detail than the FHD (1,920 by 1,080 pixels). ). (Photo: Molly Flores) This monitor combines a refresh rate of 240 Hz and adaptive synchronization for smooth, tear-free breaking. The image quality is first class. The Datacolor SpyderX Elite measured 99% DCI-P3 color coverage and a maximum brightness of 300 nit. I’ve seen brighter screens, but this could not be called dimmer. Also, you will not be disappointed with the quad-speaker ROG Strix Scar 17. Dolby Atmos tuning creates complete, rich sound that is good for games and music. As for the webcam, it does not exist. It’s the biggest omission of this laptop and at this age it makes no sense. Plan to buy an outdoor model with clips. There is also no fingerprint reader. Going forward, the physical connectivity is satisfactory, starting from the back with USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, Thunderbolt 4, HDMI 2.1 video output and 2.5 Gbps Ethernet. (Photo: Molly Flores) I love rear door options as it keeps the cables out of sight. The power supply is connected here as well. It has a rectangular socket that does not protrude. (Photo: Molly Flores) The other ports are on the left, which includes a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports and a headphone jack. The only feature on the right is the Asus Keystone proprietary socket, a flash drive that stores your profile settings. The unit is included in the box. (Photo: Molly Flores)

Scarring the Charts: Testing the ROG Strix Scar 17

The ROG Strix Scar $ 17 2,499 we saw and tested here, model G733ZW-XS96, has a Core i9-12900H 2.5 GHz (5.0 GHz Turbo) processor, 8 GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti with SSD1T graphics card, loaded graphics card Windows 1T a MediaTek MT7922 card that provides Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 and a one-year warranty. Our unit has 32 GB of DDR5 memory, although the production models have 16 GB. (This laptop can be upgraded by the user to 64 GB via two 32 GB So-DIMMs.) Asus lists other configurations starting at $ 1,999.99 on its website, including those with AMD processors, though most do not. are currently available in the state. Assuming you can find one in stock, the ROG Strix Scar 17 is reasonably priced. The Alienware x17 R2 had $ 2,645 at this writing, with a less timed Core i7-12700H and 165 Hz FHD display. The $ 2,449 Aorus 17 XE also features a Core i7-12700H and FHD display. The screen is the biggest difference between Asus and these models, although the Core i9-12900H has advantages over the Core i7-12700H in addition to slightly higher clocks, including virtualization support. (Photo: Molly Flores) Speaking of “Alder Lake”, our review of Core i9-12900K desktops is a must read in the history of Intel’s new hybrid architecture, which combines two different types of cores on the same chip. The 14 cores of the Core i9-12900H consist of six Performance cores and eight Efficiency cores and can process 20 threads. Our benchmarks will show that it is a radical leap for the processing power of laptops over the previous generation AMD and Intel chips, which surpassed eight cores and 16 threads. (See our preliminary Alder Lake laptop tests.) The ROG Strix Scar 17 also features the updated Nvidia RTX 30 Ti series silicon graphics, namely a GeForce RTX 3070 Ti with 8 GB of GDDR6 dedicated memory. This implementation has been rated for 125 watts of total graphics power (TGP) plus amplification up to 25 watts by activating the Turbo feature of the laptop. (More on this in the benchmarks.) This is a respectable amount of power for a laptop GPU. (See our primer on why GPU power matters.) Finally, the support of ROG Strix Scar 17 for DDR5 memory is remarkable. Although Intel “Alder Lake” processors are also DDR4 compatible, the higher memory bandwidth of the DDR5 helps increase performance limits on a high-quality Core i9 like this one. Let’s move on to the tests. I put in some of the fastest gaming laptops we’ve tested against the ROG Strix Scar 17, including the Alienware x17, the MSI GE76 Raider and the smaller but equally powerful Lenovo Legion 7 Gen 6 powered by an AMD Ryzen HX series chip. The Aorus 17 XE is the only other “Alder Lake” laptop we have tried to date. See their basic loads below.

Productivity and content creation tests

Our first test is UL PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-time productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subwoofer for the main drive. The ROG Strix Scar 17 competed with the Aorus for top honors in the main test, almost doubling the 4,000 points we consider a sign of good productivity. It also did well in the storage test, thanks to the SSD PCI Express 4.0. (Our control unit uses a Micron 3400 drive.) Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to assess the suitability of a computer for CPU-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses the company’s Cinema 4D camera to deliver a complex scene, while Primate Labs’s Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular applications ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the HandBrake 1.4 open source video transcoder to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p (lower times are better). Our final productivity test is Puget Systems’s PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses Creative Cloud 22 of Adobe’s famous image editing software to evaluate a computer’s performance in creating content and multimedia applications. It is an automated extension that performs a variety of general and accelerated Photoshop tasks with GPUs, ranging from opening, rotating, resizing and saving an image to applying masks, gradation filters and filters. The ROG Strix Scar 17 did not show up in these tests. Core i9 memory and DDR5 commanded the field. The Geekbench was its best performance, surpassing the Aorus by 18% and the previous generation silicon at MSI by an impressive 57%.

Graphics and game tests

For Windows PCs, we run synthetic and real gaming tests. The first includes two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). This group also includes the GFXBench 5 GPU benchmark for multiple platforms, which we use to measure OpenGL performance. Going forward, real-world gaming testing comes from in-game benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Rainbow Six Siege representing simulation, open-world action-adventure and competitive / esports shooter games, respectively. On laptops, Valhalla and Siege run twice (Valhalla in Medium and Ultra quality, Siege in low and Ultra quality), while F1 2021 runs once in Ultra quality settings and, for Nvidia GeForce RTX laptops, a second Nvidia performance – DLSS anti-aliasing enhanced. The ROG Strix Scar 17 mixes with the others in both synthetic and real game, suggesting that the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is the limiting factor and not its CPU. This is not a bad thing as, apart from the Aorus, the others use the theoretically more powerful GeForce RTX 3080. Unofficially, I ran Time Spy with the Turbo function of the ROG Strix Scar 17 …