Gaming Laptop: Asus Strix Scar II

Are you wondering if the Asus ROG Strix Scar II is a good choice among other gaming laptops? Today we gonna check it out by reviewing it, testing in games, and comparing it to the competition’s laptops. Equipped with a full-size RTX 2070 graphics card, Scar II offers great performance while keeping the temperatures at a respectable level. And the smooth display combined with excellent speakers translates all that power into a pure gaming experience.

General Info

if it comes to design and builds quality it’s the same for all the 2018 GTX models too. The top panel is metal with a brushed aluminum texture and a ROG logo that you can light up with RGB colors. The rest of the body is made of polycarbonate and despite it is not metal, the laptop feels very solid and premium.

On the deck, you have carbon fiber texture with a moro skin on one half, and what is characteristic for Scar II is the RGB light bar on the front of the laptop. The thing that we like is that the fingerprints are almost invisible on this laptop so you don’t have to bother with wiping it every day. The device itself is pretty portable. Thanks to thin-bezel display it’s smaller than most gaming laptops and the polycarbonate body helps to maintain lightweight so carrying it every day should not be a big effort.

Display

The display is a 1080p 144Hz IPS panel with 3ms response time but unfortunately without G-Sync support. However, with such powerful hardware, the G-Sync is not that useful. While gaming we weren’t even able to notice any screen tearing or ghosting and the display worked very smoothly.

Its color reproduction stands at 97% of sRGB, 75% of AdobeRGB, and the brightness is 329 nits so it’s perfect for gaming but we would also use it for content creation without a problem. Since this is an IPS panel the viewing angles are good and the backlight bleeding was impossible to notice during normal use, even on a black screen.

Specification

Performance

So the Scar II comes with both 15″ or 17″ variants while the 17″ models are indicated by GL704 number. Both 15″ and 17″ models come with GTX 1060, 1070, and also RTX 2060 and 2070. In some countries, the Scar II may not be available with GTX 1060 and RTX 2060, but there is a mobile version of this laptop called Hero II. If it comes to performance our unit comes with an RTX 2070 graphics card, i7-8750H processor, 16GB of RAM, 256GB M.2 NvMe SSD, and 1TB Seagate FireCuda hybrid drive.

This setup provides enough power to play a lot of popular and new titles with 1080p resolution and maxed out graphics settings. Alright, so far so good, but there is one thing that you should definitely know. The Scar II comes with single or dual-channel RAM configurations. The thing is that the single-channel RAM drastically decreases the performance compared to the same amount of RAM in a dual channel. So we suggest you get the configuration with dual-channel RAM or if you already have single-channel add one more RAM stick to take full advantage of the performance of this laptop.

Multimedia

Coming back to the review let’s talk about speakers. we were surprised by the amount of bass that they can produce. Every shot and every explosion in game was full and punchy so there was no real need to use the headphones. Mids are just on point but the highs may seem to be a little bit overwhelmed by lows. You can always equalize the sound the way you want using Sonic Studio III software. These are the best sounding speakers that we’ve seen in a laptop so far.

Battery

The battery life hits around 4.5 up to 5 hours when browsing the web, watching YouTube, and doing light productivity work. When gaming, the battery dies after 1.5 hours. we find it a decent score for a gaming laptop.

Conclusion

Scar 2 is an amazing laptop with decent features going for it. But the thing we hail the most is that it has a full desktop processor and GPU which gives it equivalent power to a PC. First, we thought that if this laptop has a full desktop processor so it will thermally throttle but we were surprised by how good the thermal remains even at extensive high-end gaming.