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

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. Update March 2026: After about 2.5 years the laptop is still running pretty well. The temps do get a good a little bit higher than when I first got it and the fans still run pretty high. However, it can still run just about anything and any game pretty smoothly. To help combat the temps getting too high while gaming I got an llano laptop cooler (can run pretty loud as well if you put it on the max settings, but can run much quieter as well) to go along with it since it can cool the laptop better than any of the other laptop coolers I had before. It does get a fair amount of dust inside the fans and air holes from time to time since the laptop just sucks in so much air to cool down the components inside, but it can be fixed by simply cleaning it. The battery life on it does drain pretty fast without a charger but I usually just leave it plugged in.

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.

It takes a lot longer to load than advertised

So far, it's handling all of the 3D processing I throw at it. It works great with local AI .gguf 8B LLM GPT transformer models. Update: 12/22/2024 - The laptop is running strong. Just put in larger drives and set it to RAID 1. Been keeping this laptop very busy with 3D and LLM processing. Real work horse. Cooling is fantastic.

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.

Obviously this laptop has the top of the line graphics card and processor, so that’s always great. BUT, it’s almost like I was sent an unfinished laptop. I’ve been having issues where the laptop does not wake up from sleep, many options are missing from the settings, and my USB hubs don’t work after sleep. It’s very frustrating that I spent $3k on a laptop that has issues like this. I know ASUS won’t see this review or fix anything I’ve said, but to my fellow consumers: I do not recommend ordering this laptop; buy it or something else in-person.

Everything about this computer is end game. It takes anything you throw at it like a champ. My only gripe would be battery life if you're actually using it off of a wall outlet even with eco setting's turned on don't expect any long gaming sessions out of it. I purchased a portable power station I keep in my car which keeps it going for a long time so that's always an option. Other than that this thing is a beast and worth every penny.

I am receiving a 90-day warranty extension from ASUS for this review. But I was going to do a review anyway. Let me start by telling everyone, I bought this system as a replacement/upgrade for my old STRIX system that had a GTX 1070 in it, so it was OLD AS HELL!!! I can tell you that after powering this new system up and going through setup that I'll likely not buy another mobile system for at least a decade unless technology makes giant leaps by then. This system is what makes you future-proof. The display is absolutely gorgeous. Compared to my old system, it's night and day. New system is life-like. Can't wait to really put this baby through her paces. Eventually going to go after VR and everything now that I have this. Only the 1st day, will update again later.