Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 review: sure, this one is good, too

theverge.com:

Last week, I wrote about the ROG Strix Scar X3D: a gigantic, very expensive gaming laptop with off-the-charts benchmark scores. The X3D is a very exciting product in terms of what it represents for the laptop sphere but not something I necessarily see a whole bunch of people rushing to purchase.

Today, we are instead discussing the ROG Strix Scar 17 — no X3D in the title. This Scar does not use AMD’s fancy 3D V-Cache technology. But it does have an astonishingly powerful pair of chips inside: AMD’s Ryzen 9 7945HX and Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 4090. It is slightly less powerful and, with a price of $3,499.99, compared to the high-end Scar X3D’s $3,699.99, slightly more affordable.

Apart from the chip architecture, the Strix Scar 17 is basically identical to the Scar X3D. It’s got the same 17-inch QHD screen, per-key RGB keyboard, somewhat grainy FHD webcam, and massive 6.6-pound chassis. Given that similarity, as well as the fact that $200 is not all that much when you’re already paying upwards of three grand, I imagine that many gamers may prefer to wait for the X3D model to hit shelves (which is supposed to happen in late September, per the last time I bugged Asus about it). Still, if you don’t want to wait that long or you find $3,700 to be just a bit beyond what you can afford, the regular Scar 17 will still deliver an exceptional gaming experience that’s pretty far above the rest of the field.

First, let’s talk about the most important matter here: how well the thing can game.

Even at native 2560 x 1440 resolution with ray tracing to the max, you will be hard-pressed to find a game that gives the Scar 17 any problems.

The laptop left the 100fps ceiling out of the water on Red Dead Redemption 2, Shadow of the Tomb