Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 review

This here is a proper gaming laptop which means we spent most of our time with the latest game titles, some important old ones and heavy workloads. Needless to say, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 works like a charm.

Note that all of our gaming benchmarks were done with DLSS turned off and all settings set to their maximum limit.

The display is also QHD so we’ve tested all our games on this resolution as well. As the GenZ say, ‘You paid full money, so you use the full laptop’.

Resident Evil 4 runs at a steady 100+ FPS with all the settings set to max. Even with Ray Tracing and Leon’s luscious locks set to max, the game never dropped below 90 FPS. For the frame nerds, much of the game runs at more than 150+ frames per second, it’s only in the face-paced action sequences it dwindles down to 100.

Hogwarts Legacy had a bit of a rocky start but with $1 billion in sales, we’re fairly certain that you will be playing this game. Again, all settings ramped up to their absolute limits and our frame rate ticker was healthy floating above 60+ FPS. The game is absolutely demanding and our desktop reference Nvidia RTX 4090 can barely hold it together too. That said, when the going gets tough, it will limp to a cool 35FPS. Which, I may add, is the game’s poor optimization as well. So let’s move on to something more reliable.

CS:GO runs at a whopping 250FPS and is one of the few games that takes full advantage of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17’s 240Hz refresh rate.

Atomic Heart runs at 120 FPS average with all settings on max and without any Nvidia DLSS stuff happening. On 2K getting this consistent frame rate is absolutely amazing. Sid Meier's Civilization VI is a bit CPU bound and that runs at 300+ FPS with 40% of AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX’s brain power put to use.

Our video editing test with 4K clips and scrubbing also proved insanely quick. Having 16 cores and 32 threads really opens up a massive headroom for productivity tasks. Our magazine and video work across Photoshop, InDesign and Adobe Premiere Pro was a breeze. The Ryzen 9 7945HX is absolutely quick in multithreaded tasks. It was as good as our reference desktop Intel i9-11900K CPU and in some cases outperforming it in multithreaded workloads.

Kudos to Asus ROG for actually making this thing run much, much cooler than laptops just a few generations ago. The AMD CPU also saps less juice so it's not surprising that there’s less overall heat generated here as well. The fans run at a considerably lower decibel too but if you’re not sitting in an air-conditioned room, it can become a hot mess in the summertime.

The Strix Scar 17 isn’t lust-worthy in terms of design. It’s surprising that a laptop of this quality and price looks inconspicuous and… common. It’s acceptable to look inconspicuous but if you put the Strix Scar next to other Asus ROG laptops, they all will have a shared design ethos. Some may find this better but folks who are shelling out close to ₹3lakhs would want their machine to look like one, right? 

There’s a light bar at the bottom which adds some flair and excitement to the table it's sitting on but other than that the keyboard and design are drab.

The keyboard is also not as exciting as Lenovo or MSI’s offering. Competition’s laptops come with mechanical keyboards and more vivid RGB disco on the keyboard. There’s more thock and rebound as well. This Asus ROG laptop is missing such festivities on it.

The display is also not as ostentatious as the other gaming laptops in the market. We were expecting a 10-bit colour panel, HDR and slightly higher colour accuracy. What it misses out on colour specs it makes up for in the resolution and frame rate. QHD display with 240Hz is absolutely brilliant. It’s the sweet spot for most high-end games and there’s G-Sync here as well.

The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 gaming laptop is an absolute beast for the price. The dress code might be a bit boring but the guts of this machine is built to rival desktop replacing laptops and the price is very tempting. Especially when you consider the 5nm AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX processor. It’s fast, reliable and takes up less power. This also means that Asus could steamroll this machine to be a lot thinner than the MSI GT77 Titan. It’s also rocking an Nvidia RTX 4090 and if you want to shave off a few grand, opting for the RTX 4080 should reap better price-to-performance results.