Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (2022) review

Our Verdict

The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (2022) is a great gaming laptop with impressive levels of power, but one that might also break your bank.

The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (2022) is quite the beast of a gaming laptop and comes at quite a high price. At around $2,500 (£2,800), it’s definitely the priciest piece of kit I’ve tested. Paying this much for a laptop that packs in an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti seems a touch overkill – especially considering spending this much on a laptop would normally get you something with a beefier GPU inside.

Nonetheless, the rest of the spec sheet of the Strix Scar 17 (2022) makes it an especially appealing option, not to mention one of the best Asus gaming laptops at the time of typing. It’s powered by an Intel Core i9-12900H processor and also packs in 32GB of 4,800MHz DDR5 RAM, as well as a solid 2TB solid-state drive for storing all your games. The biggest party piece of this laptop though is its display – a 17.3-inch WQHD 240Hz screen, which, needless to say, is pretty large. In this review, I’ll explore whether it’s one of the best gaming laptops.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (2022) Specs and Design

If you were expecting to get a featherweight ultrabook, then you can think again. It’s an especially thick and heavy beast, with a total weight of 2.9kg, and comes with a sturdy chassis that could survive a few drops – not that you’d ever want to risk denting its excellent look.

This is also a modern-looking gaming laptop with especially thin bezels around the sides and the top of the Scar 17’s massive display. Although, they’re so thin that there isn’t a webcam present, even if it would typically be a 720p one. This may be a sore miss for some, but it’s a less important feature for a gaming laptop in the grand scheme of things.

Despite the ROG marque usually standing for products with a typical gamer aesthetic, sharp edges, and aggressive styling, the Scar 17 is tastefully kitted out. It packs a grey plastic chassis, complete with the ROG logo and a smattering of bright RGB on the underside. That lighting will flash red when the laptop goes into idle mode, which can be a bit of a pain, but otherwise, there’s nothing particularly overboard about it.

The vibrancy of the Strix Scar 17’s look also extends into its chiclet keyboard, which features a sea of RGB backlighting. That’s where things get a little over the top, although I will say the coverage is solid and even. The keys themselves don’t feel mushy, and there’s some decent travel for you to utilize. Unlike smaller gaming laptops, you also get a full-size number pad.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (2022) Features

Perhaps the star of the show for this Asus laptop is its large 17.3-inch display that also comes with a 240Hz refresh rate. 144Hz is arguably the common refresh rate that most people will aim for, but the higher the better for competitive players, and 240Hz is where things get tasty.

It’s an absolutely gorgeous screen, I must say, and the QHD resolution provides a fine balancing act between detail and price. Getting 4K output running at such a high frame rate will require a serious amount more power than the Strix Scar 17 can provide, so a 240Hz 1440p screen is perhaps the perfect option for a laptop of this spec. It handles motion especially well, and games look crisp and vibrant on it. The addition of Dolby Vision HDR adds a little more pizzazz to proceedings, accentuating detail and the solid contrast on offer. Meanwhile, the IPS screen aids colors in looking accurate and viewing angles to be solid.

Under the hood, the inclusion of an Intel Core i9-12900H processor, with its 14 cores and 20 threads, is a real behemoth of a processor, complete with a boost clock of up to 5GHz. It brings with it handy support for the latest generation of memory, which the Strix Scar 17 takes advantage of with 32GB of DDR5 4,800MHz RAM inside. You also get a 2TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD which offers the benefit of both a generous capacity and amazing speeds, to store your games on. Everything feels especially snappy, it must be said, and you’d have to go a long way to find a better combo of processor, RAM, and SSD inside a laptop at this price.

Asus also appears to have not spared any expense when it comes to connectivity options with the Strix Scar 17, either. Ports include a Thunderbolt 4 capable DisplayPort, a pair of USB 3.2 Type A inputs, a USB-A port, HDMI 2.1 out, and 2.5G Ethernet for solid hard-wired networking. WiFi 6E ensures reliable and especially speedy wireless internet, while Bluetooth 5.2 ensures the Strix Scar 17 is on the edge of modernity.

Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (2022) Benchmarks and Performance

Of course, the true marker of whether a gaming laptop is worth it or not is quite simply how fast it is, and the performance it can offer you for the price you pay. I’m happy to report the Strix Scar 17 is an especially speedy laptop, and a capable 1440p machine, offering more than playable frame rates in a series of games when pushing things to the max, as you’ll see from the graph below.

As well as offering marvelous gaming performance, a run of the usual synthetic benchmarks such as PC Mark 10 reveals the Strix Scar 17 to be a handy all-around laptop. This includes tasks like simple things like web browsing, as well as intense creative tasks such as rendering and editing with some especially high riding scores.

The RTX 3070 Ti inside this laptop proves itself as an excellent GPU at a wide range of resolutions, with smashing 1080p performance that scales up to 1440p in plenty of games. That said, it can be difficult to max out the 240Hz refresh rate of the Strix Scar 17 (2022) at the highest settings. Dialing the quality down a tad will yield higher frame rates, but of course at the detriment of the overall visual fidelity on-screen. If you do want even better performance, Asus offers a form of overclocking with its ROG Boost for you to eke out a few more frames.

Under load, this isn’t the quietest laptop in the world, but the Strix Scar 17 doesn’t sound like a jet fighter taking off. Things get pretty toasty when you’re using it on your lap for its intended purpose, but otherwise, it’s comfortable to use. Most people will probably want to stick it on a desk or lap pad to use it with a mouse anyway, as no one wants to game on a trackpad.

It’s on the front of battery life where things falter, as this laptop only musters 3 hours 12 minutes in the PC Mark 10 Modern Office benchmark I ran with the screen brightness and keyboard RGB at 50 percent, despite Asus’ claims of up to 10 hours with video looping, and a total 90Wh battery capacity. To add to this, the power brick that comes with this laptop is chunky.

Of course, in all of this, it’s hard to ignore the $2,500 / £2,800 price tag for a laptop that features an RTX 3070 Ti, but in looking at things holistically, this is a powerful machine with an especially solid screen with good detail and amazing motion, as well as a great feeling and looking frame, too.

You’re mainly buying the ROG Strix Scar 17 (2022) laptop for its display as well as that level of power, and if you can cough up, the asking price might just be worth it.