I have been 2days with this computer the I play REPO and it runs awesome!! Is very fast the screen 240hz is not a joke it is very smooth. Design 10/10. I hope I do mot have in problem in the future

Altough the laptop is quite expensive, it is worth it. The overall performance is quite top and also the design of it. Can't complain about anything. Regarding customer service, I requested help directly to a sales assisant, who kindly guided me throughout the international purchase process.

I was a prior owner of the 2023 Zephyrus M16, I had to turn it in to get it fixed. When geek squad couldn't they gave me back it's price in full credit up front and I'm so extraordinarily happy with my purchase. Thank you Geek Squad.

After launching games, I often could not open a browser anymore. USB devices would randomly disconnect after about 30 minutes of gaming, including my keyboard. The only way to fix it was doing a full restart using the power button. Very frustrating experience.

If you’re looking for a laptop with all the bells and whistles, this one will ring and whistle with all the latest tech spread throughout the laptop. TL;DR: Bright colorful Display, easy to add SSD or RAM, Thunderbolt 5 support, PCIe 5.0 Support for SSDs, Large and heavy, runs cool and quieter than 2023 Strix model (13980/4080), battery life only good for a few hours (less if your gaming), Armory crate is better than it used to be, wifi 7 is very fast, sound is okay, camera is okay (but glad to see windows hello), keyboard is great, mousepad is great, comes with MacAfee preinstalled (ew.). ---Performance is amazing. The Ultra 9 275HX and 5080 paired outputs great performance at a pricing sweetspot. The Ultra 9 gets Cinebench scores around 2050-2150 in my testing, depending on running processes. While my CPU score on a Time Spy benchmark run was 16581 straight after startup. Synthetic tests are great for general comparisons, but the general feel is just responsive and snappy. ---Gaming on this machine is delightful. The mini LED 2k absolutely shines in gaming. Running at 240hz and over 2,000 local dimming zones, you get amazing visuals. Supporting the monitor is the Nvidia 5080 GPU. Coming from my 4080, I felt comfortable running my games on the 5080 at ultra settings where I was only at very high or high on the 4080 just to keep frames up (gaming at 2k resolution). No issues with frame rate or stutter on the 5080 thus far and while I haven’t played every game in my library on this new GPU, I’m enjoying the graphics I’m getting on New World and Battlefield. ---Design is new this year too. ASUS moved all of the exhaust out the back of the system. I like this move, given this is a large laptop, you might dock or store this at a desk in a way that could block exhaust if it were on the sides. The chassis material composition is mostly plastic but it feels like it’ll hold up to years of use, not flimsy and with very little flex. The lid appears to be metal and displays the anime vision led light strip on the back. I find Anime Vision to be a neat addition, much like RGB, but that’s the extent of it. I suppose you could scroll, “Do Not Disturb” for passerby-ers while you’re gaming or working. On the underside is the panel to get access to the motherboard where you can easily upgrade the RAM and storage, as well as easy access to cleaning the fans. You’ll notice the bottom devoid of screws, instead, there’s a latch you push to the side and the whole bottom slides down and pulls away effortlessly. I love this. And it seems like the engineers thought, “why stop there?” and also made the SSD’s tool-less, with a hold down latch that keeps them in place. ---The Display is beautiful. You can go and grab all the specs off the website, but it looks great. I do think that an OLED screen would have a slight edge on the mini LED technology, but each have their tradeoffs. The over 2,000 local dimming zones does a pretty great job at giving you some deep blacks. It isn’t individual pixel off black like OLED, but the tradeoff is a very bright screen and without any of the OLED maintenance or potential burn in of static images. While I’ve seen some maintenance features built into other ASUS products that keeps burn in at bay and the OLED healthy, they’ve opted not to include that with the Strix Scar product line. ---Other Thoughts on this machine can be summarized as some nice to have and wish I had features. It’s been nice to see windows hello IR camera included. I went as far as buying a fingerprint sensor to permanently live in my USB port on my last machine, so it’s nice to see ASUS including this on their high end machine. I wish there was a touch more battery life. This is very likely a flaw in 86x architecture that Intel uses, and when you load it up with a powerful processor, it needs it’s juice. I would have also liked to have seen a PCIe Gen 5 SSD, seeing as how they’re available to the consumer, instead of a PCIe Gen 4. It’s still fast, but for a flagship PC, it would have sweetened the deal. The WiFi 7 is fast, no issues getting my 1 gig fiber stretching it’s legs. The card is buried under an additional cover under the bottom if you wanted to swap it later. I’d be willing to guess it’ll be a while before this gets swapped since routers are just now populating the shelves over 6e. The speakers are loud but sound quality is “meh”. I hate to undersell how far laptop sound has come, as I can crank the volume up to 80, and was very loud, which is a refreshing upgrade to most modern laptops. The downside is it doesn’t have the depth of sound you get from the industry leader on laptop sound, the macbook. I’ll take what I can get. Trackpad is fine. I’m not a trackpad fan but it has it’s place. Keyboard has been pleasant to type on and I’m in that 85-95 wpm range for typing speed and accuracy. Camera is fine. Lighting goes a long way to making it look better, but probably was not the focal point of the engineering of this laptop. ---My Final Thoughts on the ROG Strix Scar 18 is it’s clearly a flagship machine and it was meant to be a portable desktop. I game 95% of the time on the couch, with a large laptop in my lap. I can appreciate the engineering that went into making this cooler, quieter, easier but still competing with desktops of the last generation.