Customer Ratings & Reviews

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 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

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.

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.

Love the design but gaming performance isn't impressive cs2 on 1080 resolution all low visual settings holds fps at 200+ no more than 3 mins then overheating and drop to around 130 fps not happy a about it I think a ventilation stand might be able to help a bit

This is an okay machine, but somehow a downgrade from my desktop that has a current MSRP at 33% of the price of this thing. The only aspect of this "desktop replacement" tier laptop that feels like you get what you pay for is the display, which is, admittedly, great looking. 1) The iGPU fought with my apps and games on multiple displays ultimately causing total system failure multiple times before disabling it manually. 2) The first (and only) BIOS update nearly bricked the mobo, I was lucky enough to have the chance to flash it and start over. It still took multiple tries for some unknown reason. 3) Wireless peripherals (and my USB dock) consistently fail to work with it. I get a hissing sound from my wireless headset - that worked perfectly on my desktop - after playing demanding games for 20-30 minutes. This hissing sound bleeds into my own audio input in calls making communication suffering for everyone. Wireless mouse freezes intermittently. 4) Games still crash intermittently after disabling iGPU and doing all system/driver updates. In one instance, I turned a game down to medium settings from ultra and it still crashed in an online ranked match from "GPU Failure". 5) This is a minor gripe but the chassis is easy to smear or smudge with daily use just from your own oils. I found no known laptop palm rest/skins to mitigate that, just have to clean it often. 6) Technical support from the pre-installed MyASUS app is very underwhelming and also failed to follow through with tier 2 support on my inquiries regarding the wireless peripherals issues.

So far, so good. It appears ASUS has fixed their Liquid Metal application problems in my experience so far or perhaps I just got lucky. The laptop runs incredibly well, the cooling performance is top notch, and it’s surprisingly quiet. I’ve attempted to put it through its paces, but it just keeps on chugging. Just don’t forget - Liquid Metal absorbs into copper, so a re-application will inevitably be necessary at some point down the line. Plan for that.

I really really want to like this laptop, but I've now had to return it for a 2nd time. Before i continue, I would like to mention that I'm a system builder, and I know my way around computers. I have updated bios on multiple machines and I know how to back up Windows in case there's hard drive failures, I felt large desktop machines from scratch without any issues, etc. Both buying attempts of this laptop had two different issues. I had all the drivers and bios updated the latest versions, and even called aces tech support to which they confirmed that there were issues. The first unit, the back lights did not work on the keyboard at all no matter what I did. Asus informed me that there was faulty wiring in the unit that I had. The second unit I purchased was fine with the keyboard backlight but it had constant freeze issues. They weren't even blue screen of death crashes, they were straight up constant freeze-ups where the screen, mouse, and keyboard would just lock up and then it would self power off and reboot. Once I rebooted, Rinse and repeat it would do it again constantly. All of this and not to mention the armory crate app is absolute garbage still and caused all kinds of conflicts with Windows. Go with 3rd party apps if your can. I'll be looking elsewhere for my next purchase. My Asus from 5 years ago is still rocking it, but just allowing it's age in Alex and specs. But it still works while these new ones are just absolute messes.

On specs, the laptop is extemely powerful, sure. But its a mess! First 10 minutes using it and it crashed. Tried playing a small indie named Touhou Luna Nights and the screen kept flashing white while the game ran af 20fps. The bluetooth disconnects for no reason on its own. After messing around woth armoury crate, i was finally able to play fhe game just for it to freeze. I couldnt even turn it off by holding down the power button. Just let the battery run out so it could turn off. The screen is extemely bright, which is a plus, but fhen its very blurry when streaming media or browsing. Yes it was set to QHD so maybe i got a defective screen? I’m hoping that’s not the case since i have zero backlight bleed. The RGB will turn off on its own and just wont come back on. The plastic chassis actually feels very comfortable and sturdy. I’m trying my hardest to make it work because i love fhe 18 inch screen but it looks like its going back. Another year where I’ll avoid Asus.

Very pricey for a 5080 laptop but overall was worth it for my needs. Did have issues with armoury crate when setting up took it to geek squad to fix and got it back few days later. Hopefully will get some gaming in this weekend. 4 hour battery life on average.

I would give this unit 5 stars if only it did not stop rebooting randomly! I dont understand why it reboots by itself! Not even on heavy loads it just randomly reboots. Frustrated

I have updated latest version, but for many games it keeps crashing, not sure what is wrong with this, and I just use it to play games, right from steam… it goes into performance mode, but crashes 80% of games I input… I am just waiting for a fix, since I cant return it anymore….

It's a big gaming laptop you get what you look for.

Pretty good so far. Hopefully stays that way, worried about the charger being so flimsy

I love my laptop, it's quite powerful, I demand a lot of it with heavy games and programs like Resolume arena

Not ready to use as game development. DX12 disabled

This computer is powerful even when the delivery guy didn’t handle with care , i was very afraid that he broke it but everything is fine also he even didn’t ask for a signature downside , but the laptop is a 10 for me i play doom and Wow amazing screen too