ASUS announced the ROG Strix Scar G18 gaming laptop back in CES 2023. It’s the laptop with the largest screen of all the products that the company announced. And as the screen suggests, it’s probably something that you leave in place for extended use rather than brought around on the regular, even if it remains a realistic use case. I’ve given it a quick try earlier today, but it’s probably fair to say that the surface has barely been scratched.
As the name suggests, the ASUS ROG Scar Strix G18 comes with a 18-inch screen, explaining its massive size. But as recent laptops have had much better screen-to-body ratio (which the company says is 89%), it’s still smaller than 17-inch laptop equivalents from a few years ago. This, and its weight of 3kg, makes it somewhat portable still if you need to lug it around from one spot to another.
For the other spec numbers associated with the screen, we’re looking at 16:10 QHD display with a 240Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time. But I mentioned earlier about only scratching the surface of the laptop because the ASUS Malaysia representatives told us that at the time of testing, the necessary drivers to run at such refresh rates weren’t ready. This means that we got to run Counter Strike: Global Offensive at a more mundane standard of 60fps.
That being said, the colours that appear on the display are pretty amazing. Which probably isn’t too surprising since ASUS says that the ROG Strix Scar G18 comes with the company’s own ROG Nebula display certification, which means Pantone validation and 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut coverage.
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If this laptop has any issues, sheer performance is probably not one of them, considering its internals. We’re looking at a CPU that goes up to an Intel Core i9-13980HX, and up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, paired with up to 32GB of DDR5 RAM and 2TB of PCIe 4 SSD storage.
On to the more mundane parts of a gaming laptop, the top lid has the ROG logo at the back, and on the business end of the laptop there’s a 4-zone RGB backlit chiclet keyboard. Here is also where you’ll see that it has a translucent body shell, which allows you to see some of what’s inside.
As with the Zenbook 14X and Zenbook Pro 14, we don’t yet have the exact configurations for the ASUS ROG Strix Scar G18 that will be making their way here. That and there’s no availability window for now, but ASUS Malaysia says that this will arrive sometime in Q2 of 2023.
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