ASUS ROG STRIX SCAR 18 G835L Review

The ASUS ROG Strix Scar 18 has arrived to set the bar for gaming notebooks with its extreme performance and extreme price tag. This year’s model of course, now packs the RTX 50-Series GPU range and the model I have just reviewed is the RTX 5090 version that comes specced out to some godly extremes.

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The model in this content is the ROG Strix Scar 18 G835L variant. It comes with the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX 2.7GHz CPU with a max clock speed of 5.4GHz, 24 cores and 24 threads. The CPU includes 36MB of cache and an AI Boost NPU with up to 131 TOPS. The CPU has a TDP of 55W

Then there’s the GPU. The notebook includes the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 notebook GPU. This GPU has an operating power of 175W thanks to its 150W base power and 25W extra dynamic boost power. This means it can reach a max clock speed of 1647MHz with dynamic boost or 1597MHz without it. It also comes with 24GB of GDDR7 RAM.

Of course, this is the notebook RTX 5090 and on paper, it includes architecture that has been significantly reduced to fit into a notebook. It has 112 ROPs, 10496 Shader Cores, 82 RT Cores, and 328 Tensor Cores and TMUs. So essentially, everything on this GPU has been cut in half compared to the desktop version. It makes sense here given the various limitations that come with notebook chassis and thermals.

However, while the GPU is a Max-Q chip, it does still come with the perks of DLSS4 which include Multi Frame Generation, enhanced upscaling and all those other features. So we’ll have to see just how far that takes the GPU when we test it.

ASUS has also kitted the ROG Strix Scar 18 G835L with 64GB of RAM in the form of two 32GB Hynix DDR5 SDRAM with a max memory clock of 2800MHz. This RAM is upgradable. The notebook also comes with 4TB of SSD storage in the form of two 2TB Western Digital NVMe SSDs.

Already you can see that this year’s ROG Strix Scar 18 G835L isn’t playing around. With a price tag of R100,000, the notebook has packed virtually everything you can possibly get into it and there isn’t much room for anything else. I am sure if ASUS could fit the kitchen sink into this beast, they would have.

Before I get into the technical stuff, we need to admire the ROG Strix Scar 18’s design. ASUS has made some slight changes to this year’s model that makes it look and feel a bit more grown-up. The display is now a 2.5K 18-inch Mini-LED panel with a 240Hz refresh rate, HDR and G-Sync. It is gorgeous and sorry to say, in my opinion this display is so much better to see here than the OLED and IPS panels. The Mini-LED delivers the brightness that I expect from a notebook and is ready to challenge any room’s lighting.

No joke here, this is the brightest Windows notebook display I have reviewed so far. While Windows might seem dim due to the HDR implementation, booting up a game kicks this panel into gear and it looks truly spectacular. The Mini-LED delivers bright and vivid imagery that truly elevates the experience. HDR also compliments the experience thanks to the Mini-LED tech bring able to brighten up those specular highlights.

The rest of the notebook has also been given some attention. We now have a wrap-around RGB light strip that travels around the base of the notebook. It creates an illusion that the notebook is sort of floating in the air. It looks okay. I didn’t enjoy the corners of this lighting as there’s an obvious LED brightness mismatch that makes it look a little cheap. Sort of like there’s a bit of extra plastic in each corner that refracts the light and makes it look uneven.

To add more RGB to it, the lid includes a glowing ROG logo and ASUS has added an AniMe Matrix strip to the side of it too. This strip includes tiny lights that shine through perforated holes to create moving animations. I wasn’t a fan of the last model’s light strip and that hasn’t changed here. This lid is annoying and distracting. I would never subject anyone around me to seeing it flash while I am sitting at a coffee shop sipping on my cupacchino and I would despise the person who did it to me. All of the RGB can be tweaked in the Armoury Crate and it is also where you’ll find my favourite preset called “off”.

ASUS has done something I haven’t seen in a notebook yet and that is move the speakers to the back side of the keyboard and have them fire forward. This means there are additional speaker holes underneath the notebook and under the display. It produces a powerful, multi-sound experience. It seems like a simple thing but it actually makes a big difference. The result is much louder, direct sound from all speakers. In most cases, the speakers also did a great job simulating stereo output, something you don’t often see on a notebook. These are some good speakers that get loud and pack a bit of power.

The keyboard is then your standard full-sized keyboard with per-key RGB. It felts nice to type on and the travel time was decent. The arrow buttons were in a strange spot for me and took some time to get used to. They are merged with the numbered for some reason and that slight right-hand position threw me off.

The trackpad is also okay. It is your standard black trackpad that is quite large and tactile. It is glass so it shouldn’t wear down over time and become shiny.

When it comes to the ports, ASUS has packed most of the IO you’ll look for. On the right-hand side, there are two 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports. On the left, you’ll find the 3.5mm audio jack combo port, one HDMI 2.1 port, two Thunderbolt 5 ports with DisplayPort and power delivery, another USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, and a 2.6GB LAN.

There’s nothing more you’ll need here. The notebook is powered by a 380W power brick and uses a special connector found on the left-hand side to charge. Speaking of charging, the battery on this ROG Strix Scar 18 G835L is a 90Wh cell and while it is one of the largest around, it doesn’t last very long. Given the sheer power of the internals and the Mini-LED screen, the battery depletes quite rapidly.

You’ll get around 3-4 hours of battery life when using the notebook in energy saver mode with the display at 50%. The notebook will last about an hour and a half when the screen is maxed out and on video playback. Just take your charger with you.

Lastly, when it comes to the design of this ROG Strix Scar 18 G835L, I need to touch on the tool-less functionality on the notebook. ASUS has a new quick release latch on the bottom of the notebook that when slid to the left, unlocks the bottom shell cover. All I had to do was push the cover to the front of the notebook and it would unclip and come off.

Here, you’ll find a really cool-looking underbelly area where you can manage your SSDs, check out the RAM, upgrade it if you want, swap out the battery and just look at the stylish triple-fan cooling system that is really impressive to see.

This underbelly is pretty amazing and is a lot cleaner and stylish than likely 99% of gaming notebooks out there. But you have to keep in mind that ASUS hasn’t done anything here but slap on a plastic cutout over the ugly stuff you usually see on those 99% of other notebooks. We’re not talking about the design sophistication of say a MacBook here which is perfectly engineered, wire-free and truly a design marvel under the hood.

This is a plastic shell covering the ugly internals to give the illusion of sophistication. I can’t hate on ASUS for doing this. Again, it seems like such a simple thing and it makes a world of difference to the general user experience here.

Overall, the design of this ROG Strix Scar 18 G835L made me happy. I can nitpick and say I hated the RGB brightness issues on the corners and the lid’s AniMe Matrix isn’t for me but these are things I can just turn off. I am happy that ASUS decided to go with a bit of a thicker design this year without worrying about making a stupidly thin notebook that ruins performance. The result is a stylish 3.3KG notebook that actually functions.

So what about that performance then? Well, the ROG Strix Scar 18 G835L is a beast. I ran tests across every possible benchmark tool I could to show you how powerful this notebook is. There are a few things you need to know first.

The ROG Strix Scar 18 G835L does have a thermal protection cap of 87C and like other ROG notebooks, it is quite easy to turn on dynamic boost and max out all the performance. I did just that. In Armoury Crate, I created a manual mode which enabled 175W of power on the GPU and CPU. I also increased the Base Clock by 150MHz to 200MHz offset and Memory Clock by to 200MHz to 300MHz offset. This is the most overclocking you can do on the Armoury Crate and is likely the most juice you’ll squeeze from this notebook without further overclocking it in the BIOS.

During my stress testing, the GPU thermals reached 84. Given this notebook uses a triple-fan cooling system, each fan operates separately. The system fan was at 6700RPM, the CPU fan was at 5700RPM and the GPU fan was at 56000RPM. It all resulted in a 48dBA fan noise. I don’t need to mention how loud this is because you can imagine. It is loud. These fans blow and make quite a noise.

However, while loud, the notebook is impressively cool to the touch. Even after an hour of stress tests and heavy gaming, the top of the notebook at the back centre measured only 49C. The underneath hot spots ranged between 30C in the fronter shell to 50C right at the back near the vents. This is a lot cooler than I expected and essentially means you won’t have to worry too much about heat build up here.

I pretty much pushed this notebook to the extreme. The GPU clock was hitting 2100MHz and the temperature at 84C was likely as high as it would get without fiddling even further with advanced overclocking. The CPU I ran at 100% and the notebook measured 95C where it sat quite comfortably without any throttling kicking in. The CPU was reading 5283MHz.

But it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows with this notebook. I had various technical issues and bugs when reviewing it. Windows would freeze periodically for about 5-10 seconds at a time leaving everything completely frozen, even the mouse cursor. It would then suddenly come right by itself. I also had issues where the screen would go off and on like it was switching inputs.

There were also moments when Windows would just feel incredibly sluggish. Sort of like the device just wasn’t working properly. Even the simplest tasks like opening settings or a folder would hang. Sometimes launching 3DMark would see the program glitch out and get unresponsive for a minute. I also had the entire notebook crash multiple times during gaming. This happened while playing games like Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Cyberpunk. I was forced to hold down the power button for 15 seconds to force shut it down. These are tasks this notebook should be able to handle in a blink, so seeing this happen was concerning.

Apart from those few hiccups, I was very impressed by the ROG Strix Scar 18 G835L. This is a very capable and very powerful device. The gaming performance is rather fantastic as this RTX 5090 definitely delivers the performance to run all modern games with max settings before even looking at DLSS 4. To see this power in a notebook is quite cool to be honest.

In the end, I was worried about thermal issues on this notebook but it surprised me. The cooling system works and although fans can get loud, it keeps this notebook from being throttled. It is also a stylish device. ASUS has crafted a notebook that looks as expensive as the asking price. I still absolutely hate the AniMe Matrix dots nonsense but hey, each to their own.

Visit the ASUS website here for more information on the STRIX SCAR 18.