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Asus ROG Strix Scar II Gaming Laptop Review
Asus ROG Strix Scar II GL504GV is a power-packed gaming laptop with LEDs for you to show off.
The Asus ROG Strix Scar II GL504GV with a GeForce RTX 2060 GPU is priced at Rs 1,64,990
In India, we currently have a good selection of gaming laptops with Nvidias latest GeForce RTX GPUs We just recently tested our first laptop with a GeForce RTX 2060 — the Dell G7 15 7590 — and its now time to take a look at another one from Asus, called the ROG Strix Scar II GL504GV
Compared to the Dell G7 15, Asus has taken the flashy route for the GL504GV, dressing it up with plenty of RGB LEDs What really makes this laptop interesting is that has pretty much the exact same core specifications as Dells offering, but at a slightly higher price
Its time to see whether youre paying this premium for just the light show, or whether Asus has done more in order to justify the higher price
One look at this laptop and its very obvious what its intended purpose is Asus hasnt held back in letting everyone know that this is a gaming laptop The lid has a very nice dual-tone brushed aluminium finish with a giant backlit ROG logo and the ‘Republic of Gamers moniker at the bottom The lid also has a cutout at the bottom, which lets you see the status LEDs when its closed
There are LEDs for power, battery status, hard disk activity, and airplane mode The lid is sturdy, theres barely any flex, and it offers good protection for the display We didnt notice any pixel warping even when applying pressure on it The edges are chamfered but they do feel a little sharp to the touch
The display has narrow borders around the sides, which gives you an immersive viewing experience
The laptop is fairly heavy at 24kg but its dimensions are quite compact thanks to the narrow bezels around the display Its relatively thick at 261mm, but despite this, we were able to comfortably carry it around in a messenger bag
You get a decent selection of ports spread across both sides of the laptop There are a total of three USB Type-A ports two USB 31 Gen 1, one USB 31 Gen 2, a USB Type-C port USB 31 Gen 2, a Mini-DisplayPort 12 connector, full-sized HDMI 20b, Gigabit LAN, a multi-format card slot, and a 35mm headphone and microphone combo socket
The ports are well spaced and easy to get to There are several vents all around the laptop as well Theres one on the right side, one above the keyboard area, a couple at the back, and a few more on the bottom
The keyboard area has a carbon fibre pattern as well as a camouflage pattern overlapping the top right half of the laptop Its not the most tasteful design in our books, but some might like it In our opinion, the carbon fibre pattern alone should have been enough
You get a full-sized chiclet keyboard with a number pad The keys are mildly sculpted and the 18mm of travel is comfortable for typing The keys dont require much effort to press and arent noisy The WASD keys are transparent, so they shine brighter when gaming in the dark
Apart from the standard set of keys, you also get a few shortcut keys for volume control and muting the microphone, and a ROG button for launching the Asus Armoury Crate application The power button is isolated in the top right corner, while the direction keys are properly sized We also like the extra lip given to the spacebar, which makes it easier to hit with your thumb when gaming
In terms of lighting, the keyboard supports 4-zone RGB backlighting and theres even a RGB strip on the front of the laptop which can be customised
The trackpad is decently sized and you get individual trackpad buttons, which is what every serious gaming laptop ought to have
Finally, we come to the display, which is a 156-inch, full-HD IPS panel with a 3ms response time and a 144Hz refresh rate Just like the Dell G7 15 we tested, the Asus ROG Strix Scar II also has very slim bezels on three of its four sides However, Asus has placed the webcam in a very awkward position, off-centre to the right of the border below the screen
Now, we poked some fun at Dell when it did this with the XPS 13 a couple of years ago, but this is even more ridiculous You can adjust the lid to fix the ‘nose-cam perspective to some extent, but theres no way to avoid the side-angle view that you get Asus should have at least placed it in the centre, at the bottom, in place of its logo, which would have been somewhat more acceptable
Overall, this laptop is built well and feels extremely sturdy Its slightly on the thicker side but that doesnt hamper portability too much There arent any quick-access hatches on the bottom to get to the RAM or storage
In the box, the ROG Strix Scar II ships with a 230W power adapter and some warranty information
The ROG Strix Scar II is available with either an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 or an RTX 2070, and the GL504GV variant that we have for review comes with the former The rest of the components are common across both models, except for the boot SSD, which is a PCIe NVME 256GB unit on this variant and 512GB on the RTX 2070 one
The CPU is an Intel Core i7-8750H hexa-core chip with multi-threading, and you get 16GB of DDR4 RAM 2666MHz running in dual-channel mode, with the SSD as mentioned as well as a 1TB FireCuda SSHD Theres also Wi-Fi 80211ac with 2x2 MIMO antennas and Bluetooth 5
The laptop has plenty of vents all over, but the base cannot be easily removed for accessing the RAM and hard drive
There are a few things worth noting about Asuss choice of components and configuration There are two 8GB sticks instead of a single 16GB stick Running RAM in dual-channel mode effectively doubles theoretical bandwidth, which is noticeable in synthetic benchmarks although its effect in real world performance may vary
Next, is the SSD, which uses the faster PCIe interface and not SATA, which should make a difference in app responsiveness and read/ write speeds Finally, Asus has gone with a Seagate FireCuda hybrid mechanical hard drive instead of a regular one This type of hard drive contains a small amount of flash memory which acts as a cache to speed up read/write operations
Windows 10 comes preinstalled, along with the usual apps from the Windows Store and trial versions of McAfee LiveSafe and Office 365 The main Asus application is called Armoury Crate, and is the central dashboard for monitoring the CPU and GPU, adjusting the RGB lighting, and accessing additional Asus apps The interface is designed well and its easy to navigate through The home screen shows you the laptops current power state by default, its on ‘Turbo when plugged in and ‘Silent when on battery power, the CPU and GPU load, and fan speed
The System sub-menu lets you force-close running apps when you start a game, choose from a bunch of lighting presets, and update the firmware Next up is the Aura sub-menu, which lets you sync lighting effects across all the zones on laptop and also with any compatible accessories such as a gaming mouse or headset, which support the companys Aura Sync feature
The next tab lets you install additional Asus apps if you want, such as GPU Tweak II for overclocking, Game Visual for changing the display colour profile, Sonic Studio for tweaking the speaker sound, and Sonic Radar which gives you a visual cue of which direction in-game sound is coming from, such as gunfire Other apps include system utilities and some for live streaming your gaming sessions
The Armoury app is a little gimmicky but it lets you monitor your system from your phone
We found a few bugs with the Armoury Crate software on our review unit For instance, we werent able to customise keyboard lighting Every time we tried to do it, the app would simply crash We tried restarting the laptop and updating the program, but to no avail We also didnt like the placement of the toggle switches to turn off lighting for the ROG logo on the lid and the LED strip in the front They are buried within the app and are not easy to find
Asus also has an Android and iOS app which can connect to the laptop through Bluetooth and let you access some features of Armoury Crate such as monitoring system resources
Expectedly, the Asus ROG Strix Scar II had no trouble handling ordinary Windows 10 tasks Booting is quick, apps also start up quickly, and multitasking is handled very well On battery power, the laptop automatically forces the refresh rate of the display to 60Hz in order to save power
You can manually toggle between Asus ‘Silent and ‘Balanced power profiles by hitting the Fn+F5 key combination but we noticed that in ‘Balanced mode, the chosen Windows power profile is still ‘High Performance and not ‘Balanced
The laptop runs cool and quiet when youre not gaming or doing anything CPU-intensive When plugged in and with the ‘Turbo power profile, the fans are audible but they arent excessively loud When gaming, we noticed a few times that the fans got a little noisy for brief intervals but there wasnt a constant drone Asus says that the cooling system features anti-dust tunnels, which automatically gets rid of accumulated dust inside the laptop
The display offers good sharpness and colour reproduction Brightness is very good and the matte finish of the panel helps reducing glare and reflections High-resolution videos look good and the stereo speakers offer good accompaniment in games and movies The speakers get loud and have decent bass, and vocals are crisp without any noticeable distortion even at full volume
Performance is pretty solid too We put the GL504GV through our series of regular tests and were quite happy with how it performed In PCMark 10, we got a score of 5,219 points, while in 3DMark Fire Strike, we got 14,668 points Real-world tests fared well too Compressing a 32GB folder of assorted files took about 2 minutes and 37 seconds, while Blender took 7 minutes 10 seconds to finish rendering the BMW benchmark 3D model
The SSDs performance is also very good, and we got sequential read and write bandwidth of 15GB/s and 446MB/s respectively in SiSoft Sandra 2018s file system benchmark, and random read and write bandwidth of 15GB/s and 433MB/s respectively
The ROG Strix Scar II does a very good job in games, and one of the reasons for this, besides having a fast SSD, is the overclocked RTX 2060 The base clock is set at 1,110MHz as opposed to the default 960Mhz, and the boost clock is also increased to 1,335Mhz from the default 1,200Mhz The memory clock speed is left unchanged at 1,750Mhz These factors explain why most of the benchmarks and frame rates in games were generally higher than what we got on the Dell G7 15 laptop
In Deus Ex: Mankind Divideds built-in benchmark, we averaged 456fps using the Ultra preset, with DX12 enabled and 2x MSAA In FarCry 5, we averaged an impressive 81fps at the Ultra graphics preset Even Assassins Creed: Origins averaged a good 65fps with the eye candy maxed out
Switching to some of the newer titles that support features such as ray tracing and DLSS, the laptop was able to hold its own in most of them Weve talked about what these features add to the following titles, which you can read about in our Dell G7 15 review You can also check out our deep dive into Nvidias Turing architecture and how ray tracing and DLSS actually work
In the Metro: Exodus benchmark, we averaged 348fps with the Extreme preset, but all the RTX features disabled After setting ray tracing to ‘High and with DLSS turned on, the frame rate got a boost to 464fps In Shadow of The Tomb Raider, we managed to hit an average of 71fps at the ‘Highest quality setting with the RTX features turned off With ray traced shadows set to the ‘Ultra quality preset, the frame rate tanked quite a bit to 32fps
However, enabling DLSS helped slightly as we saw it recover to around 36fps Finally, in Battlefield V, we averaged a playable 40-50fps with ray tracing on and DLSS off With the latter enabled, textures did appear a little soft but the boost in frame rate made up for it In the same battle scene, we managed to get upwards of 60fps
Battery life is one area in which this laptop falls flat In our Battery Eater Pro benchmark, the laptop ran for just 58 minutes, which is very poor With actual usage, even in the ‘Power Saver mode, the best we could achieve was a little over two hours Were guessing that switching all the LEDs off would give users a bit more mileage, but we doubt that would change much
Verdict On the surface, the Asus ROG Strix Scar II GL504GV is very similar to the Dell G7 15 7590, which we recently tested Asuss new laptop shares a lot in terms of specifications, but adds RGB lighting and has a higher price tag For that extra bit of money, you do get a faster SSD, a better mechanical drive, and an overclocked GPU The laptop also generally runs a lot cooler and quieter, which is something we really liked The RGB lighting is cool but if youre not a fan, you can turn it off
On the downside, the webcam placement is terrible, which makes it practically unusable Battery life is also very poor
If youre planning on using a gaming laptop for work too, then the Dell G7 15 7590 is a better option However, if you want an all-out gaming machine and would rarely use it on the go, then spending a bit more for the Asus ROG Strix Scar II will get you better gaming performance and a more attention-grabbing design
For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on Twitter, Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel
Roydon has written about technology and gadgets for more than a decade now and began his career reviewing PC components He found his calling with laptops, smartphones, and cameras and is the go-to More
Timez Doctor
Asus ROG Strix Scar II GL504GV is a power-packed gaming laptop with LEDs for you to show off.
The Asus ROG Strix Scar II GL504GV with a GeForce RTX 2060 GPU is priced at Rs 1,64,990
In India, we currently have a good selection of gaming laptops with Nvidias latest GeForce RTX GPUs We just recently tested our first laptop with a GeForce RTX 2060 — the Dell G7 15 7590 — and its now time to take a look at another one from Asus, called the ROG Strix Scar II GL504GV
Compared to the Dell G7 15, Asus has taken the flashy route for the GL504GV, dressing it up with plenty of RGB LEDs What really makes this laptop interesting is that has pretty much the exact same core specifications as Dells offering, but at a slightly higher price
Its time to see whether youre paying this premium for just the light show, or whether Asus has done more in order to justify the higher price
One look at this laptop and its very obvious what its intended purpose is Asus hasnt held back in letting everyone know that this is a gaming laptop The lid has a very nice dual-tone brushed aluminium finish with a giant backlit ROG logo and the ‘Republic of Gamers moniker at the bottom The lid also has a cutout at the bottom, which lets you see the status LEDs when its closed
There are LEDs for power, battery status, hard disk activity, and airplane mode The lid is sturdy, theres barely any flex, and it offers good protection for the display We didnt notice any pixel warping even when applying pressure on it The edges are chamfered but they do feel a little sharp to the touch
The display has narrow borders around the sides, which gives you an immersive viewing experience
The laptop is fairly heavy at 24kg but its dimensions are quite compact thanks to the narrow bezels around the display Its relatively thick at 261mm, but despite this, we were able to comfortably carry it around in a messenger bag
You get a decent selection of ports spread across both sides of the laptop There are a total of three USB Type-A ports two USB 31 Gen 1, one USB 31 Gen 2, a USB Type-C port USB 31 Gen 2, a Mini-DisplayPort 12 connector, full-sized HDMI 20b, Gigabit LAN, a multi-format card slot, and a 35mm headphone and microphone combo socket
The ports are well spaced and easy to get to There are several vents all around the laptop as well Theres one on the right side, one above the keyboard area, a couple at the back, and a few more on the bottom
The keyboard area has a carbon fibre pattern as well as a camouflage pattern overlapping the top right half of the laptop Its not the most tasteful design in our books, but some might like it In our opinion, the carbon fibre pattern alone should have been enough
You get a full-sized chiclet keyboard with a number pad The keys are mildly sculpted and the 18mm of travel is comfortable for typing The keys dont require much effort to press and arent noisy The WASD keys are transparent, so they shine brighter when gaming in the dark
Apart from the standard set of keys, you also get a few shortcut keys for volume control and muting the microphone, and a ROG button for launching the Asus Armoury Crate application The power button is isolated in the top right corner, while the direction keys are properly sized We also like the extra lip given to the spacebar, which makes it easier to hit with your thumb when gaming
In terms of lighting, the keyboard supports 4-zone RGB backlighting and theres even a RGB strip on the front of the laptop which can be customised
The trackpad is decently sized and you get individual trackpad buttons, which is what every serious gaming laptop ought to have
Finally, we come to the display, which is a 156-inch, full-HD IPS panel with a 3ms response time and a 144Hz refresh rate Just like the Dell G7 15 we tested, the Asus ROG Strix Scar II also has very slim bezels on three of its four sides However, Asus has placed the webcam in a very awkward position, off-centre to the right of the border below the screen
Now, we poked some fun at Dell when it did this with the XPS 13 a couple of years ago, but this is even more ridiculous You can adjust the lid to fix the ‘nose-cam perspective to some extent, but theres no way to avoid the side-angle view that you get Asus should have at least placed it in the centre, at the bottom, in place of its logo, which would have been somewhat more acceptable
Overall, this laptop is built well and feels extremely sturdy Its slightly on the thicker side but that doesnt hamper portability too much There arent any quick-access hatches on the bottom to get to the RAM or storage
In the box, the ROG Strix Scar II ships with a 230W power adapter and some warranty information
The ROG Strix Scar II is available with either an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 or an RTX 2070, and the GL504GV variant that we have for review comes with the former The rest of the components are common across both models, except for the boot SSD, which is a PCIe NVME 256GB unit on this variant and 512GB on the RTX 2070 one
The CPU is an Intel Core i7-8750H hexa-core chip with multi-threading, and you get 16GB of DDR4 RAM 2666MHz running in dual-channel mode, with the SSD as mentioned as well as a 1TB FireCuda SSHD Theres also Wi-Fi 80211ac with 2x2 MIMO antennas and Bluetooth 5
The laptop has plenty of vents all over, but the base cannot be easily removed for accessing the RAM and hard drive
There are a few things worth noting about Asuss choice of components and configuration There are two 8GB sticks instead of a single 16GB stick Running RAM in dual-channel mode effectively doubles theoretical bandwidth, which is noticeable in synthetic benchmarks although its effect in real world performance may vary
Next, is the SSD, which uses the faster PCIe interface and not SATA, which should make a difference in app responsiveness and read/ write speeds Finally, Asus has gone with a Seagate FireCuda hybrid mechanical hard drive instead of a regular one This type of hard drive contains a small amount of flash memory which acts as a cache to speed up read/write operations
Windows 10 comes preinstalled, along with the usual apps from the Windows Store and trial versions of McAfee LiveSafe and Office 365 The main Asus application is called Armoury Crate, and is the central dashboard for monitoring the CPU and GPU, adjusting the RGB lighting, and accessing additional Asus apps The interface is designed well and its easy to navigate through The home screen shows you the laptops current power state by default, its on ‘Turbo when plugged in and ‘Silent when on battery power, the CPU and GPU load, and fan speed
The System sub-menu lets you force-close running apps when you start a game, choose from a bunch of lighting presets, and update the firmware Next up is the Aura sub-menu, which lets you sync lighting effects across all the zones on laptop and also with any compatible accessories such as a gaming mouse or headset, which support the companys Aura Sync feature
The next tab lets you install additional Asus apps if you want, such as GPU Tweak II for overclocking, Game Visual for changing the display colour profile, Sonic Studio for tweaking the speaker sound, and Sonic Radar which gives you a visual cue of which direction in-game sound is coming from, such as gunfire Other apps include system utilities and some for live streaming your gaming sessions
The Armoury app is a little gimmicky but it lets you monitor your system from your phone
We found a few bugs with the Armoury Crate software on our review unit For instance, we werent able to customise keyboard lighting Every time we tried to do it, the app would simply crash We tried restarting the laptop and updating the program, but to no avail We also didnt like the placement of the toggle switches to turn off lighting for the ROG logo on the lid and the LED strip in the front They are buried within the app and are not easy to find
Asus also has an Android and iOS app which can connect to the laptop through Bluetooth and let you access some features of Armoury Crate such as monitoring system resources
Expectedly, the Asus ROG Strix Scar II had no trouble handling ordinary Windows 10 tasks Booting is quick, apps also start up quickly, and multitasking is handled very well On battery power, the laptop automatically forces the refresh rate of the display to 60Hz in order to save power
You can manually toggle between Asus ‘Silent and ‘Balanced power profiles by hitting the Fn+F5 key combination but we noticed that in ‘Balanced mode, the chosen Windows power profile is still ‘High Performance and not ‘Balanced
The laptop runs cool and quiet when youre not gaming or doing anything CPU-intensive When plugged in and with the ‘Turbo power profile, the fans are audible but they arent excessively loud When gaming, we noticed a few times that the fans got a little noisy for brief intervals but there wasnt a constant drone Asus says that the cooling system features anti-dust tunnels, which automatically gets rid of accumulated dust inside the laptop
The display offers good sharpness and colour reproduction Brightness is very good and the matte finish of the panel helps reducing glare and reflections High-resolution videos look good and the stereo speakers offer good accompaniment in games and movies The speakers get loud and have decent bass, and vocals are crisp without any noticeable distortion even at full volume
Performance is pretty solid too We put the GL504GV through our series of regular tests and were quite happy with how it performed In PCMark 10, we got a score of 5,219 points, while in 3DMark Fire Strike, we got 14,668 points Real-world tests fared well too Compressing a 32GB folder of assorted files took about 2 minutes and 37 seconds, while Blender took 7 minutes 10 seconds to finish rendering the BMW benchmark 3D model
The SSDs performance is also very good, and we got sequential read and write bandwidth of 15GB/s and 446MB/s respectively in SiSoft Sandra 2018s file system benchmark, and random read and write bandwidth of 15GB/s and 433MB/s respectively
The ROG Strix Scar II does a very good job in games, and one of the reasons for this, besides having a fast SSD, is the overclocked RTX 2060 The base clock is set at 1,110MHz as opposed to the default 960Mhz, and the boost clock is also increased to 1,335Mhz from the default 1,200Mhz The memory clock speed is left unchanged at 1,750Mhz These factors explain why most of the benchmarks and frame rates in games were generally higher than what we got on the Dell G7 15 laptop
In Deus Ex: Mankind Divideds built-in benchmark, we averaged 456fps using the Ultra preset, with DX12 enabled and 2x MSAA In FarCry 5, we averaged an impressive 81fps at the Ultra graphics preset Even Assassins Creed: Origins averaged a good 65fps with the eye candy maxed out
Switching to some of the newer titles that support features such as ray tracing and DLSS, the laptop was able to hold its own in most of them Weve talked about what these features add to the following titles, which you can read about in our Dell G7 15 review You can also check out our deep dive into Nvidias Turing architecture and how ray tracing and DLSS actually work
In the Metro: Exodus benchmark, we averaged 348fps with the Extreme preset, but all the RTX features disabled After setting ray tracing to ‘High and with DLSS turned on, the frame rate got a boost to 464fps In Shadow of The Tomb Raider, we managed to hit an average of 71fps at the ‘Highest quality setting with the RTX features turned off With ray traced shadows set to the ‘Ultra quality preset, the frame rate tanked quite a bit to 32fps
However, enabling DLSS helped slightly as we saw it recover to around 36fps Finally, in Battlefield V, we averaged a playable 40-50fps with ray tracing on and DLSS off With the latter enabled, textures did appear a little soft but the boost in frame rate made up for it In the same battle scene, we managed to get upwards of 60fps
Battery life is one area in which this laptop falls flat In our Battery Eater Pro benchmark, the laptop ran for just 58 minutes, which is very poor With actual usage, even in the ‘Power Saver mode, the best we could achieve was a little over two hours Were guessing that switching all the LEDs off would give users a bit more mileage, but we doubt that would change much
Verdict On the surface, the Asus ROG Strix Scar II GL504GV is very similar to the Dell G7 15 7590, which we recently tested Asuss new laptop shares a lot in terms of specifications, but adds RGB lighting and has a higher price tag For that extra bit of money, you do get a faster SSD, a better mechanical drive, and an overclocked GPU The laptop also generally runs a lot cooler and quieter, which is something we really liked The RGB lighting is cool but if youre not a fan, you can turn it off
On the downside, the webcam placement is terrible, which makes it practically unusable Battery life is also very poor
If youre planning on using a gaming laptop for work too, then the Dell G7 15 7590 is a better option However, if you want an all-out gaming machine and would rarely use it on the go, then spending a bit more for the Asus ROG Strix Scar II will get you better gaming performance and a more attention-grabbing design
For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on Twitter, Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel
Roydon has written about technology and gadgets for more than a decade now and began his career reviewing PC components He found his calling with laptops, smartphones, and cameras and is the go-to More
Timez Doctor
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