Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 Review: A Massive, Powerful Gaming Laptop With Plastic Build and Short Battery Life

The first thing reviewer Anuj Bhatia did with the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 was wonder whether he wanted it at all. Asus asked him to review the laptop twice, and each time he questioned whether he was the right person to live with an 18-inch gaming machine. He concluded he may not be the target buyer, but he allowed that a certain kind of user would be drawn to a screen this large, an Intel Core i9 processor and an Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card. The unit he tested costs Rs 3,59,990.

The look is familiar ROG territory. The shell is black, with a glow-in-the-dark Republic of Gamers logo on the lid and a long strip of lighting running along the front of the chassis beneath the wrist rest. Multi-coloured RGB lighting glows at the back, and the sides and vents are transparent plastic. Inside, the keyboard has RGB lettering and there is a large trackpad, plus a semi-translucent section of the deck that lets you see into the machine. Bhatia calls it cool.

The material is less impressive. Asus chose plastic rather than magnesium alloy. The build quality is fine, he writes, but nowhere near rivals such as the Alienware 18 and the Razer Blade 18. The laptop weighs 3 kg, which is unsurprising for the category. It still feels relatively light given the screen and specifications, but when he travelled with it, it was heavy and barely fit into his old Samsonite backpack. The power brick adds more weight. He wished it were lighter, though he accepts that the power-hungry components need a big one. Ports are spread across three sides: two USB 3.2 Type-A Gen 2, one Thunderbolt 4, one USB 3.2 Type-C Gen 2, HDMI 2.1, a LAN port and the DC input.

The display is the star. It is an 18-inch QHD+ IPS panel running at 240 Hz, covering 100 per cent of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, with 400 nits of peak brightness. Playing Halo Infinite, Bhatia felt the larger screen added a new dimension to the game. The bezels are slim for a laptop this big. Colour performance is excellent, he says, but the panel cannot match laptops with OLED or mini-LED screens.

The keyboard and trackpad also earn praise. Typing feels great, keys give the right feedback, and they are quiet and well spaced. There are dedicated keys for volume and mic mute, programmable keys that can be customised in the pre-installed Armoury Crate software, and a full number pad. The layout may take a few days to learn. The trackpad is large and responsive.

The review unit carried top-end hardware: an Intel Core i9-13980HX with 24 cores (eight performance, 16 efficient), 16 GB of DDR5 RAM, an RTX 4090, and two 1TB drives set up in RAID0 as the boot drive. Halo Infinite and Dirt 5 ran smoothly at enhanced graphics settings, as did Forza Horizon 5. In a Chrome test, the laptop ran 30 tabs at once without stutter. The cost of that power is heat: the fans get loud, and after a while of high-quality gaming the keyboard becomes hard to use.

Battery life, speakers and webcam are the weak points. Bhatia averaged about four hours, which he says is true of every gaming laptop. Asus positions such machines as desktop replacements, but the power brick must come along whenever you leave home, which undercuts the idea of an all-in-one system for demanding work and AAA gaming on the go. The speakers lack punch, are not loud enough, and struggle with fine sounds and bass. The webcam is 720p, fine for basic calls but poor in low light, which he calls unacceptable at this price.

His verdict is mixed. What impressed him most was that an 18-inch laptop was light enough to travel with, though comparing it to a MacBook Air would be too much. He sees room in the market for an 18-inch laptop, and calls the Scar 18 polished, but with the same nagging problems he has found in earlier gaming laptops.