Asus ROG Strix SCAR 18 Review: Big, Bright, and Nearly as Fast as Its Rival

The second laptop built around Intel's Arrow Lake-HX chipset and Nvidia's Blackwell graphics to pass through Digital Trends' review process is the Asus ROG Strix SCAR 18, and the first thing to know about it is its size. The first was the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, a 16-inch machine the reviewer found very fast. The Asus is bigger still, with an 18-inch mini-LED display that he calls the best he has reviewed.

The SCAR 18 comes in several configurations, and only some were available when the review was written. All use the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX. The base model pairs it with 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and an RTX 5070 Ti. Moving to an RTX 5080 and a 2TB SSD brings the price to $3,400, and an RTX 5090 pushes it to $4,500. The Legion Pro 7i costs $3,399 with the same processor, 32GB of RAM, two 1TB SSDs, an RTX 5080 and a 16-inch QHD+ OLED panel. The reviewer suspects much of the gap comes down to Asus's larger mini-LED screen.

The chassis is large and bulky, and the reviewer says that is unavoidable at this screen size. It measures 1.26 inches thick and weighs 7.28 pounds, against the Razer Blade 18's 1.1 inches and 7.06 pounds. The keyboard deck is aluminum, while the lid and bottom are plastic. The reviewer found no bending, flexing or twisting, though he guesses the Razer feels better built. The lighting is extensive: per-key RGB on the keyboard, RGB around the underside, a pulsing ROG logo on the lid, and white AniMe Vision LEDs that scroll messages like a ticker. It lacks the fighter-jet-style exhaust vents and lit trim of the Legion.

The notable hardware change is ease of upgrade. The rear panel slides off without screws, the two SSDs sit in Q-latch mounts that need no tools, and the two SO-DIMM slots for RAM are also toolless.

The keyboard is a mixed result. The reviewer found the keycaps oddly small, which made it harder to stay on home row, and the switches deep and springy but not especially satisfying. He did not enjoy typing the review on it, though he thinks gamers will find it good enough. The large touchpad has unresponsive buttons, and he switched to an external mouse. Ports sit only on the sides, which he would have moved to the back. They include Thunderbolt 5 and 2.5G Ethernet. The 1080p webcam has an infrared camera for Windows Hello. Because Arrow Lake-HX lacks a fast NPU, this is not a Copilot+ PC.

The Core Ultra 9 275HX has 24 cores, eight Performance and 16 Efficient, at up to 5.4 GHz. Asus gives the chip up to 65 watts, per the reviewer's press materials, while its website says 80. The GPU gets up to 175 watts, 240 watts total, versus the Legion's 250. Asus's site says 255, and the reviewer says he will update the review if Asus clarifies.

Cooling uses an end-to-end vapor chamber, three fans and liquid metal, with air drawn in through the keyboard deck. Above the keyboard he measured 41 to 43 degrees Celsius. CPU temperatures mostly stayed at 65 to 68 degrees, and the GPU stayed under 80 during AAA games. In Windows or Silent profiles it is one of the quietest gaming laptops. In Turbo the fans are harsh enough that he suggests noise-cancelling headphones.

In benchmarks the two Arrow Lake-HX and Blackwell laptops perform similarly, with the Lenovo slightly ahead across the board, possibly from more power or more aggressive tuning. Both are far faster than previous-generation Windows laptops. Only the Asus ROG Flow Z13, with an AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ chip, beat them in Geekbench 6 multi-core. In PugetBench for Premiere Pro, the SCAR 18 even beat the Apple MacBook Pro 16 with its M4 Max, though the Legion was faster still.

On gaming, the reviewer notes that the RTX 5080 laptops he has tested are not much faster than 4000-series machines in games. Blackwell's gains come from DLSS 4 upscaling and frame generation, which his current benchmark games do not fully support. In 3DMark Time Spy the SCAR 18 again trailed the Legion Pro 7i slightly. The review text available ends there, and the power-limit question remains open.