All brawn and no brains. A big old brick with plenty of performance but zero portability and battery life. That’s the traditional approach to high-performance gaming laptops. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The new Asus ROG Strix Scar II isn’t exactly petite. But it is sleeker and slimmer than the gaming monsters of old. Partly that’s thanks to its slim-bezel design. With ultra-narrow bezels on three sides of its display, the Scar II fits into about as small an overall footprint as feasible for a 15.6-inch gaming laptop.
But that doesn’t mean it’s short of features. That LCD display is both IPS and capable of 144Hz refresh, for instance. There’s a quad-core 8th Gen Intel CPU, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics, an RGB backlit keyboard, loads of connectivity and more mood lighting than you can shake an LED at.
That’s just as well, because the Scar II is up against some serious competition. The likes of the Acer Predator Helios 300 matches many of its specs and is aggressively priced, while laptops like the Gigabyte Aero 15 pack similar components into an even sleeker chassis.
Price and availability
At $1,699 in the US, £1,699 in the UK and $3,025 in Australia, Asus’s new ROG Strix Scar II GL704GM is far from the cheapest laptop that offers its core components of CPU and graphics with a 144Hz display.
The Acer Predator Helios 300 will give you all those components for around £300 / $300 less cash. So, what you’re paying for is Asus’s particular attention to detail, the quality of the chassis, the execution of those components and then all the added extras that come with every Asus ROG product.
Design
First up, the Asus ROG Strix Scar II feels solid and robust. The chassis is a mix of tough plastic and brushed aluminium and it feels ready to take a beating.
That built-to-last vibe carries over to the customizable quad-zone RGB backlit keyboard. It’s firm under finger and very satisfying for gaming. It also offers a desktop-style layout, highlighted WASD keys and a longer keystroke than you get with conventional laptop keyboards.
The RGB keyboard is complemented by an LED-powered ROG logo on the screen cover and another backlit LED strip along the front of the chassis. Along with the keyboard, they’re all customizable via Asus’s Aura Lighting app. So, you can choose colors and have everything running from full reheat for show to fully shut down for gaming stealth. The choice is yours.
The narrow screen bezel, meanwhile, gives the Scar II a contemporary feel. It also means this second-gen Scar is nearly 2.5cm narrower overall than its predecessor.
That said, this isn’t the slimmest gaming laptop you’ll find powered by a quad-core Intel CPU and Nvidia 1060 graphics. It’s 2.6cm thick and weighs in at 2.4kg. The Gigabyte Aero 15, for instance, weighs in at 2kg and measures 1.89cm thick. The Razer Blade 15 is also thinner and lighter.
As for connectivity, we have no complaints. There are plenty of USB 3.1 ports, including a USB-C port, and Asus has also provided both DisplayPort and HDMI connectivity.
Component matching usually makes or breaks a gaming laptop. By that we mean items like the CPU, graphics chip and screen. It’s no good, for instance, pairing an ultra high-res screen with a middling GPU. In that regard, the Scar II is nicely balanced.
Its 1080p LCD panel isn’t very high resolution. Indeed, many laptops offer screens with four times the resolution. But 1080p is a resolution the Scar’s Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics chip can cope with. As our benchmarks show, even at the very highest settings in games like Total War: Warhammer 2 and Middle Earth: Shadow of War, this laptop outputs playable frame rates.
That said, those frame rates are only just playable - there’s little to no performance headroom to spare. That has two implications. Firstly, this laptop doesn’t come with much by way of future proofing for more demanding games down the road.
Secondly, when you’re playing the latest games, its 144Hz refresh rate capability is essentially academic. The graphics subsystem isn’t capable of playing the latest games at high details at anything like 144Hz.
One obvious solution would be to specify the optional upgrade to Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1070 graphics, which is a significantly more powerful GPU. It would give this laptop much more headroom and allow you to feel the benefit of that 144Hz refresh more often in games.
The 1070 graphics would also help justify the Scar’s beefier proportions versus the likes of Gigabyte’s Aero 15. Inevitably, the upgraded graphics will also cost several hundred more, whether you measure that in pounds or dollars.
The Asus ROG Strix Scar II GL704GM’s components are all pretty familiar. The quad-core Intel Core i7-8750H CPU, for instance, will be plenty for most if not all tasks. That Nvidia 1060 graphics, as we’ve discussed, gets the job done adequately in today’s games, but doesn’t leave much room for more demanding games down the road. In short, there are no surprises in our benchmarks.
For the record, its SSD is a 256GB M.2 unit and delivers decent performance, cranking out around 1GB/s of peak transfers and and random access reads and writes of around 50Mb/s and 100MB/s respectively. Overall, this is a quick and responsive laptop.
As for battery life, it probably depends on your expectations. Three and a half hours of video isn’t too shabby by the standards of big desktop replacement laptops. But it’s not much use for a long plane flight or operating away from the mains all day.
Verdict
The Asus ROG Strix Scar II GL704GM is undoubtedly a high quality bit of kit. The chassis is a very solid bit of kit and its 15.6-inch 1080p IPS display, complete with 144Hz refresh, is certainly a highlight, while the thin-bezel design helps keep a check on overall proportions.
Overall performance, likewise, is certainly strong. Our only reservation is that the Scar II is unambiguously pitched as a gaming laptop. Make no mistake, it’s good for playing games right out of the box. It’s just the lack of headroom is a little worrisome. It won’t be long before games appear that force you to trade off visual detail with frame rates. More to the point, the GTX 1060 graphics doesn’t have the grunt today to make the most of the 144Hz refresh capability.
As with any gaming laptop, the graphics subsystem is such a critical aspect for gaming performance and the GeForce GTX 1060 isn’t the very best fit. It is possible to buy a laptop with the faster GTX 1070 at this price point, albeit without quite the same physical quality and polish.
On the other hand, if you’re really sold on the Scar II’s design and overall feature set, we’d advise spending a little more on the upgraded graphics options and getting that GeForce GTX 1070 under the hood. You’ll be glad you did in the long run.
from TechRadar - Technology Reviews https://ift.tt/2NM81Wp
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