Pros & Cons
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- Blazing performance and gameplay
- Sharp, fast Mini LED 240Hz display
- Longer battery life than expected
- Effective cooling
- Tool-free RAM, SSD upgrades
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- Competitively priced, but still expensive
- Loud fans when cooling
- Number pad overlay on the touchpad can be triggered by accident
Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 G635LW Specs
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 2 |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Class | Gaming |
| Dimensions (HWD) | 1.21 by 13.9 by 10.6 inches |
| Graphics Memory | 16 |
| Graphics Processor | Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop GPU |
| Native Display Resolution | 2560 by 1600 |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Pro |
| Panel Technology | Mini LED |
| Processor | Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX |
| RAM (as Tested) | 32 |
| Screen Refresh Rate | 240 |
| Screen Size | 16 |
| Tested Battery Life (Hours:Minutes) | 8:23 |
| Variable Refresh Support | G-Sync |
| Weight | 6.28 |
| Wireless Networking | Bluetooth 5.4 |
| Wireless Networking | Wi-Fi 7 |
The latest gaming laptops are never cheap, prioritizing pure graphics power over affordability. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 (starts at $3,299.99, as tested) is a fitting example, leveraging a monster Intel Core Ultra 9 processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 graphics chip for superb gaming performance. The laptop even has some unique perks, like tool-free access for simple upgrades and a quirky-but-fun AniMe Vision display that lets you program custom animations on the screen lid. With its powerful blend of serious gameplay and premium features, it's hard to imagine anyone being disappointed by this machine. If you want an even bigger screen, grab an MSI Raider 18 HX AI, but the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 claims our Editors' Choice award as the top high-end gaming laptop.
Configuration and Pricing: Premium and More Premium
Our Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 review model (number G635LW-XS97) contains an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 Laptop GPU with 16GB of GDDR7 video memory, 32GB of DDR5 system memory, and 2TB of solid-state storage. It sells for $3,299.99.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The top version of the ROG Strix Scar 16 ( number G635LX-XS97) steps up to a GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU with 24GB of VRAM, which bumps the price to $4,299.99. The rest of the specs are the same, so that $1,000 difference is all graphics performance.
Design: Open Up This Beast for Tool-Free Upgrades
Gaming laptops tend to adhere to a pretty specific design aesthetic, with thick chassis designs, large ventilation grilles, and a handful of superficial features for visual interest. These include RGB lighting and usually a distinctive element, like a glowing touchpad, a mechanical keyboard, or a particularly ostentatious design.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The ROG Strix Scar 16 has plenty of that, too, with per-key RGB backlighting on the keyboard, an RGB strip around the edge of the palm rest, a glowing Republic of Gamers (ROG) logo, and the AniMe Vision display originally introduced on the Asus ROG Zephyrus series. (This grid of LEDs on the lid can display custom designs and animations.) You'll be satisfied if you want a bold gaming laptop with plenty of blinkenlights. And if you don't want that, the laptop has a Stealth Mode that turns the lighting features off.
Asus didn’t stop there in improving the laptop's functional design, adding tool-free access for upgrades. Open the bottom of the chassis via an easy slide lock, and you'll be greeted with access to two SO-DIMM memory slots, as well as M.2 SSD installs with an easy-to-use latch system, and three different cooling fans. Everything else inside is hidden away behind the frame; you'll need to break out the tools to get to any of those items, which aren’t really upgradable, anyway.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The whole system sits in a tapered, angled chassis with an aluminum lid and plastic construction. While you can find lightweight, portable gaming laptops (the Asus ROG Zephyrus is the prime example), this machine is not that. It weighs 6.28 pounds and measures 1.2 inches thick at the back.
Inside, the ROG Strix Scar 16 has pretty much every cooling technology you can name, from a trio of cooling fans to a giant vapor chamber, indium-gallium liquid metal thermal paste, and a full-width dual-layer heatsink that sandwiches the entire rear edge of the motherboard with cooling fins. The result delivers effective thermal management, but it does have the byproduct of sounding like a wind turbine.
Display: Asus' Mini LED Marvel
The ROG Strix Scar 16 features a 16-inch display with a 2,560-by-1,600 resolution, but just like a seven-layer burrito, a lot is happening here. The ROG Nebula HDR display has mini LED backlighting with more than 2,000 distinct dimming zones, providing OLED-like contrast with the superior brightness of a backlit LCD panel.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)With a 240Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time, it's one of the most responsive and smoothest-looking displays on a gaming machine, and Nvidia G-Sync support ensures that the laptop's GPU and the high-refresh-rate display stay perfectly matched.
Keyboard and Touchpad: Tactile and Precise
The keyboard and touchpad on most gaming laptops are usually an afterthought, if only because most gamers will bring their own mechanical keyboard and gaming mouse. But I was impressed to see that the ROG Strix Scar is not only outfitted with per-key RGB backlighting, which looks sharp, but that it also has decent tactile feedback. While it has no dedicated number pad, and the arrow keys are tiny, it's a keyboard you'll actually want to type on.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Asus’ large glass-surfaced touchpad makes up for the lack of a number pad with a light-up overlay that gives you a nine-digit grid for numeric input. Asus has used this trick before, but it's never really impressed me. More often than not, this extra functionality seems to trigger by accident, pulling me out of whatever I was trying to do. But glowing numbers aside, the touchpad is smooth and precise, with a decently clicky response to every tap.
Ports and Wireless: All the Connections You'll Need
Because the laptop's design allocates the entire rear edge to an array of vents, all of the ports are on the sides of the chassis. On the left sits a power port, a 2.5Gbps LAN jack, an HDMI 2.1 output, a single USB Type-A port, and two Thunderbolt 5 ports.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)On the right are two more USB Type-A ports, giving you plenty of connectivity for ordinary peripherals. The system has Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 radios inside for wireless connectivity.
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Performance Testing: A True Gaming Contender
With the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 armed with an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 (16GB), it's on par with some of the most powerful gaming machines we've reviewed recently. The closest comparison is the MSI Raider 18 HX AI ($3,999 as tested), which has a similar Intel Core Ultra 9 HX processor (in MSI's case, the 285HX) and the same RTX 5080 GPU, but in a larger 18-inch format and with double the RAM. Our other comparisons are the Alienware 16 Area-51 ($3,399.99 as tested) and the Razer Blade 16 (2025) ($4,499.99 as tested), which also drive superb performance.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput. Three more tests we use are processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators utility rates a PC's image editing prowess by executing a variety of automated operations in the seminal image editor Adobe Photoshop 25.
Considering that our baseline for productivity is a 4,000-point score in PCMark 10, it's no surprise that the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 (and the high-powered systems we're comparing it with) more than double that score. Office and multimedia work will be no problem for this machine, as seen in its superb scores across the board. None of these systems will break a sweat, regardless of what work you have to do. The Asus ROG may not have led the pack—it fell in the middle of the group in most tests—but if you wanted to use this machine for heavy media editing toil or workstation-grade number crunching, it will definitely be up to the task.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We challenge all systems’ graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The second pair, Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests, focuses on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. Last, we turn to Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance in a synthetic environment. This benchmark subjects 3D scenes to increasingly intense ray-traced workloads at 1440p.
Our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at the system’s full HD (1080p or 1200p native) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. If the screen is capable of a higher resolution, we rerun the tests at the QHD equivalent of 1440p or 1600p. Each game runs at two sets of graphics settings per resolution for up to four runs total on each game.
We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Minimum graphics preset—aimed at maximizing frame rates to test display refresh rates—and again at the Extreme preset. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs fully, so we run it on the Ultra graphics preset and again at the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR on AMD systems) test, demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-boosting upscaling technologies. The capacity of these frame-rate boosts changes with the version of frame-generation tech available, with DLSS 2 and 3 stitching in one AI-generated frame for every originally rendered frame, and the latest version of DLSS (DLSS 4) inserting up to three additional frames.
In 3DMark, the ROG Strix Scar 16 proved a top-class machine, with excellent scores in every test, though the Razer Blade 16 led throughout. We'd expect as much from any high-end gaming laptop. But in gaming tests, the Scar proved its mettle. In F1 2024, the Asus actually led the pack with DLSS on at both resolutions. In Cyberpunk 2077, the Scar fell a frame or two behind the rest, within the margin of error.
Asus’ laptop lagged a bit further behind in Call of Duty, but it still reported sky-high frame rates at all of our test settings. (The MSI laptop could not complete the Call of Duty test due to software issues.) We're talking about some of the best gaming performance you'll see in a current laptop, thanks to the GeForce RTX 5080 laptop GPU inside.
Battery Life and Display Tests
We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
With a tested battery life of 8 hours, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 is surprisingly long-lasting, with hours more battery life than the Alienware 16 Area-51 and MSI Raider 18. Obviously, that sort of energy efficiency won't hold up under demanding uses, and certainly not when gaming full-time off the plug, but this impressive result will still translate into more use away from the charger.
The laptop’s display quality is also impressive, with excellent color coverage and brightness. However, we’ll note that our display testing doesn't measure the brightness of short-burst HDR, which can drive the panel's peak brightness even higher. At any rate, the Scar’s display quality is top-notch, and the spacious 16-inch screen is perfect for laptop gaming without the unwieldy size of an 18-inch system.