2023 ROG Strix SCAR 18 Review - This is NEXT-GEN! [RTX 4090]

every year I make a new video saying this is the fastest the most powerful gaming laptop I've ever tested and here we go again this is the Asus RG strix scar 18 and it's one of a new breed of gaming laptops with RTX 40 series gpus and Intel 13th generation CPUs as well as a few other new additions and it is a bit ridiculous firstly a big thank you to Asus for sending this out for me to test and while I'm going to keep you guessing about the price just for a minute let's first talk about what is inside this thing the strict scar 18 packs in an RTX 4090 with up to a 175 watt tgp as well as an Intel I9 13980 HX 65 watt CPU that's 24 cores and 32 threads if you're asking up to 64 gigs of ddr5 4800 megahertz Ram which is great although I have seen up to 6000 megahertz elsewhere we also get this new and brighter 18 inch nebula HDR display 240 hertz Quad HD Plus and it supports Nvidia g-sync so my first question was how much is this thing and it's 4 000 pounds an awful lot of money but my second question is how much faster is this compared to last year's gaming laptops say with a 3080 TI the flagship from last year well here's one I made earlier this is the origi strix car 17. now to be fair this is a bit smaller this is the 17 this is the 18. and also this is a fair bit cheaper now it's out of a price cut because it's well the old model with a 3080 TI and the 12th gen Intel CPUs but I am curious just how much faster this new guy is going to be and if you're thinking hang on Tom that's you know very helpful you've got that but what about the smaller 16 inch version of the new Rog strix for 2023 well where would you be without me I've got one here although suddenly I can't actually Benchmark this this is a pre-release sample basically the same specs although this tops out with a 4080 versus a 1490 this is a more portable Powerhouse and starts from 3300 and also the option for a mini LED panel which as we'll come to in a second does make this a lot more tempting it's kind of surprising we don't have that option on here especially given the price okay so next to the older 17 and apart from a few design cues and a similar keyboard the 18 is pretty much all new we have this refresh design and new motherboard and also much better cooling with an 82 percent larger cooling area or the RGB you could throw a stick at and maybe most importantly these tiny vents around the wasd keys where the internal fans cool your fingers and as the 18 in the name suggests a bigger screen which gives us about 12 percent more screen space and also by shrinking the bottom bezel they've been able to squeeze in the extra screen without adding too much to the overall footprint although the new guy is a little bit thicker and also a bit heavier I mean fair enough really given it's got a bigger screen size but either way you're going to probably feel this lugging it around in your backpack you can see the slightly bigger overall footprint there not significant especially given how much extra screen you're getting but really this is a desktop replacement gaming laptop the mux switch makes a return although now it's a dynamic mux switch which means you can switch between the integrated and dedicated gpus without restarting and so if you're not gaming and Battery Life's a lot more important then you can switch to the igpu easily they've also moved the i o from the rear on the 17 to the sides on the new 18 which I'm not sure is an upgrade because it is quite nice to have all your cables hidden out the back what I don't particularly love is this clear plastic that now covers the sides in the back it just looks kind of cheap although I do like the RGB light bar that runs along the front and the back edges the swappable and 3D printable armor caps make a return although a little smaller than before and look at this we finally get a webcam it's a fairly basic 720p camera no windows hello support for face unlocking but it's there and it's also in this little housing but it's actually quite helpful for getting your finger released so you can open it one-handed let's talk about this screen because it's a new Quad HD plus 60 by 10 240Hz Rog nebula HDR display which is brighter at 500 nits it's more color accurate and also we get support for Dolby Vision HDR Asus claims 100 of the P3 color gamut coverage although I measured slightly less than that but still pretty good and so the above average color accuracy means you can use the power of this gaming laptop for some more creative tasks but here's the problem while this looks great and it's big and it's fast and gaming is fantastic on it it misses out on the mini LED display option which we have on the 16 and I'm not sure how well this is coming across on camera because it's a SDR video this guy will get you around 500 nits I measured about 480 and this is about 1200 nits it actually supports display HDR 1000 so it's much brighter and you can really see the difference in person and also with mini LED you get much higher contrast so it is a bit confusing and a little disappointing we don't have this screen option for the 18. I would like to have that on here but that said this thing still feels amazing when you can max out 240 hertz on a screen this big the keyboard is as good as ever and now we get slightly larger arrow keys the trackpad is wider and taller this time which makes it easier and less cramped to use and along with that Slimmer screen bezel it just brings the whole look of the machine up to date now as I'm driving around Forza Horizon 5 you can probably hear the fan on my mic it is notably loud I've measured around 42 decibels so it is noticeable but not if you've got a pair of headphones on and actually one of the improvements this year is the cooling because we've got a larger chassis coming from the 17 they've actually managed to increase the cooling area by 80 percent along with new heat pipes and also a third fan just for the CPU and the GPU so there's three fans in total in here and they are also using their conductor note Extreme liquid metal on the CPU and the GPU to keep them cool and reduce throttling so yes it does get fairly warm not uncomfortably so and you can hear the microphone but given the 4019 the top spec 13th gen CPU and the performance we get out of this it's not bad at all although switching to turbo mode which gets you the highest clock speeds the maximum 65 Watts for the CPU and 175 Watts for the GPU and an extra 50 megahertz for the GPU on top of that although it does get noticeably louder but as usual you can customize your own power and fan settings in manual mode Plus in lighter workloads you can set it to silent and the fan turns off completely which also gives you the longest battery life okay enough waffling just how fast is this thing the new kit on the Block managed 11.4 faster single core and 31 faster multi-core scores in geekbench and in cinebench it was 17 faster in single and a massive 60 faster in multi-core in geekbench's GPU test the 4090 scored 42 higher in the opencl test and a whopping 54 higher in Cuda and in time spy it was 41 faster and switching on turbo mode that another five percent that's a lot of raw power there and then switching over to Puget bench in Premiere Pro the strix car 18 was 23 faster but more importantly games and in cyberpunk at Native quad 80 plus and everything set to ultra the 4090 was around 25 faster with Ray tracing off however it's clear that Ray tracing is where the 40 series shows its biggest jump up a massive 43 when you then enable DLS 3 which also has frame gen it boosted the FPS a further 54 to a whopping 120 FPS in F1 2022 their strict scar 18 was anywhere from 25 up to 40 faster than the 17 and with Maxwell settings with Ray tracing and dlss which includes frame gen in F1 close to 200 frames per second in Flight Sim the new 18 delivered around a third more frames per second with ultra settings and was about 22 faster with the LSS set to balanced but once again turning on frame gen basically doubled the frame rate to almost 120 it's incredibly effective and in games like this the added latency doesn't really make much difference in Modern Warfare 2 again Max settings of course I got about a 10 boost without dlss and a massive 42 with DLCs set to balanced which seems like a surprisingly Big Boost but I tried it twice and got the same result and finally I averaged around a third higher FPS in Forza Horizon 5 using extreme settings that's a lot of numbers but my takeaway is if we put Ray tracing in dlss to one side for a second it's roughly a sort of 25 to 35 uptick over last year's 3080 TI but with Ray tracing we're seeing sort of up to 40 45 boost and then when you add dlss particularly in games that support frame generation which to be fair there are only a handful and again it's best suited to non-twitchy competitive Shooters in some situations it can more than double the frame rate compared to what I got on the old 17 which is pretty incredible so really it's going to come down to what games you play uh do they support DL says do they support frame gen that will have a big impact on just how much of a boost you're gonna see the problem is though even though we're closer to hitting that 240 FPS in most of these maxed out AAA games we're still just not getting there quite yet you can drop settings you can of course play all the less demanding games and we are taking more advantage of it than we are in the past but Quad HD 240 is still a bit of a stretch even with a 1490 to fully max out a couple of final points Before I Let You Go sound quality fantastic really really good speakers in here although mostly I use my headphones battery life is also pretty good you'll get four to five hours with the integrated GPU with light use but obviously if you are gaming you're going to want to use it plugged in with this guy this is the 330 watt brick you get with it which is smaller than most Rivals it doesn't add too much to the overall size of this if you are lugging it around taking it to a LAN party or something although one small point is that we only get a 90 watt hour battery in here which is a reasonable size but some Rivals uh squeeze in 99.99 watt hour battery because that's like the legal limit where you can still take it on planes and I think given the 18 inch size of this you'd have thought they could cram that in to get a little bit more battery but no 90 Watts which is fine so to wrap up for the princely sum of 399.99 Pence you could bag yourself a strict scar 18 but I'm willing to bet most of you probably aren't going to do that but it is always fun to see just how fast these new laptops are and as we saw with the scar 17 if you wait a little bit prices do come down but importantly we are seeing solid gen on Gen 4 performance boosts especially in games with the LSS and frame gen but across the board really and while this is the new Top Dog and it is the fastest laptop I've ever tested uh don't discount last year's models with the 30 series which is still very capable and you can get for probably over a thousand pounds less thank you so much for watching guys let me know what you make of this and whether you're tempted to sell a kidney or two to pick one up in the comments below and I'll see you next time right here on the tech chat

Channel: The Tech Chap

Views: 214,475

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Id: HE5ua-jZ2kA

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 13 2023