Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D Review

Killer Queen

We got hands on the first unit of the Scar 17 X3D in India courtesy AMD. While it isn't officially launched here, it didn’t stop us from drooling all over it. Coming in at a not-so-featherlight 3 kilograms, this laptop makes a grand entrance with specs that'll make your gamer heart skip a beat. We are talking mainly about the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D chip that creates 3D voodoo for the games that support it. It is the first mobile processor with stacked L3 cache, delivering unmatched 144 MB of on-chip memory. Then you have the NVIDIA RTX 4090, 32GBs of RAM and 1TB of NVMe storage. But more on that later. Let’s look at the Scar 17 as a whole first…

Display & Design

In terms of design, it’s pure Asus. It looks and feels like a tank! The lid sports the etched Asus ROG logo and there’s RGB lighting that surrounds the beast. When you lay eyes on it you won’t be mistaken - this is built for hard-core gamers! Even with it’s almost 3Kg weight, I’d be happy to lug it around just for bragging rights.

Open it up though and you’re greeted to a nicely laid out full-sized keyboard and a big enough touchpad, but what greets you is that gorgeous 240Hz QHD display. It’s an IPS panel though and not the Nebula HDR magic that I personally love. So brightness is on the lower side, but colour accuracy is astounding thanks to support of the full DCI-P3 colours. The main connectivity ports for ethernet etc. are located at the back, as they should be and the left side hosts the USB collection, the right is where the heat goes out from.

Keyboard & Trackpad

Asus has used a full membrane keyboard here with support for per-key-RGB through the trusty Asus Armoury Crate software and is well laid out. Everything is where it should be and is super intuitive to use even for people who aren’t used to the standard Asus layout. The trackpad is slightly to the left, which is a thing we’ve seen plenty of times and is done to avoid accidental palm touches and swipes. It’s perfectly proportionate to the rest of the machine and obeyed every stroke and input I put in.

Performance

Nestled inside the Asus ROG Scar 17, the latest flagship from AMD comes with 16 cores and is based on the Zen 4 architecture with support for Hyperthreading with 32 threads. The clock speed is set to a cool 5.3Ghz at the top for a single core and the 64MB 3D V-Cache is the party trick here. The default TDP is 55W for the processor and it can be configured to a cool 75W!

Here are a few FPS numbers apart from the benchmarks you see in the pictures…

*All games played in QHD with settings at Ultra

Arma III - 122fps

The Witcher 3 - 174fps

Cyberpunk 2077 - 128fps

F1 2021 - 204fps

Red Dead Redemption 2 - 128fps

Lies of P - 87fps

DayZ - 112fps

The above numbers speak for themselves and AMD is clearly on the right path when it comes to the new V-Cache tech which boosts the in-game performance.

Initial Verdict

It’s clear through the benchmarks that the new Ryzen 9 does incredibly well with multi-core scores and boosts in-game performance, however we did test the new Apple MacBook Pro with the M3 Max and the results were as expected. In the Cinebench 24 benchmark the M3 multi-core score turns up 1644 and single-core comes up at 139, which is slightly higher than the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D that got 1467 and 105 points in multi-core and single-core. The benefit here is in the gaming zone entirely and should give you a hint if you’re thinking of using this laptop for work. With that being said, the price is not out yet, so we can’t give a definitive verdict, but if Asus prices it right, this could be the apex predator in the world of gaming laptops.