300Hz refresh rate!
Aside from its dual-screen gaming notebook, ASUS also launched a bunch of other traditional form-factor gaming laptops armed with Intel and NVIDIA’s newest silicon. The ROG Strix SCAR 17 is probably the best equipped one outside of the elusive Zephyrus S17, sporting a huge 17-inch display with a blisteringly fast 300Hz refresh rate.
We had a few minutes to spend with this beast, and here are our first impressions of it:
RGB everywhere
ASUS isn’t letting up on RGB, and the Strix SCAR 17 is absolutely filled to the brim with RGB light bars. The front and side of the notebook have LED light bars lined along the bottom (much like the ones on cars with questionable customizations) that can be customized depending on your taste.
It’s not a feature everyone will like of course – but thankfully you can turn it off if you don’t like the light show.
As for the rest of the notebook, the design is similar to previous members of the Strix SCAR family. ASUS knows how to build solid, durable and premium-looking gaming notebooks, and the Strix SCAR 17 isn’t an exception to that rule.
The notebook uses a 17.3-inch full HD display, and along with the slim bezels on the side and top, deliver a screen-to-body ratio of 81.5%. The standout feature here is the blisteringly fast 300Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time, making it one of the fastest displays we’ve ever seen on a notebook.
Just like previous generations of the notebook, ASUS has included their Keystone II technology in the Strix SCAR 17. It basically allows users to transfer stores saved profiles and system settings from one device to another, handy for professional e-sports players. Sliding in the Keystone drive also unlocks a “Shadow Drive” of sorts that disappears when it’s taken out.
As with ASUS’s new notebooks, the Strix SCAR 17 packs Intel’s newest 10th generation processors up to Core i9-10980HK. It can also be had in different flavors of NVIDIA’s RTX cards, all the way up to the GeForce RTX 2080 Super.
That’s not all – two NVMe SSDs running in RAID 0 reside inside the SCAR 17’s chassis, which can be expanded to include a third drive for maximum storage capacity. ASUS has also made it easy to upgrade RAM, using easily removable non-proprietary screws that allow people to bump RAM up to 32GB if needed as well.
Heat is something that ASUS constantly battles with its new notebooks, and the company combating thermal issues in its new notebook by adding an additional heatsink aside from the three that was already the standard on the Strix line. Aside from that, the Strix SCAR 17 also gets exotic liquid metal compound applied on the processor and heatsink, applied by hand at the factory to ensure better thermal management compared to previous generation notebooks.
Just like the company’s top-end ROG Zephyrus Duo though, we don’t know how much the SCAR 17 will be when it finally arrives in the Philippines, or if it’ll arrive as scheduled because of the worldwide pandemic.
