ASUS ROG Strix SCAR 18 (2025) Gaming Laptop, 18” ROG Nebula HDR 16:10 2.5K 240Hz/3ms, RTX 5090, Core Ultra 9 275HX, 32GB, 2TB, Win 11 Pro, G835LX-XS97

Excellent laptop, second one ive purchased and have not been disappointed yet.

An absolute beast. This laptop is balanced so well that I want for nothing with it. It doesn’t get too hot or too loud, the screen is gorgeous, the keyboard feels good, and the performance is outstanding. If you want a top tier gaming laptop, definitely check it out.

I have to say I have mixed reviews about this laptop. I sound system of this product is pretty bad in my opinion. The speakers it comes with are the worst have heard on any top tier gaming laptop I have used. It was all highs. There are no mid or low freqs. When you are playing games where there are multiple layers of sounds going on all at once, the speakers this system has can not handle it and it is just a horrendous, jumbled sounding mess. You cannot differentiate anything. Some sound effects could not even be heard as the low freq range they used could not be produced by the speakers. It sounded to me like they put in a set of tweeters and not speakers that could handle a wider range. Switching to headphones did not help. The issue was the exact opposite where the sound was primarily low s and the sound was muffled and muted. I tried three separate headphones I own and it was the same with all three of them. I had to download a third party program to tune the sound to something that I considered to be acceptable. Unfortunately, no amount of tuning was able to help with the laptops speakers. I spent several hours trying to get it to a point where it was natural sounding but it just sounded shrill, compressed, high-pitched. Overall, I really dislike the sound of the speakers. The speakers in my 10-year old laptop sound numerous times better. The speakers are more natural sounding cover a wider freq range and playing games, watching movies or playing music is quite a pleasant experience. This is not the case with the Asus. I could not enjoy using the Asus with the speakers. I had an ongoing issue with getting the system to release external hard drives and USB drives. I was being told that the drives were being used even though I had nothing open at them time. Some research indicated that this may be Armory Crate or MyAsus accessing the drives in the background. The speakers where really only audible if the system volume and the game volume were at max settings. When I put headphones on I had to go back into the game audio setting and turn all volume settings down to about 15-20% to keep my ears from being blasted. It was quite irritating to have to keep adjusting the volume to account for whether I was using the laptop speakers or headphones. Last thing about the sound. Adjusting the volume from 0-50 seemed pretty normal and linear. Once I got to 50 the volume did not really increase until I got to 90-100. This was for both system volume and adjusting volume with game setting. When launching a game the system would lock up for 5-10 seconds. I would get the windows "ping" sound and then the game would launch. The same thing would happen when I exited the game. The game would close and shortly after the system would freeze for 5-10 seconds. I would then hear the windows "ping" sound and would be to once again use the computer. The GPU temps stay pretty cool, staying between mid-50 to mid-60 in all the games I played at high settings. The CPU on the other hand always seemed to run higher than I would expect . Most the tie the CPU temp would get into stay in the upper 70s and low 80s. There were times where it got as high as 95. Even in a game like wow where on my 10-year old laptop with the setting set at 5/10 the CPU would stay usually in the 60s. Using the exact same setting on the Asus and capping frames at 60 to match the old laptops max frames, the Asus CPU temps would get in to 80s at times. Framerates were not bad for a laptop, Usually in Diablo 4 at max settings I got 150+, Black Desert online was 100+. WoW all depended on what I was doing. I a major citiy or in a raid I was anywhere from 60-90 fps. Flying in the open world I could get 200+ fps but I did get in the mid-20fps when doing something like an outdoor boss where there could be 30+ others participating at the same time and this is once again with WoW setting at 5/10 of the settings slider. I could have probably gotten higher results in some of these games if I messed around with DLSS and MFG settings. The monitor looked great but coming from my 10-year old laptop with a 1080, 60hz monitor this was to be expected. The keyboard was acceptable to me. I prefer a much more tactile feeling when I press and release a key. This keyboard has a much softer touch than I am used to and is probably something that someone who is into e-sports or competitive gaming would appreciate more. The build quality is what I expect from a gaming laptop. It was sturdy and solid in construction. I do like the easy access bottom. MUCH more convenient than having to remove 12+ screws to add an SSD or change update memory. If my only concern about a gaming laptop was how well the gaming performance on it was than I would have been happy with this laptop. It ran all the game I played on it quite smoothly (with the exception I mentioned above). But when paying a premium price I have to look at other issues like CPU and GPU temps, sound quality, any sort of quirks when using the laptop outside of gaming, etc. At this price I need something that I feel confident is gong to last me for several years and with the short time I have used this laptop and am not sure that I am going to get that.

This laptop is my lifeline and savior! I was very fortunate enough to win this laptop through the ROG 50 series laptop giveaway, and I am grateful to all those who engineered this laptop and those who helped to make this giveaway possible! I will come out with a review of the product with as less bias as possible to make a fair review, but for now, 3D Mark and benchmark tests, HERE WE GO!!!!

Good laptop with decent upgrades from last year's model, the toolless access bottom panel and the fact that I can add in new RAM or storage easily and in less than a minute is a huge plus for this laptop for repairability and upgradeability. I have not had any issues in the past week I've used this device, but for some reason my computer does not like having more than one storage unit installed so I have to deal with just one for now. Unfortunately, the main frustration I've had with the whole design change is that the Samsung pro SSDs with the heatsinks don't fit in this device, I've already tried both sides but the heatsink is too big. This wasn't an issue to last year's model, but I am also going to keep in mind if there's any other problems like I've had last year with the previous model like dead pixels or any other manufacturing defects. Overall, this is a nice upgrade from last year's model that had the 4090M and I already upgraded my RAM to 64GB. I would recommend sticking to the 2024 model if more vram or performance isn't needed since it seems like driver issues and unoptimized games are currently the real main problems with low framerates at the moment.