Over the past four years, Asus’ Zephyrus line of laptops has been a personal favorite of mine. Not because they are the absolute best, even though they are a hot favorite among the enthusiasts , but owing to their sleek form factor. The Zephyrus GA502 was my first purchase due to its slim profile and non-gaming laptop charm. Over the years, Asus has kept refining the formula and delivered fantastic machines.
The company is no stranger to going “showoff” mode and delivering bonkers hardware, though. The latest from the brand is the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 . It’s big, bold, and brash, packing the best silicon that Intel and Nvidia have to offer, and marrying it with plenty of in-house pizzazz. We recently reviewed the mid-point variant with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 GPU, but what I have right now is the big brother with Nvidia’s top-of-the-line RTX 5090 graphics engine.
Priced at $4,499.99, this laptop is going to test the limits of your laptop gaming passion. Otherwise, if the latest and greatest is all you seek and don’t mind the numbers appearing on the bill, read on to find out what this machine gets right and where it falters.
What does it get right?
This is a hefty and colossal laptop. Plus, the massive 380W AC adapter is not going to do your backpack any favors. Thankfully, it also supports 100W top-up via the USB Type-C port, so you can invest in a smaller PD-certified brick. On the positive side, the build is solid, with a few extra conveniences thrown in to the mix by Asus.
To access the innards, you simply have to slide a latch, and the base lid comes off. The SSDs are also linked to the in-house Q-latch system, which means you don’t need a screwdriver to swap them. A similar convenience is offered for the RAM sticks. The material used to create this hulking machine is pretty high quality, but it also gets smudged rather quickly, especially the keyboard deck.
The port situation is generous, but for a laptop this size, a little clutter-friendly. There are a couple of Thunderbolt 5 bolts, a trio of USB Type-A ports (two on the right, and one on the left side), an HDMI 2.1 port, and a 2.5G Ethernet port.
Most of the ports are on the left, which means all the cables will be right in front of your eyes. Sorry, cable management fans . I wish some of the ports were positioned at the back, an approach that has been championed by the likes of Dell for years. I was also hoping the webcam was better, especially for a laptop that costs $4,500, even though I appreciate the Windows Hello face unlock facility.
The trackpad is absolutely massive, and it does its job fine. I love the keyboard, and not just because of the deep RGB customizability it has to offer. It’s a full-sized layout, but it’s the smooth upward feedback and satisfying actuation that really make it a joy to furiously type a few thousand words on.
Heat and noise
Asus has equipped the ROG Strix Scar 18 with an end-to-end vapor chamber, paired with a large heat sink, a trio of fans, and liquid metal for cooling the processor as well as the graphics unit. Interestingly, the laptop also pulls in air through the keyboard deck to handle the heat situation. The sum total of it all? It works, irrespective of whether I was playing games or editing a 4K video.
As far as the numbers go, the localized heating doesn’t change too much as you shift performance gears. In a room where the temperature levels were set at a stable 23 degrees Celsius while playing games, the total variance was pretty small. As I shifted from silent to Performance, Turbo, and finally, to Manual mode, where the fan was set to its peak speed, the entire lower deck area only varied between 22 to 24 degrees Celsius.
Simply put, if you intend to engage in long gaming sessions on the laptop, the area underneath the keyboard deck won’t give you too many problems. What I did notice was that in order to get the best in terms of thermals, you must keep the laptop at a slight elevation or leave a bit of space for air passage underneath. The heat was mostly localized, expectedly, near the center of the keyboard deck and the portion above.
Even when the system was running in silent mode for low-end tasks, the temperatures were usually around 41-43 degrees Celsius above the keyboard deck. While playing games, the hottest temperatures I recorded were in Performance mode at 51 degrees Celsius. As you switch to Turbo or Manual profiles, the fans also do a better job at regulating the air flow and bringing down the temperatures by at least 2-3 degrees.
Internally, even after a long gaming session or synthetic tests, the GPU didn’t climb above the 65-68 degrees Celsius range, while the CPU temperature remained under 80 degrees Celsius under stress. Even the central portion of the keyboard runs less warm as the fans are pushed. Of course, that cooling comes at the cost of fan noise.
In silent mode, I measured around 35 dB using a portable LabArt digital sound level meter. Dialing things up a notch in performance mode, the noise went up to 48 dB and peaked at 56 dB with manual switching. The results are not bad. The only laptops that have run quieter under similar load had a smaller 16-inch chassis, and the difference was merely 3-4 decibels.
A budget pair of earbuds, such as the OnePlus Buds 4 , almost completely drowned the fan noise, except for a faint hissing remnant. With music playback on in-game action, you won’t hear. But do keep in mind that gaming headsets don’t come with noise cancellation mode, so you will be hearing the fans, or have to drown them with audio waves beaming into your ear.
Display is a core strength
Asus has equipped the ROG Strix Scar with an 18-inch Nebula HDR display, which offers a resolution of 2560 x 1660 pixels, a fantastic 240Hz refresh rate, and Nvidia G-Sync support for smooth in-game visuals. It’s a mini-LED panel, and even though it’s not nearly as strong at sharply reproducing bright objects against black backdrops like an OLED screen, this is still one of the best display panels on a gaming laptop I’ve tested so far.
With our measurements coming in at 100% sRGB, 89% AdobeRGB, 100% DCI-P3, a color accuracy of DeltaE 1.05, and 16,310:1 contrast ratio, it even surpassed the 16-inch MacBook Pro . As impressive as the on-paper credentials are, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18’s display offers a few practical perks worth mentioning. There’s a bilayer film atop the screen that cuts down on the ambient reflections, boosts the contrast output, and improves the viewing angles.
This is massive relief. Whether you are playing games in an open-air space, a sunlit cabin, or a room with lots of artificial light, reflections are not a problem. I spent a few dozen hours working, burning hours in games, and watching videos, and have no glaring complaints about the display on offer. Colors are saturated, visuals are sharp, and I had no issues with viewing angles.
Here’s an interesting part. As usual, to get the best out of a gaming laptop’s CPU and GPU, you need to keep it plugged in to supply the necessary power. Here, the situation is slightly different. The display supports 3ms response time, but to get the best out of it in terms of motion clarity, you need to enable the panel overdrive feature from the Armory Crate. On battery, it is disabled to save some juice. Another cool aspect is the ability to change the display dimming zone behavior, something I haven’t seen any other brand offer.
So, there are 2,000 mini-LED dimming zones on the panel. Plus, there is some localized blooming happening on this panel. To avoid that, you can choose the uniform backlight preset where the entire display acts as a synchronized single color layer, or pick the option with discrete dimming controls for more accurate contrast and color reproduction. Ideally, you won’t need it, unless your work (and play) environment dramatically alters the lighting situation around you, and so does the on-screen content.
Performance, from a perspective
Interestingly, all three SKUs of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 come equipped with the Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor. On Geekbench 6, the 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX processor produced 3,069 in single-core and 19,995 on multi-core tests. Those single-core numbers put it in the same league as desktop-tier heavyweights such as AMD Ryzen 7950X and the Intel Core i9-14900KF processors.
Similarly, the multi-core performance falls in the same ballpark as AMD Ryzen 9 9900X and the Intel Core i9-13900K processor. Those are some terrific numbers for a laptop. At the PCMark 10 benchmark, the ROG Strix Scar 18 achieved a tally of 8816, which is, once again, the best in the laptop segment.
The results are slightly better than the previous model we tested with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card, but the margin is not huge, especially given the premium you pay. The only two laptops ahead of it on our leaderboard at the time of writing this are the MSI Titan HX 18 and the Alienware m18 R2.
On Cinebench, the tally was 135, which put it barely behind the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i (2025) at 135 on the single-core test. Moving over to the graphics-intensive side of things, the Asus flagship landed at 23,811 on the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, which put it noticeably ahead of the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i (2025) and the Lenovo Legion 9i Gen 9.
Do keep in mind that as you enable manual mode, you get extra headroom for an additional 25W delivered to the CPU, and can overclock the GPU, as well. This extra bit of performance tuning is definitely welcome, but you must ask yourself, “Why exactly do you need the configuration with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090, and not the RTX 5080?”
If you look at the difference between the two aforesaid configurations, they are barely separated by a gap of 5% across simulated workflows and gaming. The biggest difference across synthetic benchmarks was in 3DMark, where the gulf was roughly 17% between the models. As you push into games, the gap further erodes.
In Cyberpunk 2077 with ray-tracing and Forza Horizon 5, the gap between the two variants was always under the 10% mark. And that’s with DLSS 4 and frame generation enabled. It’s not a terrible outing, but more like a mobile GPU hitting its ceiling and failing to deliver a raw performance leap worthy of the $1,100 price gap. That’s a lot of money to spend for such a small gain.
Gaming nirvana
Now, this is a laptop that is unabashedly built for gaming fans. That also means if one has spent $4,499 on this laptop, they deserve to play with every performance toggle available and enjoy the best of games. To test out just how well the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 performs under different performance profiles, I launched a game that can truly test its mettle – Cyberpunk 2077 . We are talking a jump from extremes to literal overdrive.
So, let’s discuss the modes first. You get to pick between silent, performance, and turbo preset modes, while the last and most demanding stage is manual mode. The manual mode is where you can raise the GPU power draw and frequency, boost the CPU power target, speed up the graphics memory, and push the internal fans to their limit. You go with a linear curve based on the sequential rise in temperature, or just keep them whirring at peak speeds from the get-go.
Let’s talk performance, err, CyberPunk 2077 running at peak resolution. With ray-tracing disabled, the performance mode consistently delivered over 120fps. Switching things over to Turbo yielded 130+ fps output, while the Manual mode with full overclocking across the board only increased the numbers by 3-5 fps on average.
As I shifted to ray-tracing and moved to the deservedly demanding Ultra preset, the output dropped, but still remained close to a respectable 88-90 fps range. Switching to Black Myth: Wukong delivered similar results at high graphics settings with ray-tracing and Cinematic preset enabled at the same 1600p resolution. In both these games, the gaming performance never dipped below the 60 fps mark, though fluctuations happened as frame generation was enabled.
Coming back to Cyberpunk 2077 , you want to get the best out of this laptop, and that means digging deep into the goodies bag of Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series graphics. After all, if you can’t see those triple-figure numbers, what’s even the point? With DLSS4 enabled and frame generation factored to four, the Performance mode comfortably delivered over 200 fps.
As you switch up to Turbo and Manual mode, the output climbs higher in the 250+ fps ballpark. In general, DLSS offered nearly double (or even higher) gain in demanding titles. In Monster Hunter Wilds , for example, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 comfortably played in the 70-75 fps range, and with DLSS enabled, it climbed to 140 fps in the manual performance profile.
In older titles such as Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy , you can comfortably get over 120 fps output. And even with the hit that came with ray-tracing, the title managed above 90 fps without breaking a sweat. In Horizon Zero Dawn , with DLSS enabled at 1600p resolution and quality presets, the game was consistently within the 110-120 fps range, while the GPU barely ever exceeded the 50% mark. That’s the kind of power you have at your disposal.
Playing Doom: The Dark Ages at the native display resolution, DLSS4 enabled, and upscaling set to a factor of 4, I consistently played it in the 280-300fps range. Of course, the laptop was running in Manual mode, but it was pretty surreal to see the game touch such high frame rate figures without any stuttering or breaks. The situation won’t change for at least the next couple of years, so you can sleep in peace without any “I am toppled ” concerns.
Should you pick it?
Make no mistake. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 is one of the best laptops that money can buy. If your primary concern is top-tier gaming and unmatched future-proofing, it’s as good as it gets. And then some more. The mini-LED display is fantastic, while the build quality on this behemoth is equal parts reassuring and equal parts flashy.
Asus’ repair and upgrade-friendly approach is an unexpectedly neat perk here. If you are concerned about productivity, this laptop offers the best 24-core silicon that you can find on a mobile workstation out there. On the graphics side (read: gaming), you will find this machine on the 2025 Mount Rushmore of gaming laptops.
But do keep in mind that you’re paying all that cash for the Geforce RTX 5090 GPU, for valid reasons, and not picking up the significantly cheaper trim with a Geforce RTX 5080 graphics engine. If terms like “comparative value” don’t bother you, you can happily add this machine to your cart and sleep easily for at least two to three years.
