Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 (2022) review: A beast of a machine with unapologetic gamer aesthetics

Price: Rs 2,29,900/-

Rating: 4.5/5

Pros:
– Performance
– Display
– Generous and full-sized USB ports
– How the RGB has been implemented
– Solid build quality
– Keyboard and Trackpad

Cons:
– No integrated webcam or any other biometric system
– Speakers are dynamic but feel muted
– Interiors can get smudgy
– No SD Card slot

When you see a ROG laptop, know that you can play all AAA titles on the machine and have a great experience. However, when you see a ROG Strix laptop, know that what you have is a proper gaming machine, one that can not only run the most demanding of AAA titles but also give you a proper, wholesome gaming experience.

To a great distance, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 2022 carries the legacy that all ROG Strix machines have had. Most gaming laptops these days have a very undertone and simplistic aesthetic to themselves – minimal use of RGB, very subtle and frankly mundane styling, almost too civilised. It’s as if these machines are expected to be carried into a board meeting and therefore need to blend in with the black and grey tones suits that have besieged the corporate world. 

There’s nothing remotely wild with most modern gaming laptops. Asus’ ROG Strix 15, however, is unapologetically wild. It is flashy, extra, over the top, eccentric – all adjectives that we love absolutely.

Being a ROG machine, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 2022 G533ZW comes loaded with some of the best hardware and features that money can buy. With that being said, there are some glaring omissions as well. We take a look at Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 and see if is the gaming machine that you ought to be going for.

Specifications and features
The Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 that we tested came with the 12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900H which has 6 Performance cores and 8 Efficiency cores for a total of 14 cores. Our unit was paired with a healthy 32GB DDR5 RAM at 4800Mhz. For the GPU, we got an Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti with a total speed of 1460MHz at 150W.

For the display, we get a 15.6-inch WQHD 2560 x 1440 anti-glare display, with a refresh rate of 240Hz. It is an IPS panel which supports 100 per cent of the DCI-P3 colour range and has a response time of 3ms.

For storage, you get a 1TB PCIe 4.0-based M.2 SSD. You also get a 90W 4-cell Li-ion battery. In terms of ports, you get 2 USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C supporting DisplayPort and power delivery, an HDMI 2.1 port, a 2.5G LAN port, and a USB-C like Thunderbolt 4 support DisplayPort. The ROG Strix Scar 15 also gets Dolby Vision and Atmos certifications.

Design and Build Quality:
The Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 2022, for the most part, is built like a tank. It has a rather unique design, and clean aesthetics with plenty of RGB, which can be controlled using Asus’ software. It is on the heavier side when we consider some other 15-inch devices, but the upshot is that it offers some great cooling. 

The plastic deck of the keyboard gets very smudgy, so you’ll need to keep a cleaning cloth nearby. Otherwise, the translucent bits of the deck give it a very cool aesthetic. Asus also included two extra faceplates for the large “ROG” section of the hinge in the box and allows you to replace it with just a pull. This is purely decorative, but nevertheless, a nice touch.

The display lid opens up to 110 degrees, which can be a little restricting. With that being said, the hinges are solid, just like the rest of the chassis, which shows little to no flex, which is very reassuring. The lid itself can feel flimsy at times as it has some flex, but rest assured, it has been built really well. The hinges also allow a gap between the display and the main deck, allowing the speaker to be more clear.

You also get a healthy selection of ports at the rear, which also houses most of the air vents. On the left, you get 2 USB-A ports, a 3.5mm jack and another cooling vent. On the right, you get another vent and the KeyStone. What is conspicuously missing, is an SD card slot, and a webcam. More on that later, but first, let’s take a look at the KeyStone.

The KeyStone is a USB-like key that is bound to Asus’ Armoury Crate system. What this allows you to do, is carry out a variety of functions or a combination of functions, using just a stroke. For example, you can use the KeyStone to lock and unlock your device by removing or inserting it back in. Or, if you want to quickly start playing and streaming a game and don’t want to faff about launching different applications, you can use just this one key to get started. The KeyStone is quite interesting as a concept but is incredibly limited because it is bound to Armoury Crate.

For user expandability, the memory and storage are user-serviceable in the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15. So if you’re handy with a screwdriver and are confident enough to open up the laptop, there are two SODIMM slots and two M.2 slots to upgrade the machine down the line.

The Keyboard and Trackpad 
The keyboard on the  Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 2022 is a joy to use. Mind you this isn’t a mechanical keyboard but a membrane-based chiclet keyboard. However, it is a joy to use. During our thorough testing, not once did we feel that the typing experience on the keyboard was lacking in any way. Furthermore, the keyboard is backlit, and it has per-key RGB, which can all be adjusted using Asus’ Armoury Crate. You don’t get a separate num pad, but the touchpad does turn into a digital num pad of sorts.

All though this may be useful in certain situations, I doubt, anyone would actually let go of that amazing trackpad in exchange for a num pad.  

The trackpad itself is sublime to use. It is big, wide, and perfectly centred. It also has great tracking and sensitivity, which makes it a joy to use on a high-resolution display like the one that the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 2022 gets. We also like the fact that Asus has decided to give users dedicated media control buttons on the side, and an array of buttons to control the fan speed, the Armoury Crate and the volume and mute buttons on the top.

The Webcam and Speakers
This is where the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 2022 disappoints a little. The laptop does not have a webcam integrated into the chassis or the lid. This means you miss out on essential features such as Windows Hello. You also don’t get any other sort of biometric system on the device that would have helped you log in faster.

Asus does provide a ROG Eye Clip Webcam in the box that the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 2022 can be attached to the top bezel and used. While some people may not like this, I personally think this is a neat way to keep yourself secure. Moreover, given that this laptop may be used by hardcore gamers for streaming, who would like to use a proper camera of their own, I think I can see what the engineers at Asus were thinking of. Still, given how a webcam has become essential in the post-COVID era, we don’t think we can justify the Strix Scar 15 not having one.

The biggest disappointment in this entire package would be the speakers. They are good speakers, don’t get me wrong. They have good depth, great bass, and are balanced. They have decent treble, as well as midrange.

However, the speakers just don’t get loud enough, which really is a shame. For some reason, it feels subdued. Maybe that has to do with the way the speakers have been placed, behind the display. I have used budget laptops with speakers that get louder than the Strix Scar 15, albeit with far less clarity and dynamics. Having said that, if you’re in a quiet room by yourself, you can watch a piece of content and still have a decently good time.

The Display
While the display is not as impressive as an OLED panel but, nevertheless, it is impressive. Our test unit had a 2560×1440 IPS panel with a refresh rate of 240Hz. If you’re willing to bump down the resolution to 1080p, you can even drive the display at 300Hz. Furthermore, the 4mm thin bezels around the display make it more immersive. 

The display is surprisingly bright for an IPS panel. Furthermore, it is vibrant enough and is very accurate in reproducing colours, all of which have been backed by a Dolby Vision certification. Naturally, content consumption and gaming on this display is a joy. But more importantly, I wouldn’t hesitate to colour grade videos or work on high res photos on this display for professional use, and that is high praise for a gaming display.

Performance
The Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 has a 12th Gen Intel Core i9-12900H Processor clocked at 2.5 GHz which boosts up to 5.0 GHz. The processor has 6 Performance cores and 8 Efficiency cores for a total of 14 cores and has 24M Cache.

For the graphics, we have an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU, with 8GB of GDDR6 Memory. The 3070Ti Laptop GPU here has a 1410MHz Boost Clock plus a 50MHz overclock from Asus, which gives us a total speed of 1460MHz at 150W.

Keeping all that in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 2022 is a beast when it comes to performance. The i9-12900H crushes all synthetic benchmarks and either match up or surpasses all other gaming laptops that I have tested this year. It does well in single-threaded tasks, but the real prowess that the processor has is shown in multi-threaded tasks.

Benchmark scores, as useful as they are, do not translate that well into real-life performance. However, I am happy to report that in gaming and productivity, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 G533ZW 2022 performs phenomenally well.

We tested games like the Shadow of The Tomb Raider, Far Cry 6, Battlefield V, and the extremely trying Metro Exodus. Here again, the performance was on par with our synthetic benchmarks. Note, all of the tests were done under the Turbo profile, at 1440p, RTX turned off, and at the highest quality settings that the title in question had to offer. 

In Shadow of The Tomb Raider, we were getting about 105 fps on average and more importantly, a minimum of 98 fps. In Far Cry 6, we were averaging about 90 fps with a minimum of 78 fps. In Battlefield V, we were seeing an average fps of 134 against a minimum of 75 at the really action-intense and texture-heavy scenes. Even in Metro Exodus, we got an average fps of 68 and a minimum of 49, which is saying something. 

Clearly, there are no AAA titles that this beast of a machine cannot run smoothly. If you’re willing to turn down the setting even by a little or go for 1080p gaming instead of 1440p you will be getting some amazing performance out of the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15. 

While these performance numbers may not be chart toppers, they are very close, in second place if you will. And mind you all other gaming laptops that surpass the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 come with a 3080Ti. Most other laptops with the i9-12900H and the 3070Ti have a tough time beating the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 mainly because their cooling systems aren’t as efficient, and because the CPU and the GPU have had their TDPs kneecapped. Thankfully, Asus gives both the CPU and the GPU plenty of room to breathe, and draw its power from.

Battery Life
While the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 comes with a huge 90Wh battery, which comes with a 280W charging brick that literally is the size of a brick, being a hardcore gaming laptop, you really cannot expect to have a long battery life, especially if you have set it on Performance or Turbo mode. With that notwithstanding, in an average working day which involved a ton of writing, some photo editing, and quite a bit of content consumption on YouTube and Netflix, we got about 6-7 hours at about 65 per cent screen brightness. 

It is not something to write home about. This is despite the fact that the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 drops the refresh rate of the display down to 60Hz when on battery power, and that it goes into a hybrid mode that switches between Intel’s Iris graphics and the GPU, to strike a balance between performance and battery life.

During our thorough battery testing though, which basically is replaying a 4K video on the loop, again and again, the laptop conked out in about 3 hours or so, when it was on Performance mode. In Silent mode, it lasted for about four and a half hours. 

Conclusion
It is really difficult not to recommend the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 to someone who is looking for a gaming machine and has the money to spend on it. Yes, there are several other gaming laptops which offer some marginally better specifications, and at a cheaper price; however, they compromise somewhere or the other.

As an overall package, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 is wholesome and strikes the right balance. For Rs 2,29,900, the ROG Strix SCAR 15 (2022) G533 is slightly more expensive than most of its peers, but it feels far more refined.

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