ASUS ROG Strix Scar 15 G533ZW-LN148W Gaming Laptop (Hardware)
Official GBAtemp Review
Product Information:
Gaming laptops are like the sports cars of the tech world, you assuredly get what you pay for but you definitely know that once you have it in your possession it is going to be out of date within a matter of months. Given the small fortunes you can pour into gaming rigs, ASUS gaming laptops offer a more streamlined approach to owning a gaming beast by offering prebuilt systems with a robust selection of components that go from high-end to even higher-end.
ASUS has kindly sent me the Strix Scar 15 G533ZW to road test and even just opening the packaging this product exudes style and substance. For example, the cardboard construction of the box itself hides a mechanism that raises and presents the laptop stowed inside, upwards and towards you as you open the lid. You also get within the packaging a burley 240v 280w AC/DC charging adaptor, a selection of corner cutout panels to change the outer look of the top left corner (which are 3D printer friendly so you could make your own!), and a nifty little keystone II dongle for you to play around with.
Tech Specs:
- Model: ASUS ROG G533ZW
- CPU: Intel i9-12900H (12th Gen Alder Lake, 14 core, 20 thread, ~2.89 GHz)
- Memory: 2 Channel 16GB DDR5 SDRAM 2394 Mhz
- GPU: Nvidia 3070TI 8GB GDDR6
- GFX API: Vulkan 12, DX12
- Display: 15.6-inch WQHD (2560 x 1440) 16:9 ratio, 240Hz Wide-View IPS
- OS: Windows 11 Home Edition 64-bit
- Storage: 2TB M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD
- Keyboard: Optical Mechanical
- Disc Drive: No Optical Drive
- Connectivity: WiFi 6E, Bluetooth, NFC for Keystone II
- USB: 2x 3.2A, 1x 3.2C, 1x 4.0C
- Lighting: RGB back-lit keyboard and RGB under chassis
- Battery: 4x Cell 90Wh (1hr charge time)
- Weight: 1.42 kg
- Dimensions: 47 x 39 x 9.34 cm
The look and feel of this laptop are really nice. The transparencies in the body and the overall slender form-factor are a joy to behold, and the 1.4kg weight is pretty minimal when carrying it around in a bag or working with it on your lap. I really admire the styling that has gone into this device to keep it keeping solid, and I mean solid, when you pick it up and there is no plastic feeling flex of the edges, and no creaking at all throughout the structure. The vents and grills, the feet and tactile textures across the underside are purposeful and aesthetically pleasing from a design perspective. Even the power button glows red, it's individually diamond-shaped and feels purposeful in its usage; like you're hitting the button and nuking the enemy in a sci-fi blockbuster action movie or game.
The keyboard, in general, is well-spaced and easily functional without much of a learning curve, though there is no number pad to the right, instead, you have a selection of media navigation keys ready to control any videos or any music you want to enjoy. Handily situated by these keys is 'print-screen' to capture any interesting images so you can screenshot and share your captures quickly and conveniently. The "Enter" key is half-sized, which I'm personally not used to, so this was the biggest area of change I needed to adapt to in order to use the keyboard efficiently. The keyboard was overall responsive, quiet yet punchy thanks to its low profile optical-mechanical switches which are great for gaming and more than suitable to write essays and reviews on too.
The mouse pad is elongated and far wider than I have ever been used to, so with my thumb positioned on the left click area; I kept finding myself resting my pinkie on the far right of the trackpad. While moving the mouse around this caused the pointer to automatically switch to the two-fingered scroll gesture by accident. I consistently did this despite knowing the width of the trackpad, though in the dark I legitimately couldn't see the edge of the trackpad so perhaps a little more RGB loving around that area could fix my inability to keep resting on the pad itself, or perhaps I need to evolve to a wider splay of my digits to compensate for the girth.
The screen is a slim 15.6" 240 Hz panel with minimal bezel and WQHD, or Wide Quad HD, resolutions of 2560 x 1440p meaning it can allow for potentially higher refresh rates than 4K displays and better pixel density leading to crisper images and more eye-friendly immersion throughout. At just 3ms response timing and with adaptive sync to avoid tearing and stuttering in-game, this Dolby vision-enabled screen provides you with stunning HDR, extraordinary colour, contrast and brightness regardless of the subject matter; movies and still images also look utterly incredible on this display.
The speakers are 4 x Dolby Atmos, virtual 5.1.2 surround sound speakers that really immerse you in stunningly crisp audio. Music, games and videos thunder in front of you with bass bouncing directly off the surface your laptop is sat on via its built-in Smart Amp woofers, and front-facing tweeters pitching you the high notes and vocal tones. Speaking of which; there is also built-in AI noise cancellation on VOIP services and in-game chat with smart filtering of excess noise to help maintain a crystal clear experience throughout. The system barely makes a sound at just 40dB under maximum load and keeps its cool thanks to thermal grizzly's Conductonaut Extreme Liquid Metal keeping the internals up to 15 degrees cooler at its peak.
The Strix Scar G533Zw-LN148w also comes with a keystone II dongle, which is encapsulated in an un-assuming yet hardy rubber keyring, that allows you to store upon it customized configurations and trigger via NFC features such as unlocking or encrypting your (Z:) shadow drive. You simply slip the little keystone out of its sheath and plunge it into the dedicated port on the right side of the laptop, where it lights up and the keyboard swathes across in matching red to indicate it has been read and your configuration is ready for use. Such a handy idea on paper, but it begs the question; what scenario is this truly useful in, and also how many of these laptops are you going to surround yourself with? I assume at a gaming event or perhaps at an educational facility, if there were a batch of these laptops available for you to sit down at you could carry your personal configuration around with you ready to inject into a similar system, but other than that I can only think that it is a pretty niche, but oh so futuristic gimmick. I love it.
Running some preliminary benchmarks with Geekbench 5.4.4 I recorded a score of 169X single-core and 7718-83XX multi, and an OpenCL compute score of 100056-103921. The CPU is a 12th generation Alder Lake i9-12900H, with Intel Iris Xe Graphics built-in, which boasts 14 cores running at around 2.89 GHz, 20 concurrent execution threads, and up to 5.00 GHz Intel Turbo Boost 3.0 Max technology. The GPU score is indicative of 2021's supercharged 'Ti' variant of Nvidia's Ampere powered ray-trace-centric 3070 card, and has a boosted clock speed of at least 1.77 GHz via ASUS Strix edition.
Running GPUScores "Relic of life" tech demo to get some benchmarks for each API on the 3070 Ti, I recorded a result of 3515 overall score with 29-43 FPS and an average of 35 FPS on Vulkan 1.2 and 3607 overall with 31-44 FPS and a 36 FPs average using Direct X12 rendering at 2560x1440 resolution.
Checking the specs against the popular requirements lab site and checking if the Strix could run all the latest games I am happy to report that out of 9000 games listed the Strix could handle 100% of them at recommended settings, out the box with no messing about required at all. As a firm believer in ease of use this was music to my ears and mean that I could play anything and everything I could imagine on this laptop, and given the GPU and CPU combination, paired with the ultra-fast 2TB (1.8TB usable) NVME storage and the 16GB DDR5 memory it would also be an absolute beast for process-heavy applications such as those used for photo and video manipulation. As a user of Photoshop and Premier for several years, I know from experience that the better the spec the fewer issues you will run into along the way and the smoother the ride will be when rendering out projects, so the Strix has completely exceeded my expectations in terms of immediate usability.
ASUS laptops come preloaded with Armoury Crate which gives you detailed information about your hardware temperature and operability, while also giving you access to nifty customisation settings and profiles with-in which you can customise them further to your individual liking. The RGB can be adjusted to ripple lighting under your fingertips, strobe and pulse, or just cycle through the gorgeous selection of colours. The under chassis lighting melds into this RGB display that emanates from the keys by accentuating the overall glow and taking the effect into a third dimension by bounding it off the surface you are perched on and rebounding light glow off surrounding objects and walls. I have to say that I was impressed with just how beautiful the lighting was on this laptop and how effortlessly it gave it that wow factor to look at.
The 4 cell battery within the chassis provides you with roughly 10 hours of general laptop usage, though this alters with various factors including the amount of RGB it expels, volume levels, connected devices and intensity drawn upon the CPU and GPU, however, the charge time is more than impressive with just a 30-minute charge time giving you 50% battery back!
Connectivity-wise the Strix Scar 15 is packed out with an HDMI socket, dual USB-C ports, and an RJ45 2.5G LAN socket out the rear, and dual USB-A ports and a 3.5mm jack on the left side. The right-hand side only houses the NFC connector for the Keystone II dongle, and there are no sockets for SD cards or anything else. The system has WiFi 6E built-in for lag-less connectivity, as well as Bluetooth for those gaming peripherals and pads and headsets.
One thing that concerned me, when I switched the machine on for the first time, was that it was running Windows 11. As an OEM, would the Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) feature and Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity (HMCI) really bring a system lower than optimal performance? It is known that HMCI and VBS should be disabled by default on gaming machines, as opposed to non gaming machines, to maintain performance rather than security from malware. The good news is that if you updated your machine from Windows 10 to Windows 11 this should all be mitigated, as it's not enabled by default, however you can disable VBS in windows features settings after confirming it is running via hitting Windows+R and typing: msinfo32. The great news is it was disabled on the Strix Scar 15, so it was all good! I wouldn't have wanted to know that the performance could have been hampered by up to a whopping 28% because of Microsofts decision to ramp up security.
In all Windows 11 is a dream to use, sure it's different and slightly draws influence from more Mac OS looking UI's than previous Windows entries, but I much prefer it to the frankly god awful Metro Windows 8 thing that happened and it really isn't that big of a leap from Windows 10 or Android/IOS style OS's in terms of usability. I really, really liked it and boot time and load times were virtually non-existant, which certainly helps the flow of using a system day to day.
The price point may be the biggest barrier to entry for anyone wanting to get hold of the ASUS Strix Scar series laptop. At around £2300 for this exact laptop, around £2600 for the wider 17.3", 32GB ram upgraded, version, and then an additional £100 or so for the 3080 upgrade: it's not for the faint of heart. That's almost £3k of your hard-earned cash, however, it would be worth every single penny as you are getting streamlined and guaranteed premium performance and top-notch ASUS tweaked hardware delivered to your door with no set-up or building required, that you can fit in your bag and take with you anywhere in the world, and you can't do that with a physical PC rig.
As it stands; the ASUS ROG Strix Scar Edition is a fantastic all-rounder that is built to perform and uses every resource at its disposal to achieve that. I was incredibly impressed by its sheer compatibility and overall ability to simply run, without hesitation or hours of tinkering, out of the box. The price is reasonable, and the functionality is applaudable, so it's a no brainer to recommend to anyone after a reliably solid laptop for gaming and productivity without escalating into the £5k echelons of having production level hardware, latest and greatest components with the most storage and the most ram available: this is more than enough muscle for the average consumer with a modest budget and an eye for stunning design language.
Verdict
- Lightweight and beautifully lit
- Stunning 240 Hz WQHD screen
- Superfast 2TB PCIe G4 storage
- i9 + 3070 Ti combo is powerful
- Big price tag
- No optical drive
