The Lenovo Legion 7 and ASUS Scar 15 are both powerful Ryzen gaming laptops, but which is
better and which should you pick?
I’ve compared both in this video to show you the differences and help you decide which
is worth it.
Starting with the specs both of my laptops have the same CPU, GPU and amount of memory,
so we should be in for a fair comparison.
That said the Legion 7 does offer a higher power limit on the GPU.
The Legion also has a bigger screen, both in terms of size and pixels.
Both have a terabyte of storage, and the battery in the Scar is larger.
I’ve got to give the Legion 7 the edge when it comes to build quality, it’s got a dark
grey aluminum lid, interior and bottom panel while the Scar also has a metal lid, but the
interior is black plastic with a translucent section.
The scar offers a little customization with three plastic corner pieces that come with
it and can be changed to your preference.
They’ve both got crazy amounts of RGB, in addition to the keyboards, both have light
bars running along the left, front and right hand sides.
The Scar has a light bar under the screen and on the lid logo, while the Legion also
lights up the lid logo but also does the air exhaust vents.
The Legion is a bit heavier when just comparing laptops by themselves, but then it gets even
heavier when including the power bricks as it uses a larger 300 watt brick compared to
the Scars 240 watt brick.
The Legion is slightly wider and deeper, but it’s only a very small amount, and honestly
I can forgive it when you consider that it’s using a larger 16” screen, though the Scar
was a little thicker.
The Legion has a 16:10 aspect ratio compared to the Scar’s more traditional 16:9, so
extra vertical space for the Legion.
I’ve got a 1080p screen in my Scar, but there is also a 1440p option.
The Legion has a MUX switch and lets us disable hybrid mode aka optimus, which offers a speed
boost in games, and it also has G-Sync if optimus is disabled or FreeSync with Optimus
enabled, while the Scar just has FreeSync.
With the screens my units had, the Legion had slightly better colour gamut and also
got brighter as well, at least at maximum, by the time we step down to 75% brightness
or below the Scar takes the lead as the Legion drops off quickly.
Both laptops have a screen overdrive mode to boost response time, and with that enabled
the Scar was a little faster, but realistically both were great compared to most other laptops
tested.
Both of my units had basically no backlight bleed, but this will vary between laptops
and panels.
The Scar has no camera, but it still has microphones, while the Legion has a 720p camera above the
screen in the center.
There’s a switch on the right of the Legion so that you can physically disconnect the
camera to ensure privacy while you, uh, watch my videos.
Personally I preferred typing on the Scar, it’s got an optical mechanical keyboard
which is louder and isn’t for everyone, but that was my personal preference, that
said I had no issues typing on the Legion, which still had a nice clicky feel.
The Legion 7 has a numpad while the Scar does not, but the Scar has some extra shortcut
buttons above the keyboard.
The precision touchpads on both were smooth and worked well.
The one on the Scar felt a little better for me personally, it was slightly larger, and
it can optionally be turned into a numpad.
Both have air exhaust vents on the left.
The Scar has two USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A ports while the Legion has a USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C
port with DisplayPort 1.4, and both have a 3.5mm audio combo jack in similar positions.
On the right of the Scar there’s just the keystone and another air exhaust, while the
Legion also has an air exhaust but also a second Type-C port, though this one is the
slower USB 3.2 Gen1.
The Legion also has the previously mentioned camera switch.
The rest of the I/O is on the back.
Both have the power inputs on the far right.
Both have gigabit ethernet and a USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C port.
Both also have HDMI, however the Legion offers the newer HDMI 2.1 while the Scar has 2.0b.
The Legion has 3 USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A ports here while the Scar just has 1.
For those not keeping track, both have 3 USB Type-A ports, but the Legion has 3 USB Type-C
while the Scar just has the one, though both laptops do support USB Type-C charging with
the port on the back.
I also preferred plugging stuff into the legion, it’s got icons that light up above the ports
on the back so you can easily see where cables go when you’re in front of the machine.
On the Legion all display outputs connect directly to the Nvidia discrete graphics,
for the Scar HDMI connects to the integrated Radeon graphics, so you need to use Type-C
to bypass optimus, more on that soon.
The bottom of the Legion definitely looks cleaner, not that it matters much, but regardless
both appear to have adequate air ventilation over the intake fans.
Opening the Legion was definitely easier, the light bar is connected to the main chassis
so no problems, but the Scar’s bottom panel has the light bar on it so it’s connected
to the motherboard with two ribbon cables, so you’ve got to carefully take the panel
off to avoid ripping them out and then reconnect them when putting the panel back on, a bit
more hassle.
Despite the layouts being a little different the functionality is about the same.
Both have the battery down the front, cooling up the back, two memory slots, two M.2 storage
slots, and WiFi 6, though the wifi card in the Scar is hiding under the SSD.
The Scar has a larger 90Wh battery compared to the 80Wh one in the Legion, though both
are 4-Cell.
By default the Scar will change the refresh rate to 60Hz when you unplug the power, a
nice feature to help save battery.
The Legion doesn’t do this automatically, but it does at least have this shortcut to
quickly swap refresh rates, so I’ve also tested the battery with this mode too, and
the results were quite close together, great battery life from either machine in this ideal
scenario.
The Legion 7 results are also with the Corsair iCUE software disabled.
I've gone into depth on the problems this causes in the full review if you want the
details, but basically if you want optimal battery life then you can’t control RGB
on the Legion - battery life is much worse by default on the Legion with the Corsair
software active which is the biggest issue I have with the Legion 7, but it is easy enough
to fix.
Both laptops also give you the option of lowering the maximum charge level to help improve battery
longevity, though the options offered on the Scar give you more choice.
The speakers on the Scar sound noticeably better, there’s some nice bass, they’re
louder and sound clearer.
The Legion is still above average for a gaming laptop and pretty good, just not as good as
the Scar in my opinion.
Cooling also differs, the Legion is using a vapor chamber cooler while the Scar has
a standard heat pipe solution, however the Scar also has liquid metal on the processor
while the Legion uses regular thermal paste, so with that in mind let’s check out thermals
next.
The control panels on both have different options for controlling performance, for the
purposes of this comparison I’ll just look at the best settings otherwise the graphs
will be huge, you can check out the full reviews linked in the description if you want detailed
thermal results in all modes.
These are the temperatures for the CPU and GPU on both laptops at both idle and with
a CPU plus GPU stress test running to represent a worst case.
The Legion 7 is in the red bars and the Scar 15 is in the purple bars.
The Legion was far cooler when sitting there idle, and was also a little cooler on the
CPU in the stress test, however the Legion’s GPU was a bit warmer, but still quite a bit
below the 87 degree thermal throttle limit so not an issue.
These are the clock speeds while running the stress tests - no point measuring idle here.
The Legion was reaching lower CPU clock speeds, which may be why its CPU was cooler.
Likewise the Legion’s GPU was hitting higher clock speeds, which would be related to it
being warmer.
This is made clear when looking at power limits, as more power equals more heat.
The Legion’s GPU runs up to 150 watts in this heavy CPU plus GPU stress test, so we’re
expecting a warmer GPU, and that’s also why the legion’s GPU clock speeds are higher.
Same reason the Legion has lower CPU clock speeds and CPU temperature, it’s capped
to 45 watts in this combined test while the processor can go higher on the Scar.
Both laptops are offering the best results I’ve seen in Cinebench R23 out of any laptops
I’ve tested, though the Legion was slightly ahead in both single and multicore performance,
but the difference is very minor, and realistically the other 5900HX results aren’t too different
either.
When the GPU is idle it seems that the Legion does better in CPU performance, as we just
saw earlier with the GPU active too the Scar had better CPU performance.
The legion drops back further when we run the same test on battery power though.
Single core is still better on the Legion, but multicore is almost 1000 points ahead
with the Scar now, showing that its larger battery can deliver more power when needed.
When idling the Scar was noticeably warmer, not hot, but this makes sense given the internal
temperatures were much warmer with the Scar despite both sitting there doing nothing.
The Scar turns things around with the stress tests running though, it’s cooler to the
touch whether or not the fans are maxed out.
Setting the fans to max is a benefit the Scar offers, the Legion has no fan control, but
this also means the Scar runs louder.
Both were quiet when idling, but when under load the Scar was noticeably louder, even
prior to setting the fans to max speed, but at least this is an option for those that
want it, oh and the previous thermal data from the scar was with its fans maxed.
Now let’s take a look at gaming performance, as both laptops have different resolutions
I’ve tested at 1080p, as that’s also the resolution I’ve got data for for the purposes
of comparing.
It’s also worth noting that the ASUS Scar 15 applies the following GPU overclock when
in the highest performance mode.
The Legion 7 on the other hand does not overclock by default.
We could of course do this manually, but I’m comparing with defaults here.
Battlefield V was tested in campaign mode, and I’ve got both laptops highlighted in
red.
The Legion 7 was reaching 22% higher average FPS here, quite impressive when you consider
that technically both laptops have the same CPU, GPU and memory specs on paper.
The Legion 7 likely has the edge both because of the higher GPU power limit, but also because
we can disable optimus.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the games benchmark tool.
The Legion was still 14% ahead of the Scar, though the gap wasn’t as big this time,
but hey winning’s winning.
Far Cry 5 was also tested using the games benchmark, and again a similar 14% boost with
the Legion in this one too.
Both laptops are down a little compared to the Intel machines that dominate the top of
the graph here, but still high frame rates from either.
As mentioned earlier we can bypass optimus on the Scar by connecting an external monitor
over Type-C, as that offers a DisplayPort connection directly to the Nvidia graphics.
The Legion gains no benefit from this unless you have hybrid mode enabled, but you can
just turn that off as the Legion has a MUX switch.
Anyway this simple change boosts the average FPS of the Scar by 12.5% in this test, putting
it only very slightly behind the Legion 7 with higher GPU power limit now, demonstrating
what the Scar could be capable of if ASUS instead gave us the option of disabling Optimus
like the Legion has.
Like the games, the 3DMark tests also see an improvement with the higher GPU power limit
from the Legion 7 and because it lets us disable optimus.
Now let’s check out some content creator workloads, I’ve tested Adobe Premiere with
the Puget systems benchmark.
Both of these laptops are literally offering chart topping performance, though the Legion
had a 5% higher score.
The Legion was still ahead when it came to Adobe Photoshop, though the scores are much
closer together here now, and the Tongfang and Clevo units also steal the 1st and 2nd
places respectively now.
Strangely the Scar was ahead in DaVinci Resolve, granted the difference is next to nothing,
I was expecting the higher wattage GPU in the Legion to do better here as this tends
to be a GPU heavy test.
The Legion 7 had the edge in most of the SPECviewperf tests, which makes sense given these depend
on the GPU.
The 1TB M.2 NVMe SSDs in both were fairly comparable, no major differences with either
having wins and losses depending on the specific test you’re looking at.
I’ve tested Linux support with an Ubuntu liveCD.
Out of the box both had working WiFi, keyboard, touchpad, and camera for the Legion.
The speakers worked on the Scar, but not for the Legion by default.
The Legion could still adjust performance modes, keyboard brightness and effects as
it has some built into firmware, while the Scar couldn’t have lighting customized by
default, maybe with some third party software, not sure if ASUS is offer Linux support.
Alright let’s discuss price next, you’re going to have to refer to the links in the
description as prices will change over time, but also US pricing for the Legion 7 still
isn’t available because it’s not out just yet.
The base model is meant to start at $1700 USD, but this top end configuration I’ve
tested should be much more.
The Singapore model is around $3000 USD when converting currency, but stuff in the US generally
costs less than other regions too so I’d expect less than this.
The Scar 15 that I’ve tested is $2700 USD, but you can save quite a lot of money by lowering
to half the RAM and Ryzen 7 CPU, and as I’ve shown the performance difference between Ryzen
7 and 9 isn’t that big.
All things considered, I think both are pretty good gaming laptops, nothing is perfect so
it depends on the features that you prefer and which downsides you can deal with.
Both have similar amounts of RGB, are available with similar specs, have similar upgrade options,
have similar CPU performance in Cinebench, and similar screen response time.
Although the Scar was a little better for screen response time, the Legion screen was
bigger, brighter, had slightly better colour gamut and also has G-Sync.
G-Sync requires no optimus, and the Legion 7 does let us do this as it has a MUX switch,
and as a result the Legion has the advantage in games, and it’s higher GPU power limit
also helps there too.
The Legion has more ports, but the Scar has a better keyboard in my opinion as well as
better speakers, but the Scar generally runs hotter and it also doesn’t have a camera.
Personally, based on these differences, I think I would go for the Legion 7, but that’s
just because it has fewer downsides for my own personal use case.
You probably have different needs, so use the information in this video to make the
decision based on what you’re after.
I’m still planning on comparing the Legion 7 against other laptops like the 5 Pro, so
make sure you’re subscribed for more upcoming laptop comparisons like this one.
Come and join us in Discord and get behind the scenes videos by supporting the channel
on Patreon, and if you want further details on both of these laptops then check out the
review videos over here - I’ll see you over in one of those next!