Hi, are you looking for a good gaming laptop?
The Asus ROG Strix Scar 3 is worth attention with no doubt.
It's a fast gaming laptop equipped with many features that will take your gaming experience
to the next level, but is it the best possible choice out there?
In this video I'll make as many comparisons as I can to help you decide if the Scar 3
is worth buying, or if you should consider some other laptop instead.
In the video description i left Amazon links for the USA and also for other countries to
check the correct price.
To skip to any part of this video you can use the timestamps down below.
I'm Chris from techfindsreview.com and now let's jump into the review.
If it comes to design the Scar 3 is a very eye catching laptop.
You have metal lid with brushed aluminium texture and the ROG logo that you can light
up with RGB colors.
On the back it has extended exhaust section, but when you open the laptop it doesn't stick
out too much thanks to well-designed hinge mechanism.
On the front and on the sides there is one large light bar that makes the laptop look
like it's hovering above the ground.
The deck is made of solid plastic with few extruded lines and a keystone slot on the
left hand side.
Thanks to carbon fiber pattern the fingerprints are not so visible on it.
The display with thin bezels looks nice, but unfortunately Asus decided to remove the webcam.
I bought my unit in the UK and I got an external webcam included, but the USA models most likely
don't come with one, so keep that in mind.
If it comes to dimensions the Scar 3 is pretty portable.
The extended exhaust section makes it slightly deeper than some other gaming laptops with
thin bezel display, but it's still light, and it will fit to a regular 15.6" laptop case with ease.
Inside you can find the keyboard with long 2mm key travel and good spacing.
It's not full size, but don't worry - you have the number pad displayed on the touchpad
after touching right top corner.
The useful feature that it has is the "overstroke" technology which registers the key press before
you actually press the key all the way down.
This may translate into an advantage in game, since your reaction will be registered faster.
So if you ever needed just a few milliseconds more to not die or get a kill,
with overstroke technology you might have been saved.
If it comes to lighting you have very vivid per-key RGB.
You can customize every single key the way you want or use one of many built in effects.
However many people complain about the Armoury Crate app and i must admit that sometimes
it may be full of glitches.
I wasn't able to customize the keyboard lighting properly, because the app didn't support the
keyboard in Scar 3 yet.
Once Asus announced that this feature will be implemented yet i still couldn't customize
the keys separately.
Let me know guys if you have the same issues as well.
By the way, if you can't find all the lighting efects in Aura tab, follow the steps.
The touchpad uses Windows Precision drivers, so it's got good gestures and tracking.
I had no complains when using it.
It was big enough, accurate, the surface was smooth and 2 dedicated clicking buttons were
working well.
One thing to note is that if the numpad is on, you can't use the touchpad until you turn it off.
If it comes to port selection you have pretty much every needed IO, but i don't like that
Asus removed SD card slot and MiniDisplay port.
As same as previous generation, the Scar 3 still doesn't support Thunderbolt 3.
In Scar 3 you can find a new feature called Keystone which is a magnetic NFC chip that
you can plug in to the slot on the right hand side.
It can save your gaming and lighting profiles and also unlock the secret Shadow Drive where
you can store your files.
Except that it looks nice i don't find it very useful so i'd rather have SD card slot
and MiniDisplay port back.
One of the most hyped features of Scar 3 is 240Hz display and i believe it's buttery smooth
but i've got the unit with 1080p 144Hz 3ms response IPS pannel which is not worse at all.
Despite it doesn't support G-Sync it's the smoothest 144Hz display that i've tested,
which in combination with powerful hardware allows you to take advantage of the fast refresh rate.
The color accuracy is good as well, the colors are vivid and sharp with cold tone.
I find them very accurate, the games look great, but i can recommend this laptop for
content creation as well.
You have 97% of sRGB color gamut, 73% of AdobeRGB and the brightness is 320 nits.
Alright, since you may prefere other specs, let's quickly mention other confogurations
of the Asus Scar 3.
I also prepared a list with approximated prices as for today, but please note that the prices
may vary with time, so in the video description I left Amazon links for the USA and other
countries to find the configuration that suits you best and check the current price.
The Scar 3 is only available with full size RTX 2060 and RTX 2070.
For the processor you can choose between i7-9750H and i9-9880H, but if you want wider range
of configurations there is also a budget option, the Asus Strix G which you can buy with
GTX 1650, GTX 1660Ti and i5-9300H processor as well.
There is also the Asus Hero 3 which except for few visual changes looks the same as Scar,
but you can mostly find it with 17" screen.
Comming back to the review let's talk about speakers.
I was surprised by the amount of bass that they can produce.
Every shot and every explosion in game was full and punchy so there was no really need
to use the headphones.
Mids are just on point but the highs may seem to be a little bit overwhelmed by lows.
You can always equalize the sound the way you want using a Sonic Studio III software.
These are the best sounding speakers that i've seen in a laptop so far.
If it comes to performance it's pretty hard to predict what you will get.
I had one unit that was overheating, and because of that the performance was affected.
For this review purposes i bought another unit with exactly the same specs, since many
people reported me that their Scar 3 laptops run much cooler than mine.
Here you can see the results of my tests performed on the overhiting unit that i had previously,
and another unit that i bought now.
This time i had a proper laptop which worked as intended and the frame rates say for themselves.
For a quick comparison here is how the Scar 3 compares to other laptops with similare specs,
so if you wanna stop here longer pause the video now.
The temperatures were much better too.
My first unit was often exceeding 90 degrees Celcius, but this time the unit with proper
cooling didn't even throttle.
The average temperature of the processor while gaming was 84 degrees Celcius on Turbo mode
and -0.150V undervolt applied.
For the graphics the average temperature was only 74 degrees.
If you're not into tweaking things and playing with undervolting i also tested the laptop
right out of the box with only Turbo mode enabled, and since the Scar 3 has a good cooling,
the temperatures were not very high too.
The fan noise was not an issue at all.
On idle and during basic tasks on silent mode the laptop was completely quiet.
While gaming on turbo mode it gets lout, but that's normal for a gaming laptop.
It wasn't the loudest that i've tested though.
As for the storage there are various configurations of the Asus Scar 3.
My unit came with only 512GB M.2 PCIe SSD which was very fast.
The games were loading in a blink of an eye and the system startup took only from 10 to 15 seconds.
You have also one 2.5" drive bay, so if you wanna add more storage you can can put some
hard drive in here.
Inside the box you can find the cable needed for upgrade and the caddy for drive should
be inside the laptop.
If you worry about breaking something you can check out my step by step detailed guide
showing how to disassemble and upgrade this laptop.
I'll leave the link in the description.
The battery life hits around 5 up to 5,5 hours when browsing the web, watching YouTube and
doing light productivity work.
When gaming, battery dies after 1.5 hour.
I think it's a good score for a gaming laptop.
Alright, let's quickly mention other laptops that you may like to compare with the Asus Scar 3.
Please note that the prices may vary with time, so check the links in the description
for current prices.
You can also find there related reviews and comparisons, so there's a big chance that
you'll find the laptop you're looking for.
The first worth atention is the new 2019 HP Omen 15.
As always Omen has a wide range of configurations.
For the graphics you can choose from GTX 1650 up to RTX 2080 Max-Q and for the processor
you have 9th gen. i5, i7 and i9 chips.
In general the Omen is a lot cheaper than Scar 3, so i think that it's a good, cheap alternative
especially the models with GTX 1660Ti and RTX 2060.
The advantage of it is that you're getting Thunderbolt 3, 144Hz or 240Hz display with G-Sync,
a built in webcam and SD card slot.
The next laptop that cannot be missed is the 2019 Acer Predator Helios 300.
You can choose from many different configurations, but I wanna show you the GTX 1660Ti model
which costs only $1100 and it outperforms many laptops with the same and even higher specs.
It runns on highest possible clock speeds thanks to great cooling system, and it comes
with 144hz 3ms response time display.
All of that makes the Predator the best deal out there if it comes to price to performance ratio,
but if that's not enough, it often goes on sale on Amazon, so stay tuned.
The Lenovo Legion Y540 is another laptop that can be considered instead of Scar 3.
It has efficient and very quiet cooling system that allows to reach the almost maximum CPU
and GPU clock speeds as well.
The good thing about Lenovo Y540 is that it looks very clean and professional.
The experience of using it is more like working on a high-end business device
rather than gaming laptop.
It's cheaper than Asus, it has a webcam, and with 144Hz display you're getting a G-Sync.
But if you like RGB, you won't find here any of that, because Legion comes with only white
keyboard lighting.
However, there is a higher-end version, Lenovo Y740 which comes with per-key RGB.
That's all for today and i hope you found this video helpful.
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments and if you like this kind of reviews
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On my channel you can find detailed laptop reviews, laptop comparisons, gaming benchmarks and more.
Now thanks for your time and see you in the next video.