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00:00Every year I make a new video saying this is the fastest the most powerful gaming laptop I've ever tested
00:06And here we go again
00:07This is the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 and it's one of a new breed of gaming laptops with RTX 40 series
00:15GPUs and Intel 13th generation CPUs as well as a few other new additions and it is a bit ridiculous
00:21Firstly a big thank you to Asus for sending this out for me to test and while I'm gonna keep you guessing about the price
00:26Just for a minute. Let's first talk about what is inside this thing. The Strix Scar 18 packs in an RTX
00:344090 with up to a 175 Watt TGP as well as an Intel i9
00:393980 HX
00:4065 watt CPU that's 24 cores and 32 threads if you're asking up to 64 gigs of DDR 5
00:474800 megahertz RAM, which is great. Although I have seen up to 6,000 megahertz elsewhere
00:51We also get this new and brighter 18 inch nebula HDR display
00:56240 Hertz quad HD plus and it supports NVIDIA G-Sync
00:59So my first question was how much is this thing and it's 4,000 pounds an awful lot of money
01:05But my second question is how much faster is this compared to last year's gaming laptops say with a 3080 Ti the flagship from
01:12Last year. Well, here's one I made earlier. This is the ROG Strix Scar
01:1717 now to be fair. This is a bit smaller. This is the 17
01:20This is the 18 and also this is a fair bit cheaper now
01:23It's had a price cut because it's well the old model with a 3080 Ti and the 12th gen Intel CPUs
01:28But I'm curious just how much faster this new guy is gonna be and if you're thinking hang on Thomas, you know
01:33Very helpful you've got that but what about the smaller 16-inch version of the new ROG Strix for 2023?
01:38Well, where would you be without me? I've got one here. Although sadly I can't actually benchmark this
01:43This is a pre-release sample. Basically the same specs. Although this tops out with a 4080 versus a 4090
01:49this is a more portable powerhouse and starts from
01:523300 and also the option for a mini LED panel which as we'll come to in a second does make this a lot more tempting
01:59It's kind of surprising. We don't have that option on here, especially given the price
02:03Okay
02:04So next to the older 17 and apart from a few design cues and a similar keyboard the 18 is pretty much all new
02:10We have this refreshed design a new motherboard and also much better cooling with an 82% larger cooling area
02:17All the RGB you could throw a stick at and maybe most importantly these tiny vents around the WASD keys
02:22Where the internal fans cool your fingers and as the 18 in the name suggests a bigger screen
02:28Which gives us about 12% more screen space and also by shrinking the bottom bezel
02:32They've been able to squeeze in the extra screen without adding too much to the overall footprint
02:36Although the new guy is a little bit thicker and also a bit heavier
02:40I mean fair enough really given it's got a bigger screen size
02:42But either way, you're gonna probably feel this lugging it around in your backpack
02:46You can see the slightly bigger overall footprint. They're not significant, especially given how much extra screen you're getting
02:53But really this is a desktop replacement gaming laptop the mux switch makes a return
02:58Although now it's a dynamic mux switch
03:00Which means you can switch between the integrated and dedicated GPUs without restarting
03:04And so if you're not gaming and battery life is a lot more important, then you can switch to the iGPU easily
03:10They've also moved the IO from the rear on the 17 to the sides on the new 18
03:14Which I'm not sure is an upgrade because it is quite nice to have all your cables hidden out the back
03:19What I don't particularly love is this clear plastic that now covers the sides in the back
03:23It just looks kind of cheap
03:24Although I do like the RGB light bar that runs along the front and the back edges
03:28The swappable and 3d printable armor caps make a return although a little smaller than before and look at this
03:34We finally get a webcam. It's a fairly basic 720p camera
03:38No Windows Hello support for face unlocking, but it's there and it's also in this little housing
03:42But it's actually quite helpful for getting your finger in it. So you can open it one-handed
03:47Let's talk about this screen because it's a new quad HD plus 16 by 10
03:52240 Hertz or OG nebula HDR display, which is brighter at 500 nits
03:57It's more color accurate and also we get support for Dolby Vision HDR
04:00Asus claims a hundred percent of the p3 color gamut coverage, although I measured slightly less than that
04:05But still pretty good and so the above average color accuracy means you can use the power of this gaming laptop for some more creative
04:11Tasks, but here's the problem while this looks great and it's big and it's fast and gaming is fantastic on it
04:17It misses out on the mini LED display option
04:19Which we have on the 16 and I'm not sure how well this is coming across on camera because it's a SDR video
04:24This guy will get you around 500 nits. I measured about 480 and this is about 1200 nits
04:29It actually supports display CR 1000
04:32So it's much brighter and you can really see a difference in person and also with mini LED you get much higher contrast
04:37So it is a bit confusing and a little disappointing. We don't have this screen option for the 18
04:42I would like to have that on here
04:43But that said this thing still feels amazing when you can max out that 240 Hertz on a screen this big
04:50The keyboard is as good as ever and now we get slightly larger arrow keys
04:53The trackpad is wider and taller this time which makes it easier and less cramped to use and along with that slimmer screen bezel
04:59It just brings the whole look of the machine up to date
05:02Now as I'm driving around Forza Horizon 5, you can probably hear the fan on my mic. It is noticeably loud
05:08I've measured around 42 decibels
05:10So it is noticeable but not if you've got a pair of headphones on
05:13And actually one of the improvements this year is the cooling because we've got a larger chassis coming from the 17
05:18They've actually managed to increase the cooling area by 80%
05:22Along with new heat pipes and also a third fan just for the CPU and GPU
05:27So there's three fans in total in here and they are also using their conductor not
05:30Extreme liquid metal on the CPU and GPU to keep them cool and reduce throttling. So yes, it does get
05:37Fairly warm not uncomfortably so and you can hear the microphone
05:40But given the 4090 in the top spec 13th gen CPU and the performance we get out of this
05:45It's not bad at all
05:47although switching to turbo mode which gets you the highest clock speeds the maximum 65 watts for the CPU and
05:53175 watts for the GPU and an extra 50 megahertz for the GPU on top of that
05:57Although it does get noticeably louder
05:59But as usual you can customize your own power and fan settings in manual mode plus in lighter workloads
06:05You can set it to silent and the fan turns off completely which also gives you the longest battery life
06:09Okay enough waffling just how fast is this thing?
06:12The new kid on the block managed eleven point four percent faster single core and thirty one percent faster
06:18Multi-core scores in Geekbench and in Cinebench
06:20It was 17% faster in single and a massive 60% faster in multi-core in Geekbench's GPU tests
06:26the 4090 scored 42% higher in the OpenCL test and a whopping 54% higher in CUDA and in TimeSpy
06:33It was 41% faster and switching on turbo mode boosted that another 5%. That's a lot of raw power there
06:40And then switching over to Puget Bench in Premiere Pro
06:43The Strixcar 18 was 23% faster
06:46But more importantly games and in cyberpunk at native Quad HD plus and everything set to ultra the 4090 was around
06:5325% faster with ray tracing off
06:56However, it's clear that ray tracing is where the 40 series shows its biggest jump up a massive 43% when you then enable
07:02DLSS 3 which also has frame gen it boosted the FPS a further 54% to a whopping
07:09120 FPS in F1 2022 the Strixcar 18 was anywhere from 25 up to 40% faster than the 17 and with
07:16Maxell settings with ray tracing and DLSS which includes frame gen in F1 close to 200 frames per second in
07:24Flight sim the new 18 delivered around a third more frames per second with ultra settings and was about 22% faster with DLSS set to
07:31Balanced but once again turning on frame gen basically doubled the frame rate to almost 120
07:36It's incredibly effective and in games like this. The added latency doesn't really make much difference in Modern Warfare 2 again max settings
07:44Of course, I got around a 10% boost without DLSS and a massive 42% with DLSS set to balanced
07:50which seems like a surprisingly big boost, but I tried it twice and got the same result and
07:54Finally, I averaged around a third higher FPS in Forza Horizon 5 using extreme settings
08:01That's a lot of numbers
08:02But my takeaway is if we put ray tracing and DLSS to one side for a second
08:06It's roughly a sort of 25 to 35 percent uptick over last year's 3080 Ti
08:10But with ray tracing we're seeing sort of up to 40 45 percent boost and then when you add DLSS
08:16Particularly in games that support frame generation, which to be fair
08:19There are only a handful and again is best suited to non twitchy competitive shooters in some situations
08:23It can more than double the frame rate compared to what I got on the old 17, which is pretty incredible
08:28So really it's gonna come down to what games you play. Do they support DLSS?
08:32Do they support frame gen that will have a big impact on just how much of a boost you're gonna see the problem is though
08:37Even though we're closer to hitting that 240 FPS in most of these maxed out triple-a games
08:42We're still just not getting there quite yet. You can drop settings
08:45You can of course play all the less demanding games and we are taking more advantage of it than we are in the past
08:49But quad HD 240 is still a bit of a stretch even with a 1490 to fully max out
08:55Couple of final points before I let you go sound quality fantastic really really good speakers in here
09:00Although mostly I use my headphones battery life is also pretty good
09:03You'll get four to five hours with the integrated GPU with light use
09:07But obviously if you are gaming you're gonna want to use it plugged in with this guy
09:10This is the 330 watt brick you get with it, which is smaller than most rivals
09:15It doesn't add too much to the overall size of this if you are lugging it around taking it to a LAN party or something
09:21Although one small point is that we only get a 90 watt hour battery in here
09:24Which is a reasonable size, but some rivals squeeze in 99.99
09:29What's our battery because that's like the legal limit where you can still take it on planes?
09:32And I think given the 18 inch size of this you'd have thought they could cram that in to get a little bit more battery
09:37But no 90 watts, which is fine
09:40So to wrap up for the princely sum of three thousand nine hundred ninety nine pounds and ninety nine pence
09:45You could bag yourself a strict scar 18, but I'm willing to bet most of you probably aren't gonna do that
09:51But it is always fun to see just how fast these new laptops are and as we saw with the scar 17 if you wait a
09:56Little bit prices do come down, but importantly we are seeing solid gen on gen performance boosts
10:01Especially in games with DLSS and frame gen but across the board really and while this is the new top dog and it is the fastest
10:07Laptop I've ever tested don't discount last year's models with the 30 series
10:12Which is still very capable and you can get for probably over a thousand pounds less
10:16Thank you so much for watching guys
10:17Let me know what you make of this and whether you're tempted to sell a kidney or two to pick one up in the comments below
10:22And I'll see you next time right here on the tech chat