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00:00Oh that is a bit tasty. Music's so good as well. Hey guys I'm Tom on Tech Chap and
00:05this is the new ASUS ROG Strix Scar 17 SE. And this is ASUS's biggest, baddest,
00:13and highest performance laptop for the most demanding gamers and eSports
00:18professionals. And it's like the regular 2022 Strix Scar 17 but even faster. This
00:23is the SE and it's just about the most powerful gaming laptop you can buy and
00:28certainly it's the fastest I've ever tested. So if you want an incredible
00:32gaming laptop and have very very deep pockets and you're also not a fan of
00:36video calls because there isn't a webcam, definitely check this out. Okay let's get
00:40the specs out of the way first and for starters we're looking at a 12th gen i9
00:4512950HX which is Intel's super high-end 16 core 24 thread CPU with an
00:52additional overclock from 5 up to 5.2 gigahertz. Pair that with up to an RTX
00:573080 Ti which can boost up to a 40% higher max TGP than the regular Scar 17
01:03and you're looking at a bit of a monster. And then with either a 360 Hertz full
01:09HD or in this case a 240 Hertz QHD 17 inch screen up to 64 gigs of DDR5 RAM
01:16Wi-Fi 6e and also in this RAID 0 setup 4 terabytes of the fastest storage I've
01:22ever seen on a laptop. It is however 4 grand for the top spec one. A little bit
01:28ridiculous but you are paying for that cutting-edge performance those extra few
01:32percent that you're gonna get with the SE over the regular already incredibly
01:36powerful Scar 17. The SE it's just that little bit more that's what you're
01:40always gonna be paying a premium for. Now of course with great power comes great
01:45heat and so to maintain chill which is actually something I even I struggle
01:49with Asus have added an all-new much bigger vapor chamber cooling system
01:53which uses the snappily named Conductonaut Xtreme liquid metal which
01:58Asus reckon will drop the GPU temps by around 15 degrees Celsius versus
02:03regular old thermal paste. And all this helps deal with either the CPU or the
02:08GPU drawing the full 175 watts which is the absolute max power draw that both
02:14Intel and Nvidia actually allow. Although in practice the system balances power
02:19between them so in graphically demanding games which you'll probably be
02:22playing on this you'll most likely end up with a 35 to 55 watt CPU and then a
02:27GPU between 150 and 175 watts. And it all comes together to give me the highest
02:32scores I've ever recorded in some of my benchmarks. But we'll come back to that
02:36first let's talk about the design. There is no doubt this is a gaming laptop and
02:41also the lack of aluminium or an alloy in the materials perhaps makes it feel a
02:45little bit less premium than a MacBook Pro or something. But those materials
02:50would probably add to the already considerable 3 kilogram weight and by
02:53going with plastic we get this neat little translucent keyboard effect. It's
02:58not ridiculously heavy for a 17.3 inch laptop and I think it looks pretty smart
03:02for a gaming laptop although it does pick up smudges quite easily. There's all
03:07the RGB you could ask for on the keyboard along the front edge and the
03:10side and in the logo on the lid and actually it took me a while to notice
03:13this but there's also a strip of it along the bottom of the lid which shines
03:16down onto the keyboard deck and as usual all this is customizable via Aura in the
03:21Armoury app. And if you were thinking hey Tom that's a good-looking laptop there
03:26but it's just missing that something I can't put my finger on it well Asus have
03:30been listening and they've added this invisible ink design on the lid which
03:35you can just about make out if the light hits it but really you're gonna want to
03:39shine the UV black light that Asus bundles with the laptop for a proper
03:44look at this invisible ink cybertext as Asus calls it and apparently these
03:48shapes take their design from Asus's free Scar Runner parkour game. This is
03:53why I love Asus they spend six months developing something that you're not
03:56gonna see unless you shine a black light on it that you might do a couple of
03:59times and then never again but why not it's fun never change Asus. Okay more
04:05importantly picking a screen as I say you've got two options either a full HD
04:08300 Hertz or this one which is QHD 240 and I reckon unless you're an e-sportist
04:13person then the QHD is my pick as it strikes a better balance between image
04:18quality and smooth gameplay both are IPS panels both have adaptive sync and are
04:2316 by 9 I would have probably preferred a slimmer bottom bezel to accommodate a
04:27taller 16 by 10 screen and also there's no mini LED or OLED option here it is
04:33still obviously very good for gaming thanks mostly to the big size and that
04:363 millisecond response time contrast and color do suffer a little bit if you
04:40sit off-center and also at 325 nits it's not the brightest screen I've ever seen
04:45although color accuracy is pretty good especially the 98.5% p3 score that I
04:50measured as for connectivity well we that was a bit dangerous considering
04:55this was foreground chucking it around like that we get Wi-Fi 6e but if you are
04:58a serious gamer you're probably gonna want to have a wired internet via the
05:02RJ45 port on the back and that sits alongside an HDMI 2.1 port we've got two
05:07type C's the left side has a couple of USB 3.2 Gen 1 type A's we really need a
05:13better naming system for this and the right hand side simply gets Asus's
05:16keystone slot which is a little device sold separately that stores your Asus
05:20preferences and can also unlock your encrypted drives absolutely gargantuan
05:25keyboard here with room for a numpad which is great if you fancy doing your
05:29accounts afterwards or well more likely assigning macros if you fancy really
05:34lovely keyboard excellent key travel and lovely precision touchpad down here
05:37could be a little bit bigger that touchpad certainly we've got a lot of
05:40space not really being used down here and of course it goes without saying
05:44you've got per-key RGB backlighting as well the lack of a fingerprint sensor
05:48does feel like a bit of an oversight at this price especially as there's no
05:51chance of face unlocking because we haven't got a webcam what we do get
05:55though is a mux switch you can toggle this within the armory create app and it
06:00lets you disable the integrated graphics giving you a performance increase in
06:03games and the expense of worse battery life in terms of performance modes we
06:08get silence performance and turbo with each dialing up the CPU and GPU power
06:12envelope along with the fan noise okay enough waffling let's test some games
06:18and first things first let's plug it in that helps because that way you can
06:22unlock the turbo mode starting in Halo Infinite on ultra of course the SE
06:27averaged a hundred FPS at QHD and 120 FPS at full HD which is a great start
06:33although you'll probably want to drop some settings to max out that 240 Hertz
06:36screen in Forza Horizon 5 again on ultra I managed a hundred FPS at QHD and 106
06:42FPS at full HD showing that the GPU doesn't really matter quite as much in
06:46this game and that also Forza is not particularly well optimized speaking of
06:51questionably optimized in flight sim I got 75 FPS at QHD in the Top Gun Maverick
06:57challenge and 84 FPS at full HD again these are the highest results I've ever
07:01seen out of a gaming laptop although this game needs a DLSS option in
07:07fortnight I averaged 170 FPS at full HD with epic settings and also DLSS set to
07:13performance and then jumping up to Quad HD I was averaging 150 FPS which I
07:18reckon offers a better balance between performance and image quality and
07:23lastly in Rainbow Six Siege the 17 SE hit a frankly silly 515 FPS at full HD
07:30and 403 at QHD on ultra which is kind of overkill for a 240 Hertz screen in Time
07:37Spy again it posted the highest score I've ever had out of a laptop and it was
07:41a similar story in all my synthetic benchmarks now most of the time the i9
07:4512 950 HX in here was just slightly faster than the i9 12 900 K in the
07:50Lenovo Legion 7i I tested recently but in the Cinebench multicore test it
07:55completely demolished it but to tell you the truth that's not even the most
07:58impressive part the cooling system in here is phenomenal even at the 175 watt
08:03GPU 55 watt CPU rock-solid for a good 10-15 minutes CPU clock speed seemed to
08:09plateau at around 1.9 gigahertz under serious load but in games it happily ran
08:14at 4.2 most of the time and in all my tests the GPU maintained a healthy 1.3
08:19gigahertz clock speed no matter what temperatures peaked in the low 80s and
08:23the load which is pretty good although some patches of the keyboard did get
08:26quite warm and seriously the amount of hot air coming out of the side vents is
08:30unreal although I guess better out than in the laptop does limit fan noise
08:35depending on the mode but even on turbo it's not actually that loud and at idle
08:40it's basically silent although even a light load will get the fan spinning
08:44enough for you to notice but even so this is generally quieter than a lot of
08:48other gaming laptops as for battery life well it's a gaming laptop obviously you
08:54do have that mux switch which can help actually because then I can use the
08:58integrated graphics instead of a dedicated when you're doing less
09:01intensive stuff and so actually Asus claim you'll get up to about 10 hours of
09:06video playback from this although my YouTube tests at about 200 nits that's
09:10closer to five hours which isn't the end of the world if you're doing some basic
09:14stuff but really if you're gaming or do anything more demanding you're gonna
09:17want to plug it in for performance and so it doesn't die and speaking of power
09:21we actually have this new slightly more compact power brick it is certainly more
09:26portable than ones I've seen before but it's still pretty big so there really
09:31isn't much to complain about with this Strix Scar 17 SE except for the bloody
09:36long name also no webcam no fingerprint reader and also the screen
09:42while obviously it ticks the boxes in terms of refresh rate and resolution
09:46it's not gonna blow you away in terms of brightness or the contrast it is just a
09:50regular IPS LCD but as it stands this is the most powerful laptop I've ever
09:55tested certainly one of if not the most powerful laptop gaming laptop in the
09:59world that you can buy right now if you can afford it but what do you reckon
10:03would you save up your pennies for something like this it might take you a
10:05few years or is it just overkill let me know in the comments below thank you so
10:09much for watching guys if you want to see more gaming laptop reviews from me
10:12then don't forget to hit that subscribe button and give me a thumbs up and I
10:15catch you next time right here on the Tech Jam