ASUS ROG Strix Scar 15: Storage, Battery, Pricing and Summary
Storage
The 2TB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD is very fast, with exceptional random read/write performance. Sequential read and write speeds of 7085 MB/s and 5262 MB/s respectively are also very good. There are faster drives available, and you could potentially boost performance by using a striped Raid0 array, but at these speeds, any gains to loading times are likely to be negligible.
There is an additional M.2 2280 drive slot, making expanding the storage a breeze.
CrystalDiskMark
The following are the results recorded in CrystalDiskMark, with figures measured in MB/s
Battery life
The ROG Strix Scar 15 is a thoroughbred gaming machine, so it’s best not to expect too much from the 90Wh battery. Whenever possible you should be using the power brick, as this gives you the full power of the components. Using aggressive power-saving and refresh rate limiting you can stretch the battery life out for lighter loads. There’s nothing exceptional going on here, but there is still an improvement over the 2021 Scar 15.
Watching 1080p video played back from an external hard drive, we got around 9 hours of battery life. For standard productivity and browsing, we used PCMark 10 running on a loop and averaged around 6.5 hours on a full charge. Gaming was consistent with other gaming laptops, lasting just over an hour before having to reach for the charger.
As this is a powerhouse laptop, it also has a powerhouse charger. The 280W power supply is bigger than I’m used to, but it’s certainly worth it for the extra power available. It comfortably keeps the Scar 15 running on mains juice, but if you’ve run the battery down it will charge to 50% in around 40 minutes and take just under two hours to fully charge.
Pricing and alternatives
At £2,299, the ROG Strix Scar 15 offers exceptional value. The whole package brings performance that is equal to or better than systems costing far more, and because it supports the brand new DDR5 and PCIe technologies, it’s a laptop that should last you for many years to come. As far as alternatives go, you could go with our perennial favourite, the ASUS ROG Strix G15 (R7-5800H, RTX 3070 – 2021), but the Scar 15 is likely to last you far longer based on outright performance. This may all change when the RTX 40 series releases, however, the 12th Gen intel upgrade provides such a significant improvement that the Scar 15 will stay relevant for many years to come.
Summary
I love the ROG Strix Scar 15, even if some of the styling decisions are a bit ostentatious. This is a seriously impressive piece of engineering that punches well above its weight. You could fork out quite a bit extra for the RTX 3080 Ti version, but the law of diminishing returns comes into play; You can get slightly better performance, but whether it’s worth the several hundred pounds extra it would cost is down to you.
As it is, the screen is excellent, sound quality is very good, and performance is outstanding. ASUS has knocked it out of the park with the Scar 15, and I can’t wait to see what they come out with next.