RTX 5000 series laptops are here and
ASUS sponsored this video to check it out. This right here is the ROG Stricks
Scar 16. We also have the 18 and I
cannot wait to show you just how fast these things are. Oh, guys, look at
this. The box is so fancy. You come in
here and when you lift it up Oh,
wow. It's on a little pedestal. Before we look at the laptop, let's see how
much it can draw from the wall. 380 watts is quite a bit and that is
delivered over Asus's proprietary connector here. Now, I would really like
to see USBC, but you cannot deliver 380
watts over that. And they do have 100 watt charging over USBC if you want to
do that over some other brick. Oh, yes, we have the standard stuff here. Plug it
in, open it up, turn it on, you're good.
Now, here today we have the 16-in and also the 18-in, but at the same time, we
don't really have the 18-in cuz they gave it to us, but we're not allowed to
do any testing or anything like that cuz this is a pre-production sample. Looking
at the two laptops, it seems like that the main difference is that the 18-in is
bigger. Wow. And also, it has a numb pad on the right hand side here. So, if you
are planning on doing this for work and play, maybe you're an engineer or
something like that and you want an actual numpad, 18 in is for you.
Otherwise, I would probably stick with the 16. One thing I do have to say,
though, the 18-in screen is freaking massive. Like, it makes sense. Of
course, it's a really big screen for a laptop, but man, this is a desktop
replacement. It is not a laptop. But anyway, I was not able to do anything
with the 18-in besides look at it. So,
we have now done that. For 2025, the Stricks lineup has been completely
redesigned. And I do have to say this is a fine looking laptop. It looks quite
professional. It is just dark black right here. Although, if you look right
here, there's 9,152 precision mil holes behind which
there are 810 LEDs for the anision.
Anime vision. Anime vision. Yes, of course.
Basically, you can put silly little designs here. We'll play around with the
different stuff you can do with it later, but I do really like that you can
either have it look crazy and gamey or just turn it off and it looks kind of
cool. There just a couple holes. Oh, okay. I do like this. On the right side,
we have two USB typeAs, which excellent,
but they have put almost all of the IO on the left hand side where we have two
Thunderbolt Fives, USB type A, HDMI 2.1,
2.5 gig Ethernet, and our power plug. Oh, and also a little headphone
microphone combo port right there. But there is also on the back is no IO, but
a whole heckload of ventilation because I believe that they have a vapor chamber
that goes all the way across here for many a cooling. Now, I am a bit curious
if this aluminum back panel will reject fingerprints. And oh, it's actually not
bad. I was a little bit concerned that this coating would not reject fingerprints too good, but looking here,
like I I of course can fingerprint it if I really want to, but uh that's pretty
fingerprinted. It's not the worst I've ever seen, but it's not the best either.
It's not like they're ser aluminum coating. Man, that is a heavy power
brick. Actually, we didn't even look at how heavy this whole laptop is. Ooh. Oh,
this thing feels like it might crack 5 lb. 6.1. Ouch. And then add in the power
brick and you're going to be carrying around
7.7. This is a 1.6 lb power adapter.
Also, that's 3.5 kilograms and 2.7
kilograms for the rest of the world. All right, after getting into fistauffs with
the Windows utility for RGB and completely disabling that, I now have
the most incredible light show that might have ever existed around a laptop.
They have an RGB strip that goes literally all the way around the bottom,
giving you this really quite neat little
underglow for your laptop. Is this necessary in any way?
No. Is it very cool? Yes. All right,
let's have a look at this display right here. It is their new Nebula HDR display
and it is 2560 x600 240 hertz and they
claim 1200 nits peak brightness, but it turns out that they really undersold it.
We tested it and we saw a peak value of
2,000 nits. And also in HDR, it was able
to sustain over 1,400 nits pure white on
the whole display, which is really freaking bright. They were able to
accomplish that kind of brightness by having a miniLEDD display. It's the sort
of thing that you can't really do on OLEDs yet. And also, it has a dual ACR
coating, which is sort of like a matte finish, which is incredible at rejecting
bright spots. Here you can see I have a standard screen with a typical coating.
And wow, that's a studio light right there. You sure as heck cannot see a
single thing on my phone screen. But if we move over to the ACR, double ACR
coding. Wow, that's really good. This
legitimately is probably the best display if you want to do gaming in a
bright room. It is fantastic. Okay,
Belle just said, "Who's outside gaming in the park?" But I have legitimately
been thinking that I would really love to be able to game on my patio. So, this
would be pretty sick.
One final thing about the display though, we did measure the color space and it got 99% of DCI B3, which is
great. But of course, a good display means nothing if you don't have the
performance to back it up. But we really do. Here we have an Intel Core Ultra
9275HX, which has 24 cores, goes up to
5.4 4 GHz and it is quite a quick one.
To help that, we have 32 GB at 5600
megat transfers per second, which is quite a bit slower than most of the RAM
that's on the market these days, but that's because it's replaceable. Love to
see that. Also in here, we have a 2 TBTE
NVMe SSD. That one's PCIe 4, but we have
a PCIe 5 slot in here if you feel like going extra fast on your storage later.
For Wi-Fi, we have Intel Wi-Fi 7. Love to see that. An NPU from Intel. Very
cool. But the star of the show, of course, is the RTX 5080. This entire
system is able to draw up to 255 watts.
And the GPU alone is able to suck back
175, and we did confirm that with firmware. We were able to get it to
sustain 173, which is a lot of watts for
a mobile GPU. If you do want even more power though, you can spec this with the
5090. But do know that the 5080 and 5090
are not super dissimilar on mobile and you will not be getting extra power or
wattage delivered to it. So don't expect it to be groundbreakingly faster. I do
really want to have a game on this, but first let's have a look at the keyboard
and trackpad. Now, the trackpad right here is 36% bigger than last year. And
also, it can be a numpad if you so choose. So, you can hold right here. Oh,
look at that. Okay, I can take off the sticker now. I guess this is a thing
that you can do. I don't really see how much I would use it, but at the same
it's there. I'm not going to complain about it, especially when the trackpad
itself is great. It is huge. It is glass
topped and the click feel and overall tracking is fantastic. Fortunately, we
haven't really had to worry about crappy trackpads for a while on Windows, ever
since precision drivers came out, and it's nice to see. They just continue to
be great. Same with the
keyboard. Unsurprisingly, the keyboard is fantastic. Asus has been doing a
great job on their gaming laptops for years at this point, and it's so nice
that you don't have to get a gaming laptop and deal with a crap tier
keyboard like you did a couple years ago. This thing's fantastic. It's a
little bit on sort of the softer side.
That's not a bad thing, especially for gaming where you might be holding W for
a really long time. If you don't want to just be holding W, though, up here at
the top, we have programmable macro keys if you don't want to be able to adjust
your volume or turn off your mic. I just remembered we haven't been looking at
the anime vision. Has it been doing anything? A sick. All right, we have the
anime vision enabled now. Also, we have a bunch of pre-done animations like this
one right here. You have your ROG stuff. Oh, what about
raining? That one's kind of cool. Do you guys know what this is? Is
it obvious? Yeah. What do you think? Is that what we stay
with for the rest of the shoot? Yeah. Hell yeah. All right. What game do you
guys want to play? Cyber Gun. That's
good cuz that was kind of the only option. All right. How does this run
some video games? I am in Cyberpunk here. Ultra settings and I turned on
DLSS and it is on balanced mode and I'm currently getting 60 FPS would appear.
Oh, it's dropping a bit. It was way higher before. All right. Yeah, we're
getting about 55 FPS which isn't too
bad. It's decent enough, but I do have the system right now in silent mode. So,
let's try and increase that a bit. We're going to sit
here. We're at like 70 FPS or so, but we
can go to performance mode. 100 FPS. That's looking a bit
better. I am also screen recording at the moment, but holy frig, I am much
less concerned about the game itself. And this display
is great. I know that I already talked about it, but like that is freaking
bright. Like, I'm sorry, Andrew. Is the top down able to handle that at all?
It's just freaking blown out. So, IRL, this looks pretty decent. Like, it is
very white, but it also looks like the sun is glinting off of stuff. The top
down, it is just getting destroyed. This display is way too bright for our
camera. Are are you able to like ND filter this or something? There we
go. I'm sorry, editor. Okay, so you now can see the details in the window here.
Only problem is everything else is way too dark. But that really does show you
the kind of dynamic range that you can get out of this display. It looks
awesome in real life. The fans are definitely a little bit on the louder
side now that we have put it into performance mode. I guess we can put her
in full-blown's turbo mode here and see how loud that is. Performance. I think
the vast majority of headphones once you put them on, you will not be able to
notice it or care. In turbo mode, it's increasing a bit and you might be a
little bit cross. Also, do remember that everything that we're doing here is with
screen recording. Looking at our Labs results at 1600p, we were able to get 92
FPS on average in Cyberpunk at medium settings, 179 FPS in
F124, and 66 in Total War Warhammer. And
looking at our CPU results, we were able to get 151 watts out of the CPU in
Cinebench. Although it did hit 87 degrees, it is still very impressive
that they are able to cool that much out of this little laptop. They do say that
you'll be able to get up to 175 watts PL2 on the CPU. And when combined with
the IPC increases, it should be really quick, although we were not able to
replicate that. You probably have to be in a really cold room to get that kind
of performance. Now that we know that it can get a little bit loud from the fans
in gaming, let's see how loud the speakers can get.
All right. It sounds loud and clear, but I feel like there's not going to be a
whole lot of bass
here. It's not bad. There's definitely
not a whole lot of bass in it, but it is
clear and it is loud. I also hear it sounds quite wide. One sec. I'm
curious if there's settings I can look at. Well, turns out that you can't
fiddle around with the surround sound settings, but it does sound pretty good.
All right, let's check out this webcam. The first thing that I absolutely love
about it is that they have Windows Hello facial recognition. So, there's some
little IR cameras that can pick up your face. It is the best way to get into
your laptop in my opinion. And also, they have a new 1080p webcam, which I
think looks decent. It's a little bit
chunky for sure. Like, there's some
weird there's some weird going on. I
don't really know what to call it, but it is exposing pretty decently for my
face. Right here, it's kind of hot on one side, but that's okay enough. Moving
over here, it's doing a pretty decent
job. There's a lot of noise, though. I don't know what's There's like noise and
some trails, which is interesting. That
said, though, that is not really going to affect your video calls, and it is
exposing well, so I'll give it a pass. All right, let's have a look at the
repairability here. First of all, the bottom of this looks pretty sick. ROG
Stricks, and it has a totally toolless design. So, I just push to the left
right there. Pull like that. That was incredibly simple. That
is maybe the easiest laptop to get in I have ever experienced. And in here, you
can actually do some stuff. You can upgrade the RAM. I already talked about
that, but frig. So few laptops these days let you upgrade the RAM. And I
absolutely love that that's an option. Also, the SSDs, you can just come in
here, give that a little turn, and bam.
Once again, totally toolless, and you can put an SSD there, and another one
over here if you want to upgrade it down the road. In here, we also have three
fans, which is very nice. So, we have these two right here, which are
primarily for your GPU and CPU. Although, also, this third one down here
is blowing across like your VRM and stuff like that to make sure that things
other than your main components stay cool. Speaking of other things staying
cool, they actually have the intakes for this on the keyboard, so you're sort of
actively cooling down the keyboard with the air that's going into it. So, you
don't have to worry about your fingers getting all burned from the laptop. In
here, we also have a vapor chamber that goes all the way across the back. And on
the CPU and GPU, we have liquid metal to make sure they stay nice and cool. Now,
one thing that ASUS couldn't really do is make the battery life incredible. In
here, we have a 90Wh battery, which is getting pretty close to as big as they
could get into it, but not big enough to deliver a whole lot of battery life. So,
we got 5 hours and 44 minutes, which is impressive given the power, not
impressive if you compare it to anything that's not
powerful. Oh, that is so sick. And this
laptop overall is pretty sick. I do have to say that I quite like it. It is heaps
powerful. The display is awesome and the price is high. This thing right here is
$3300 as spec. And if you want a 5090,
ouch. That said though, they have an Ultra 9 in here, a 5080, and a bunch of
storage and RAM. So, you can't really blame them for the price getting that
high. And of course, you can get like a G14 or something with way less power if
you don't want to be spending that much. So, huge thanks to ASUS for sponsoring
this video. Huge thanks to you for watching it. And I hope that you guys
have a great old day. Hit like, get subscribed and so