This Beastly ASUS Gaming Laptop Is One Of The Best $3,300 Can Buy

That’s not to say I didn’t have gripes. Its mini-LED display, while a stunner, suffered from some noticeable blooming issues due to its lower dimming zone count (1,024). Getting inside it to upgrade the RAM or storage was also, as is the case with most laptops, a bit of a hassle. These weren’t dealbreaking issues in my eyes, but I did hope they’d be addressed at some point in the future.

I’m pleased to say: they were. Our review model of the Strix Scar 16, revamped for 2025, makes some superb improvements across the board while continuing to deliver a top-tier gaming laptop experience. You’ll pay a handsome sum for it, but if you’re willing to take that hit to your wallet, you’ll find a lot to like about what ASUS has cooked up.

Before we dive in, here are the specs on our review unit:

Portable Enough

Unlike Your Desktop Tower, It Fits In A Bag

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: the Strix Scar 16 is not a MacBook Air. Where you could feasibly get through an entire workday unplugged on one of Apple’s machines, this more wattage-thirsty beast will last three, maybe four hours, tops. That’s assuming you tweak the settings in ASUS’s Armory Crate software to dial back the power.It can knock out some tasks away from the wall socket. It won’t leave you totally high and dry if you need to make a last-second change to a pitch deck at the airport. But road-warrior professional work isn’t where this powerhouse truly shines.

Those wanting more of a battery sipper should look to ASUS’s Zephyrus line of laptops.

Instead, the Scar 16 is best viewed as a desktop replacement: a high-performance PC you can easily move from one desk to another. It can be your primary work and gaming device for the next five-plus years. You can build an entire office and gaming setup around it. It’ll never meet the definition of “thin and light,” as the power it puts out and its cooling requirements add some necessary weight and thickness to the chassis. But it’s also generally stowable enough, at 16 inches, to bring along on your next business trip or holiday if need be – provided you’re plugging it in.

This laptop sits in a sweet spot. ASUS produces an 18-inch version of the Strix Scar that I don’t think is quite as reasonable to travel with, and also, some smaller 14-inch devices in different lines that aren’t as powerful. The Strix Scar 16 strikes a good balance between power and portability; you just have to know where the lines are and be sure that your use case exists between them.

A New Look & Welcome Changes

ASUS Took What Was Already Good And Made It Better

The 2025 iteration of the Scar 16 comes packing a brand-new chassis with a more streamlined design. Its underneath RGB lighting strip now extends entirely around the edges of the machine, and our review model includes an AniMe Vision panel on the lid, which can be customized to show pixelated imagery or text. AniMe Vision is the latest evolution of AniMe Matrix from the 2023 and prior Zephyrus laptops, and I have to say, it feels way more appropriate paired with the gamer-focused aesthetic of the Strix Scar line.

The gripes I mentioned at the start have been directly addressed in the form of a more dimming zone-dense (2,000+) mini-LED display, and tool-less entry into the guts of the laptop through its bottom plate. I’m thrilled to see both of these improvements (though, to be fair, the switch to the better mini-LED panel happened in 2024). The display, to me, is borderline OLED beautiful without some of the drawbacks that come with using that technology. And being able to swap in a new SSD without needing a screwdriver is an immense quality-of-life improvement.

There’s a decent amount of I/O here, with three USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, two Thunderbolt 5 / USB-C ports, an HDMI 2.1 port, a 2.5Gbps Ethernet port, and a 3.5mm combo audio jack. You likely won’t be wanting for anything unless you’re a content creator, in which case, you might long for the inclusion of an SD card slot. I have no use for one, so I wasn’t particularly bothered by its omission.

If I had one wish to make personally, having used some of the newer Zephyrus laptops, it’d be that the Strix Scar line adopted the same speaker setup. What’s here is good, but ASUS’s gaming thin-and-lights really stepped up in the audio department with their 2024 and 2025 entries. If ASUS added that to the package, I’m not sure what more I could ask for.

Desktop-Level Performance

There Won’t Be A Lot The Scar 16 Can’t Handle

The machine I have in front of me is packing an RTX 5080, meaning it occupies the same spot in Nvidia’s latest generation as the 4080 model I used. In most games, you can estimate a 15%-20% increase in performance going from the mobile 4080 to the mobile 5080. That’s ideally 115-120 frames per second on the 5080 where you might have seen 100 on the 4080, which is a respectable leap. Unfortunately, due to various economic factors, you’re paying a bit more for it than that 2023 model originally cost.

In my testing, playing everything from Forza Horizon 5 to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I was able to pretty comfortably crank up the settings and go. In that latter title – a newer, heavier Unreal Engine 5 production – I achieved roughly 55-60 FPS at Epic settings with no DLSS upscaling enabled. I was fine with that, given the game’s turn-based battles. If you’re a frame rate snob, switching over to DLSS Quality will take you into the mid 70s, and dialing this setting back even more will result in further boosts to performance.

Something you should bear in mind, though, is that there will be fan noise, especially with this laptop being as performance-focused as it is. Squeezing desktop-class hardware into a portable form factor comes with that quite audible downside. If you head into Armory Crate and switch the power mode to Silent, you’ll likely be able to run many games at playable frame rates with much less fan noise. Clair Obscur, for example, hovers in the mid 50s at Epic settings with DLSS set to balanced in the Strix Scar 16’s Silent mode. It’s definitely doable, but you’ll be sacrificing a great deal of power, and that power is ultimately what you’re paying for. I’d invest in a good headset and, so long as you’re not in a library, let the laptop’s Turbo mode rip.

The ScreenRant Verdict: Recommended

A Big Investment But Worth Every Penny

Past Scar 16s were already considered by many to be top of the line. The 2025 ASUS Strix Scar 16 keeps that momentum going, making it one of the best gaming laptops on the market at the moment. It’s powerful enough to play every game very well while being portable enough to toss in a bag and take on the go. In terms of pricing, its $3,300 MSRP is certainly not chump change, but the 5080 version finds a happy medium between price and performance, and is far more affordable than the 5090 edition Best Buy is selling for a full $1,000 more. Our review unit includes many of the same bells and whistles as that higher-end model and delivers a monstrous punch all the same. It’s the one I’d go with if I were shopping around.

I don’t think this is a machine for casual gamers. If that’s you, you’re not likely to get everything out of this that you paid for, and you’ll have a bulkier laptop, to boot. As stated earlier, you may want something in ASUS’s Zephyrus line instead. You’ll sacrifice some power, but you’ll get a more MacBook-like experience in exchange.

If you’re primarily a PC gamer and you want a top-of-the-line device that can be your home rig and your away rig for years to come, however, the Strix Scar 16 is a worthy purchase. It’s a substantial one, given the price tag, but a worthy one, nonetheless.