Asus ROG Strix Scar II Gaming Laptop, 17.3” 144Hz IPS-Type FHD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 8GB, Intel Core i7-8750H Processor, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB PCIe SSD + 1TB SSHD, RGB KB, Windows 10 - GL704GW-DS76

1.0 out of 5 stars

By John - Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2019

Do NOT buy this laptop, or Any Asus laptops! The company is ripping off consumers!

3/17/2018: Update after sending my notebook to Asus under RMA. Asus has refused to repair my notebook and tried to bill me a for a new unit. A technician at Asus damaged my notebook and they are blaming it on me. I escalated to top management and was told they would provide me a 20% discount to buy another one! Unbelievable, but this tells me the current Asus management is out to rip off people! do NOT buy their products! 2/25/2019: After using this laptop for a few weeks, the laptop has failed to power on, just out if the blue. I was recovering Windows, it hung, I pressed the power button for 4 seconds (to force power off). The laptop shut down, but will not restart no matter what I do. It is going back to Asus for RMA. After reviewing many, many laptops, I decided in the SCAR 2 updated with RTX. Keyboard is a real one, not a super flat rediclous, plastic chicklet you get on other notebooks. However, unlike the last generation, this units came with a single 16 GB DIMM (not dual channel config) and a super slow Intel 660 SSD! Unbelievelable! A super fast gaming rig and Asus went cheap on the SSD! Buy expecting to fix this.

5.0 out of 5 stars

By Julia - Reviewed in the United States on April 10, 2019

Completed hardware tests on unpacking

I will be updating this review as I use it, but I wanted to give my first impressions. First off, after unboxing and updating, I ran all the standard hardware tests (dead pixel check, keyboard check, cpu/gpu stress tests) and found no issues. That was nice since I was concerned about ordering online with UPS guys tossing it around. For a gaming laptop, it's not super heavy, though it feels more solid than most laptops I've worked on. The low bezel screen looks gorgeous and feels solid. Opening from a corner doesn't feel like I'm torquing it much at all, and it rests easily where I leave it. The trackpad may not feel as luxuriously anti-friction as a Dell XPS, but neither have I complaints. I will say the keys feel much nicer than my old Toshiba. Not surprising as it was half the price. One thing which is nice but unnecessary is the sound. Gamers are likely to use headphones anyway, but I was impressed by the volume. I actually had to shut it down overnight instead of leaving it to run all its updates and restarts because it makes what my gf calls a "Fruit Ninja" sound effect when booting up. I find it satisfying, but I'll probably need to silence it from the bios eventually. Speaking of sound, this *is* a gaming laptop, so if you want something to quietly take notes in class... Maybe don't? It's not horrible, but the fans are quite noticeable when it's not idling. This should go without saying, but for the love of Azathoth do not block the vents with a blanket. It's bad form to strangle such a nice computer. It came with a code to get Just Cause 4, so I plan to try that out in the next week and update my review with how it actually performs in game. I started out playing Pokemon Uranium while other things downloaded and I may ironically get sucked into a graphically minimal game first. God I hope the next real Pokemon is more like this... What was I taking about? Oh yeah. For now I'll just say that running FurMark stress test on 1920x1080 res and UHD settings it stabilized at 68 degrees and >80fps. Overall, I think this thing is gorgeous, feels premium, and appears to have solid specs. For reference, I have the 17" w/ RTX 2060 (6GB), NVMe SSD, and 1x16GB RAM. If you want more storage, I recommend going with that model and filling out the spare bay with a 2TB FireCudda SSHD for $80 rather than upping the price much more for less storage.

1.0 out of 5 stars

By Thomas D Smith - Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2019

Screen Not Ready for Primetime

I'd love to give this laptop a better review, but I can't, because it never got past the initial setup. The first one I received within a couple of minutes had numerous discolored vertical lines in a two inch slice of the screen, which persisted through reboots and were visible in BIOS and in a separate boot environment. The replacement I received looks to have been previously returned based on the manufacturer tape being split and covered with regular shipping tape, and it too had a screen issue. Backlight bled up from the bezel, which may not be a dealbreaker if this was a $300 laptop, but I'm not paying $1800 for a laptop with a screen with ANY defects. Once is a fluke, two in a row is probably indicative of a manufacturing problem. I have an existing Asus ROG laptop and have used Asus parts for numerous gaming desktops, but this quality control issue is seriously worrying. I would not recommend buying this for another generation or two.

3.0 out of 5 stars

By Tommy - Reviewed in the United States on March 17, 2019

Good but with some annoying keyboard issues.

First off, I am not a gamer. I purchased a gaming laptop to edit 4k videos, to run Adobe filters, and run intense trading algorithms. That being said, I HATE the keyboard. The AWS & d keys are white, which looks so tacky. Next the font of all the letters of the keyboard is wierd and gamer like, a normal person can hardly tell what the letters are the font is so far off normal. Lately the delete key is not over the backspace key, it's over 1 key, why on earth change that, I have to go looking for it all the time and because I can hardly read the keys am always missing it. The camo design is also super cheesy the fake carbon fiber too. The computer is fast, it's as big and heavy as my 5 year old Toshiba satellite that I am replacing, I was expecting a 17" laptop to be thinner after 5 years especially now that the CD rom is gone. All in all it's a good laptop which is fully on and ready 5 seconds after opening it, I just wish whoever designed the keyboard would be fired or maybe executed idk. I also think its annoying that not even a gamer designed laptop can be free of a ton of bloatware. I mean really does Asus make that much money from annoying its customers with all the unneeded programs preinstalled. The battery life is awful too. The shortest of any laptop I think I've ever had. Ok so bottom line it's not perfect but I like the quality and speed of this laptop.... just keep it plugged in and dont look down! The end.