Today we're looking at the Asus ROG Strix Scar Ii GL504GV, a gaming laptop with a long product name but some of the latest hardware inside, including GeForce RTX 2060 graphics. Having already reviewed the RTX 2060 in detail, today we're focusing on what the overall laptop package provides.

Like many other refreshed RTX laptops, in that location hasn't been a significant change to the design on the Asus ROG Strix or almost of the internal hardware. Previously I reviewed the fifteen-inch Scar Two which came with either a GTX 1060 or GTX 1070, while now you can get an RTX 2060 or RTX 2070, admitting at unlike price points. Our review unit is the GL504GV that packs the RTX 2060 priced at $one,700.

Other hardware is largely unchanged from the previous generation. The same Intel hexa-core Cadre i7-8750H is used, 16GB of DDR4 retention, and a 15.6-inch 1080p 144Hz IPS display. The master storage options accept been bumped upward a tier across the board, so where the base model got a 128GB SSD, that's at present upward to 256GB, and and so on. Our review unit of measurement, and the main choice available on Newegg and Amazon, comes with a 512GB PCIe SSD.

In terms of blueprint, aside from the brushed aluminium lid, most of the laptop uses plastic, with a soft bear on coating applied around the keyboard. This soft bear on area has a carbon cobweb pattern with half of information technology getting a camo print. We'd probably prefer if the camo wasn't there just Asus loves to do this sort of thing.

Yep, there's RGB, also. Y'all get a strip forth the front edge of the laptop, plus the off-heart Asus ROG logo on the chapeau, both controllable through Asus' Aura software. The forepart RGB strip is directly linked to the four zone RGB keyboard backlighting, you don't get per-central RGB here but the basic four zone event is nice enough. The keyboard has a flake of a spongy tactile response, it's not as clicky equally I'd prefer, but travel altitude is decent, plus you get a numpad and none of the keys are truncated to fit that in. The trackpad is great and nosotros love the inclusion of ii separate click buttons.

Like a lot of gaming laptops these days, a slim bezel around the 15-inch display keeps the laptop'southward footprint quite compact, although there'due south all the same a sizable bezel beneath the screen. Unfortunately Asus has gone with probably the worst webcam placement possible, first and low below the display, if the webcam is at all a business concern for you, of course.

The chassis is your typical mid-tier option: information technology'southward not a slim and light system like the Asus Zephyrus, only it's not a mesomorphic animal like the big male child Asus models. It clocks in at 26mm thick and 5.iii lbs, so it'southward portable without getting into the thin category that comes at a higher toll. The primary limitation for portability will exist the smaller 62 Wh battery, versus nearly 100 Wh you get with systems like the Gigabyte Aero 15.

I/O is very solid. Iii USB iii.1 type-A ports, two gen 1 and one gen 2, plus a USB 3.two gen 2 type-C port (at that place's no Thunderbolt). You also get HDMI 2.0b, miniDisplayPort 1.2, Ethernet, an SD menu slot and a 3.5mm sound jack. Internal connectivity comes in the course of an Intel 802.11ac 2x2 Wi-Fi plus Bluetooth 5.0 combo solution.

Earlier talking about performance, there are a few notes to be made. The first is relating to Asus' software suite, the Armoury Crate. There'south a lot of standard stuff in at that place, but the important matter are the fan profiles: Windows, Silent, Balanced and Turbo, plus a manual style. For game testing we used the counterbalanced mode, because we couldn't spot whatsoever divergence in functioning betwixt that and Turbo. For productivity apps nosotros used the Turbo mode, it's louder simply information technology does increase the power limit on the CPU which for long workloads like video encoding led to a small performance increase.

And while the Turbo mode is squeamish, what'due south not nice is getting a single 16GB DIMM of DDR4-2666 memory. This ways the laptop runs a standard 16GB configuration in unmarried-channel only, which leads to lower retentiveness bandwidth than dual-aqueduct laptops, and therefore lower performance. Information technology does exit a DIMM slot free if you want to upgrade to 32GB down the line, but that'due south come up at the cost of out of the box performance.

Nosotros won't get into excessive item about the Core i7-8750H because nosotros've covered it plenty of times in other reviews. Information technology'due south a popular six-core CPU used in nearly gaming laptops, and it's the option we'd choose for productivity and gaming workloads without getting into crazy form factors.

Performance

The Asus ROG GL504GV performs roughly on par with a typical Core i7-8750H laptop, but that'southward downwards to a few notable differences that both favor and disadvantage the system. Due to the Turbo fan mode, longer workloads tend to throttle less than standard 8750H functioning, so we're seeing up to a ten percentage reward for longer multi-threaded workloads similar Handbrake. This laptop tin sustain college clocks for longer. On the flip side, due to having single-channel memory, this laptop gets lower marks in our memory heavy benchmarks. That includes 7-Zip compression, MATLAB and Adobe Photoshop Iris Blur.

As usual here'southward our comparing betwixt the Core i7-8750H and the concluding-gen quad-cadre Core i7-7700HQ. Due to higher clock speeds and more cores, nosotros're looking at over a l% reward in some multi-threaded workloads, as well every bit higher unmarried-thread functioning. You won't see this sort of improvement in every workload, but if you're coming from an older quad-core system, the 8750H will be a notable upgrade.

This is the chart for those wondering whether they should buy a larger fifteen-inch gaming arrangement, or a portable xiii-inch ultrabook for their productivity tasks. By and large, the 8750H absolutely smokes a 15W CPU similar the Cadre i7-8565U, delivering more than double the performance in some cases. Throw in proper GPU dispatch and for something similar Premiere encodes, a gaming laptop is an order of magnitude faster.

When information technology comes to gaming, nosotros have tested over a dozen games breaking down how the RTX 2060 performs in this verbal system. Check that out in our RTX 2060 (laptop) GPU review. Practise notation that for that review we loaded upward the GL504GV with dual-aqueduct retentiveness, so it will be a tad faster because of that.

On average, the unmarried-aqueduct configuration of this GPU is 13 percent slower than the dual-channel config. That'due south a significant departure simply from non having that second stick of retention in there. Some games are barely impacted, such equally Clay 4, Picket Dogs two and Wolfenstein 2. Others like Casualty, Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Resident Evil 2 see a 25% performance cut or more as the limited memory bandwidth chokes these games. In that location is no doubt that dual-channel retention is significantly amend for gaming at 1080p.

In terms of an actual FPS touch on, in a game similar Hitman 2 we're talking about going from a seventy FPS average, downward to 50 FPS with single-channel memory (!!!). In Assassin's Creed Odyssey, a 60 FPS experience is cutting downwards to only 45 FPS. It'southward not a good performance loss.

This besides impacts the margins between this RTX 2060 laptop, and other GPUs. Comparing dual-channel to dual-aqueduct, the RTX 2060 is about 28% faster on average than a GTX 1060 6GB. But this unmarried-channel RTX 2060 laptop, compared to a dual-channel GTX 1060 6GB arrangement is only 12% faster, and is really slower in some games. Then compared to something with a GTX 1070 inside with dual-channel RAM, it loses by more than xx%.

Leaving that empty DIMM slot is a costly merchandise-off to get in easy for owners to upgrade their RAM in the time to come. We take to wonder how many people actually open up up their organization and chuck in that actress stick. Surely the number isn't high enough to justify cutting performance for well-nigh others.

Ideally this system should come equipped with two 8GB sticks by default, leading to much amend performance from the RTX 2060.

If yous are thinking of buying the GL504GV and want to solve this problem, you lot're looking at spending $100 for a second 16GB DDR4-2666 SO-DIMM stick. Not huge, but something you might desire to factor in.

Looking at the cooling solution used in the ROG Strix Scar II, using the balanced fan mode for gaming which delivered the performance you've seen so far, the cooler is pretty loud nether load, pushing up near 48 dBA in our testing. It also tends to ramp upward and down a fair bit while you lot're gaming, and then sometimes the cooler is quieter than this figure, only to be honest the frequent changes are just every bit annoying as running at 48 dBA all the time.

However, temperatures are very good, which indicates the counterbalanced mode is maybe ramping the fan up too high. We recorded a mere 73 degrees on the GPU and 83 degrees on the CPU in an extended Spotter Dogs 2 session, which is well below other laptops with similar noise outputs. Nosotros reckon some manual fan tuning would go a long way to balancing out temperatures and noise.

At the aforementioned time, fifty-fifty when using the Turbo fan profile, the system was much quieter nether pure CPU workloads like Handbrake. Clocking in below 40 dBA is a good result. You lot should still use the Turbo mode though to increase the power limit, even though it doesn't ramp up fan speeds to ridiculous levels in CPU tasks. While gaming the fans really creepo up, so I don't recommend it.

For storage, nosotros received a 512GB Kingston Grand.2 PCIe NVMe SSD. This is a mid-tier performer, non equally fast as some of the Samsung or Intel SSDs we've seen in other gaming laptops, but still fast enough to deliver a performance reward over basic SATA SSDs. Internally at that place'due south also a free ii.5-inch drive bay for more storage.

The laptop's display is good. A decent 15.6-inch 1080p IPS with a 144 Hz refresh rate, peak brightness is up around 300 nits, acceptable for a gaming laptop, and it has a dissimilarity ratio of around thou:1. In terms of color performance, this is an sRGB brandish, so no fancy wide gamut, just not that you need that for gaming.

Our primary concern was with the incorrect white signal. Asus is using approximately 7500K rather than the right 6500K, which gives the display a colder, bluer tone. This leads to boilerplate deltaEs between three.0 and 4.0 which isn't authentic only isn't hugely inaccurate either.

Putting It All Together

The Asus ROG Strix Scar II GL504GV is a fine laptop with a practiced design, a good trackpad and keyboard, and generous I/O. It's not overly portable, information technology's not overly mesomorphic. It's got a pretty proficient brandish, upgradeability options, and the internal hardware and performance is expert, too.

Our only major concern has to do with the single-channel retentivity out of the box. It doesn't touch on productivity workloads heavily, but it does shave ~ten% off the gaming performance. It is fixable - a $100 stick of memory added into the 2d slot immediately gives you that performance back - but nosotros'd rather go that included past default.

In terms of value, the Asus ROG Strix Scar Ii is somewhat hard to recommend to buy right now when y'all look at the gaming performance you are getting. But this is non specific to this laptop, only all RTX laptops currently in the market. At $1,700, the Scar 2 is considerably more expensive than GTX 1060 laptops with a similar CPU, display, storage and other components, which retail for around $one,100 these days. In plain figures, for 63% more than cash, you're getting a system that'southward only 12% faster... or 28% faster if you add in a second stick of RAM.

It'due south as well not competitive with outgoing GTX 1070 laptops. The predecessor to this system, the GL504GS, is only $ane,500 in certain stores, including Newegg. That gets yous a very like laptop that is faster for less money. Even if for a express fourth dimension while supplies last, RTX laptops at launch do not offer neat value.

Laptop prices will inevitably change over the coming months, and so those watching this review in the future may be faced with a completely dissimilar situation. For now, we only dislike the idea of a new product non beating concluding generation's on raw functioning nor value. Nosotros're honestly not sure who is responsible for setting these prices. Perhaps it'due south simply Nvidia charging more for the RTX GPU since every other RTX 2060 system is around the same price as the Scar II.

Value word bated, Asus has designed the Strix Scar II to be attainable and evangelize a decent 1080p gaming feel. Y'all won't find much to set it apart from other mostly adept gaming laptops at this price bespeak, but it'southward a good all-round package nonetheless.

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  • GeForce RTX 2060 on Amazon, Newegg
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