ASUS ROG Strix Scar 15 G532LW Review – One Month Later: Scarred for Life, Again

The last time we reviewed the ROG Strix Scar, we said in the title, “Scared for life, but in a good way.” Because a lot of things changed – the thermals were better, performance was solid and overall it was just magnificent. Then came later this year, another Strix Scar 15 but a rather funny one because unlike last time where there was the Scar and Hero, Republic of Gamers decided to ditch the Hero entirely and the numbering – so now it’s just the Scar. This year though, it may look the same but wow, the finetuning it has gone through and under the hood just got orgasmic.

Look and Feel

1/4

I am not going to go into the whole design because it remains the same as the older Strix Scar II we reviewed not too long ago but what I will mention is how nicer it now feels. On the top of the display, it now comes in a much cleaner slate finish and looks magnificent and the ROG logo remains to be RGB-fied. Opening the laptop with its awesome hinge, which I really love – now has a soft touch finish around the keyboard and OH MY GOD it’s feels heaven like. I am not exaggerating in any way, but it feels soft as a baby’s skin. Smooth and super silky feeling. Which also makes it one of the easiest surfaces to clean. Thank god, the Carbon Fibre look is gone for good which is now replaced with a much edgier ROG scripture on the body – again, which I absolutely love.

RGB Goodness

RGB fans, rejoice because this laptop just got a lot more lit than ever. So much so to a point that, you don’t need a Christmas tree to hang your lights – this laptop will do. The logo has an RGB lighting to it, followed by the keyboard which now has a per key RGB – amazing and the bottom of the laptop has this 180-degree RGB light strip which also looks dashing. Like I said, you got yourself a laptop that lights up as a Christmas tree.

Customizing the lights are all possible with the help of the Aura Creator Studio where you can take complete advantage of the Keyboard’s Per Key RGB and the light strip. If you do have ROG Peripherals, then you can do that too – by making the laptop synchronize with AURA Sync.

Specification and Performance

Just in time for 2020, the ROG Strix Scar 15 got some impressive changes under the hood and it’s a good one:

• Intel Core i7-10875H 10^th Generation Processor (8 Core, 16 threads)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX2070 with 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
• 16GB DDR4 RAM Dual Channel
• Triple M.2 SSD Slots
• Intel Wi-Fi 6 with Gig+ and Bluetooth 5.0

This is actually quite a decked out specification you can get for a laptop – the fact that now you can have up to a whopping 3 M.2 SSD rocks the socks off because having one in a laptop was hard to come across back in the day and ASUS has definitely future proofed that with this laptop – and chances are, with the extra slots, you could even RAID configure it whichever way you want. A dream come true. In terms of ports, the laptop comes with almost no shortcomings – with the ROG Keystone slot on the right, and 3x USB Ports full size 3.2 Gen 1 and a Headphone jack, on the back it has an Ethernet, HDMI and a USB-C port that doubles as DisplayPort, which is a god send – like finally we get those on the laptops – on ROG Laptops.

Performance is as quite as what you’d expect with the Strix Scar 15 because it’s a capable machine. We did the benchmarks with Cinebench R21, Blender, PCMARK, 3DMARK, Geekbench 5 and to verify the specification – HWiNFO. That said, the Blender score perfectly tells that the Intel 10^th Generation processor we here is a very capable one – given the fact that the BMW render took roughly about 6 minutes to render and in Cinebench, we were able to get a single score of 273 points and multicore points of 3825 and that’s just amazing. Shows, how much a multicore processor with higher thread count does fare in editing or production related content.

1/15

As for the rest, you can check out the benchmark screenshot and as for CrystalDiskMark, you can see that ASUS didn’t partition the SSD into two equal halves – thank goodness for that. And the speeds were pretty acceptable – with a read speed of 1933MB/s of Sequential Reads and 1706MB/s Write speeds.

AAA Titles will be able to take the complete advantage of the laptop and we tested some of them to give you an idea on how capable the laptop is – Far Cry 5, Resident Evil 2 and Metro Exodus. Interestingly, Far Cry New Dawn was able to take advantage of the 240Hz display this laptop has.

Display

The laptop houses a 15” FHD Display with almost thin bezels and a thick chin at the bottom – that said, the display has support for G-SYNC, yep, its makes its way back to the SCAR Series and the laptop also gives a refresh rate of 240Hz with 3 ms response time which is ridiculously impressive. As for the rest, the display viewing angles is as what you’d expect with the laptop – great with IPS panel and the colours are decent enough for you to get some photoshop or even Lightroom work done.

We had to use this laptop to edit some of our videos on Premiere Pro because this was the only machine in our Lab, we had that could edit some 4K footage from the EOS R6 we wrote about a while back.

Keyboard, Trackpad and Speakers

The laptop keyboard as a longer travel as compared to a chiclet style keyboard. Initially I wasn’t a huge fan of the keyboard because on how crammed it was or how mushy it felt with the last generations. Good thing is that the new ROG Strix Scar has upped the experience with a little bit more tactile keyboard and something nice to type on. The arrow keys are decent and well sized and certain function keys are now in a row on the right side – which is also nice.

One thing I don’t understand is that, why there are two Fan control buttons – like one dedicated on the top and another as a Fn key. I mentioned about the RGB above, its just gorgeous.

If you miss the number pad, don’t worry because ASUS has brought the NumPad to the trackpad on the ROG line-up and it looks super cool. When you are not using it as a NumPad, the trackpad experience is phenomenal with good travel and smooth texture overall. The dedicated Left and right button are a nice touch to a good experience in the long run – you also get the Windows Precision driver for good gesture controls with the swipe of your fingers.

The speakers aren’t as exciting as I thought it would be because usually ROG laptops or ASUS laptops in general has impressive speakers but this time it sounds different. But for what it’s worth, its loud enough to listen to conversations in movie scenes and easier to listen to songs as well.

Battery Life and Charging

It’s a gaming laptop and our test concluded that this laptop won’t even last way past an hour on battery and you can extend it by a bit with the Battery saving mode if you do plan to game on this. But if you are planning to do some productivity centric tasks, turn off the RGBs and the laptop automatically switches to silent mode and drops to a lower refresh rate – that also allows you to get extra few minutes for you to get some work done on the move. Which is decent.

Conclusion

In the ROG Line-up, we have the Strix, Zephyrus and the God tier laptops like Chimera. And this is the first time, in terms of specification – it feels like owning this Strix Scar 15 as a daily driver doesn’t feel like you are missing out a lot. In fact, this is hands down the best laptop we think money can buy. I mean come on – better improved thermals, triple M.2 SSD Slots and all that power – what’s not to love and the one month I spent with this ROG Strix Scar 15 using it as my go to machine for editing and to play some game titles to relax, I can strongly say that this is the only laptop you will ever need to spend all your money on.