As a content creator, a lot of what we do involves understanding the limits of our resources and compromising to what is practical and achievable. There are many instances that great ideas fall to the wayside simply because its many limitations are too steep to overcome. That being said there’s a certain comfort that comes with just powering through those limitations and just making things happen. The Asus Strix SCAR 17, the Alpha of the Asus pride, with its beefy specs, durable form factor and all-around excellence, lets you do exactly that and then some.

This beast of a machine helps you be prepared for any challenges you face and allows you focus on making content that is king.

Let’s see how it all racks up.

More To See Than Can Ever Be Seen | Appearance and Form Factor

Right off the bat, from its very exterior, the Asus Strix Scar 17 exudes the class and style of a premier laptop. The matte black finish is complemented with a diagonal pattern that extends towards the cooling and port base. The bold Asus ROG Logo is offset to the side which is also equipped with RGB lighting, accenting the onyx surface with a colored glow when in use. 

The bottom of the base also has a place for one of four different colored Armour Caps which comes with the package and can be used to add a little bit of personal flair to the SCAR 17 if you so choose.

Opening it up feels really stable thanks to a pair of sturdy hinges that cleverly swing out from under the base. 

The Scar 17’s glorious 17.3-inch screen has very slim bezels on its top and sides measuring roughly .4 cm each. Despite a large but barely noticeable 2.4- 3 cm bezel on the bottom, you get a lot of good real estate to look at.

The screen itself also houses another LED panel that adds some additional atmosphere and lighting both when the Scar 17 is closed or opened up.

The keyboard instantly impresses as not only does it reflect the diagonal design on the Scar 17’s exterior, it does so making that section transparent allowing users to see through into the parts inside. 

The keys themselves are also quite impressive equipped with RGB lighting and mechanical switches that produce a faint but satisfying click that makes them an absolute joy to hit, use and type on.

And finally, there’s also the trackpad, which does its job when necessary I suppose but most likely users of the Scar would prefer to plug in their mouse of choice, anyway.

Going around to the sides, The north side is where most of the port action is housing the Charging port, Ethernet, HDMI, a USB Type-C, and a USB 3.2 Gen-1 Type A all together with two exhaust ports on both ends.

The left side houses one of it’s four exhaust ports as well as twin USB 3.2 Gen-1 Type A ports as well as the Audio combo jack

On the right side is simply another exhaust port and the slot for the magnetic Keystone II, which are NFC-enabled keys that unlock access to personalization settings among other things and a hidden Shadow Drive for additional and private storage options.

Finally, on the south side is one lengthy wrap-around LED strip spanning the gap between both sides. This along with the rest of the RGB lighting on the Scar 17 can be customized in nifty and creative ways thanks to the built-in Aura Creator that manages it. 

The bottom of the Scar 17 surprisingly contains way more detail than usual. It has rubber parts that support the machine that are also cleverly adorned with the ROG branding stylishly framing more exhaust ports.

Perhaps the most pleasantly surprising thing is how light and compact the Scar 17 is despite being a beast of a machine under the hood—The whole thing weighs at about 2.7 kg and is only around 2.6 cm thick when folded!

In terms of overall appearance, everything about the Scar 17’s looks, make and form factor gives off a premium and elite feel. It wastes no opportunity to establish that it is a top-class machine. You can tell all of that just by merely looking at the machine but perhaps best of all, the Scar 17 backs up everything about it’s impressive appearance the moment you turn it on.

More To Do Than Can Ever Be Done | Performance 

I used the Scar 17 for about a whole month everyday as my primary machine. As a multi-faceted content creator, every piece of content that I produced in the past month went through the Scar 17. I am pleased to report that whether I was making digital art, editing videos, cleaning up hours-long podcast audio or stream hardware-intensive games, not only did the Scar 17 never falter or let me down, it was able to do so with style and at peak performance. 

In making digital art on Adobe Photoshop, I had the freedom to use any of the hardware intensive brushes, utilize any amount of layers and open PSD documents and reference photos that I need without worrying input lag or hardware issues slowing me down. This allowed me to focus on expressing my creativity and making the art piece better without holding back or waiting. 

The Scar 17’s screen feels perfect for making art since it’s incredibly bright and vivid screen while also still managing to be comfortable to look at even during long periods of use.

The Scar 17 also takes away all the hassle from editing audio and video thanks to its beefy 32GBs of RAM. My editing programs of choice DaVinci Resolve and Audacity always ran without a hitch and were devoid of painful stutters and crashes that would normally lead to sync issues and even loss of data. During my time with the Scar 17, I was absolved of all that heartache and was able to get the work done making the most of my time.
Additionally, render times with the Scar 17 are blisteringly fast. I was able to clean up, process, and save several 4 hour-long podcast recordings within under three minutes—a process that usually takes upwards of 15 minutes on a decent rig. Likewise, rendering video is a breeze, pushing out a one-minute stream promo video in just 25 seconds—a fraction of the time that I usually expect.

Even live streaming is a virtual cakewalk with the Scar 17. I streamed my digital art process in Photoshop multiple times using OBS Studio and it always went smoothly. On top of that, I was also able to stream hardware-intensive games like Rainbow Six: Siege at 6000 bitrate with OBS Studio for four whole hours and the Scar 17 didn’t even break a sweat.

Thanks to its 300 Hz screen, it was also easier to perform better in FPS games such as Siege as I was able to see situations and opponents and react quicker than normal. Thanks to its games its twin 1TB SSDs, I was also able to load AAA games at lightning-fast

On the subject of games, we also conducted some benchmarks with some of the beefiest AAA games on the market today. For the tests, we ramped up each individual game’s graphics settings to the absolute highest that they could go and tested each of the Scar 17’s modes (Turbo, Performance, and Silent). For almost all of them, with the exception of Deus Ex Mankind Divided, the Scar 17 was able to chew through them with ease barely even breaching half of the VRAM’s capacity.

Here are the results:

It Moves Us All | Final Thoughts

After my time with the Asus Strix Scar 17, I was thoroughly impressed. With it backing up it’s gorgeous premium looks with its incredible power under the hood in a surprisingly compact frame, it was very hard not to be. 

As a creator that produces content across different mediums, I enjoyed the comfort and confidence that the Scar 17 would not only be able to handle everything I throw at it but do so at a top-tier level. Whether I was streaming graphically intensive video games, making digital artwork, editing podcasts or videos, the SCAR is a beast of a tool that never let me down. 

It had more than enough power to stay with me in bouncing from different projects and activities in my day to day and that gave me peace of mind knowing that it’s more than capable of keeping up. It also allowed me to focus on making the content itself better using all the tools available without having to worry about rendering times or hardware limitations.

Everything about the design of the Scar 17 points towards it being a premiere machine. It is evident when you look at it and most importantly when you use it, you know this is the king of everything the light touches. 

If you’re able to saddle up to its admittedly high price point, you’ll find unparalleled ease, comfort, style, and peak performance that only a true content creator’s dream machine can provide.