Asus ROG Strix GL504 Scar II review: The Scar II has a great screen, but an ugly paint job

To mangle a quote from Justice Potter Stewart, I may not always be able to define what makes a good laptop keyboard, but I know it when I see it. The chunky, clicky keyboard is a highlight of this 15-inch gaming laptop, which mixes a handful of premium features with an otherwise pedestrian design.

7.9

Asus ROG Strix GL504 Scar II

$1,899 at Amazon

The Good

Excellent performance from a strong CPU-GPU combo. The better-than-most 144Hz screen has a slim bezel, giving it a modern feel.

The Bad

The boxy camo-covered body doesn't look particularly interesting. The backlit keyboard lacks individual key lighting. Battery life isn't great, even for a gaming laptop.

The Bottom Line

The Asus Strix Scar II has great performance and a high refresh rate screen with a thin bezel. But it still looks like it was designed in a dorm room.

If you go shopping for this particular model, pay close attention and make sure you're looking for the proper name. This has the unwieldy moniker Asus ROG Strix GL504 Scar II.

Asus offers a dizzying array of gaming laptops with different combinations of names: ROG (Republic of Gamers), Strix, Zephyrus, Scar, Hero, FX and so on. Most are available in numerous configurations. It usually takes some digging into specs to figure out exactly how one differs from another. The Scar II falls solidly in the middle of the pack, adding some high-end features, but inside a bulky, generic body.

The screen doesn't get past 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution, and is missing extras like Nvidia G-Sync support, but it's a 144Hz display, meaning it has a higher refresh rate than most laptop screens. That could be important to competitive esports gamers, who need low latency and fast refresh rates. Just as interesting, the bezel around the display is pleasingly thin -- a rare accomplishment for a gaming laptop.

Aside from that, the boxy chassis is a bit of a yawn. There's a subtle camouflage pattern that doesn't really pop enough. At first glance, some people told me the laptop just looked dirty. The customizable keyboard backlighting (which also includes a light-up logo on the back of the lid and a small light bar right in front of the touchpad) gets the job done, but it only has four keyboard lighting zones, rather than per-key lighting. The all-important WASD keys, often used in PC gaming, are transparent plastic. It's a little visual pop I liked, even if it's rather gamer-y.

The Intel Core i7-8750H, Nvidia GeForce 1070 version tested here is $1,999, while dropping the GPU to the Nvidia 1060 gets you down to $1,699. Asus prices and configurations vary widely around the world, but comparable models run around £1,499 or AU$2,999. 

Made for gaming

Despite not being knocked out by the overall design of the Scar II, using it to play games was an excellent experience. The system matched or beat out several other laptops with Nvidia 1070 or 1070 Max-Q GPUs in some tests, and handily beat a couple of examples with Nvidia 1060 GPUs. Moving up to a full 1080 GPU was the only way to show up the Scar II.

In anecdotal gaming, running recent games from Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire to Vampyr, the system ran smoothly at full 1080p resolution and high-to-ultra detail settings. Still, the system fans did kick in during gaming, and they get pretty loud. Asus says the cooling system includes "antidust tunnels" which blow dust away using faster fans.

Does anyone really leave their gaming laptop unplugged for too long? I know I usually don't. In this case, that's a good thing, as the Scar II ran for only 3 hours, 7 minutes in our streaming-video battery-drain test. A handful of gaming laptops can top 5 or 6 hours on this test (see the chart below), but doing any kind of unplugged gaming will drop battery life significantly.

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Plenty to unpack

There's a lot going on with the Scar II. It has an excellent CPU-GPU combo and strong performance. The slim screen bezels and 144Hz refresh rate make for superb display specs. A handful of design touches, like the transparent WASD keys, add some visual interest. But the rest of the design is boxy and generic, with the needle tipping too far into "gamer" territory, especially its silly camo paint job.

For $2,000, it's fair to expect more zing. If you're specifically looking for an Nvidia 1070 gaming laptop, those can found for a few hundred dollars less. Or you might like something especially sharp-looking, like the new 15-inch Razer Blade, which can be had for a little less (for the Nvidia 1060 version) or a bit more (for the 1070 version). Keep in mind, however, those include just a 256GB SSD, not the 256GB SSD-1TB hybrid HDD combo included here.   

Laptops with the best battery life: See the top 25 laptops and two-in-one PCs with the longest battery life.

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