The Strix SCAR II has a big display in a compact frame. It also has a cool RGB light bar on the front edge of the base. It’s expected to go on sale in India before December.
Taiwanese hardware and electronics maker Asus announced a new Republic of Gamers laptop last week in Taipei, Taiwan. Dubbed the Strix SCAR II (GL704), the new gaming laptop comes with a slew of novel features. To start with, it has an ample 17.3-inch display that sits inside the body of a 15.7-inch chassis. This is made possible through clever engineering and slim bezel design. According to the company it’s the first laptop in its class to span less than 400mm in width. Display options include a Full HD screen with a refresh rate of either 144Hz or 60Hz, depending on the variant. The variant with a refresh rate of 144Hz gets complete sRGB colour gamut coverage and a 3ms response time.
The SCAR II has a body texture that combines Kevlar and camouflage. What’s unique about it is the bright RGB light bar that stretches along the front edge of the laptop’s base. Through the AURA Sync app, RGB lighting across seven zones on the laptop—including four on the keyboard, two on the frontal light bar, and one on the ROG logo of the lid—can be customised by the user.
The keyboard on the Strix SCAR II has been rated for 20 million keystrokes, according to Asus. An Overstroke technology allows the keys to register strokes even when they’re fired only halfway through the 1.8mm key travel for faster response. During the product demo I had a chance to try typing on the laptop for a brief duration. I thought the keys depressed accurately during every stroke and the key travel seemed more than sufficient.
Powering the Strix SCAR II is the latest generation of Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors. Graphics is taken care of by an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 GPU with 6GB of video memory. RAM options go up to 32GB. According to an Asus representative I met at the demo, the laptop has two RAM slots. So a 16GB + 16GB RAM configuration is possible. Storage is taken care of by a PCIe NVMe SSD that goes up to 512GB along with either a traditional hard drive or solid-state hybrid drive that goes up to 1TB. The model I viewed at the demo had a 1TB Seagate FireCuda hybrid drive.
Asus has employed thin copper fins and patented trapezoidal cuts in the lid to ensure better heat dissipation. It has also updated its Gaming Centre app to Armoury Crate, a more unified control centre for adjusting various system settings like fan speed and acoustic performance. The ROG Strix SCAR II (GL704) is expected to launch in India well before Christmas this year.
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Vignesh Giridharan
Progressively identifies more with the term ‘legacy device’ as time marches on. View Full Profile
