Asus has officially announced the upgrades coming to the ROG Strix Scar 18. While that doesn’t include new silicon from Nvidia, and an only-slightly refreshed chip from Intel, it is still set to be one of the most performant gaming laptops available.
There is only so far you can push PC hardware, and Asus is getting pretty close to the limits of the tech packed inside the gigantic ROG Strix Scar 18. This year’s model features the same 175W thermal design power (TDP) for the RTX 5090 GPU as last year’s.
You want performance? You got it
However, Asus says the new Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus, which takes the place of last year’s Core Ultra 9 275HX, can receive an additional 54% of power in Turbo Mode, and 81% in Manual Mode. That puts the system’s total power in combined workloads at around 320W. Good thing, then, that it comes with a 450W power brick in the box.
Another notable change from last year’s model is the use of a new Mini-LED panel. The previous model’s display shipped with a ‘2.5K’ (2,560 x 1,600px) resolution and 240Hz refresh rate. This year, the refresh rate remains the same while the resolution is bumped up to 4K (3,840 x 2,400px) and brightness increases to a claimed 1,600 nits. The new panel will also support Asus’ proprietary ROG Nebula ELMB (extreme low motion blur) tech, a form of backlight strobing technology meant to reduce eye-tracking motion blur.
Read More: Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 (2025) review – Hefty performance, hefty price
Having only just been announced, there’s no telling when you’ll be able to get one of these locally just yet. We also don’t know how much they’ll cost when they do arrive. But, considering it can be specced with up to 128GB of DDR5 RAM and 8TB of PCIe Gen 5 NVMe storage across two drives, we don’t think it will be cheap.
Last year’s model launched at R100,000, so it’ll be at least that much… but probably more. Considering the last one is still listed on Asus’ website at a heavily discounted R77,000, you could score top-shelf performance if you don’t mind having last year’s hardware.
