Back in July, our hardware writer Katie Wickens called the Asus ROG Strix Scar 15 her favorite gaming laptop (opens in new tab). Now in November, you can pick it up for yourself from Newegg for $1699.99 (opens in new tab)– that’s $500 off the regular price.
It’s hard to imagine (or, maybe, accept) that a machine I could easily carry under my arm is more powerful than my once-mighty (and still large, and heavy) desktop rig, but there’s no getting around it. The ROG Strix Scar 15—a very cool name, but let’s be honest, better suited for an assault rifle than a gaming laptop—rocks an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU with 16GB DDR4 RAM running at 3200GHz and the pièce de résistancea GeForce RTX 3080 GPU with 8GB GDDR6.
Rounding out the package is a 15.6″ 1080p IPS display running at 300Hz, and for storage, a 1TB NVMe M2 SSD. Wireless connectivity comes in the form of WiFi 6 with Asus-exclusive RangeBoost technology, and Bluetooth 5.1. The opti-mechanical keyboard features per-key LED lighting—this is a gaming laptop, remember—and ROG’s Intelligent Cooling keeps it all from getting too spicy on your lap.
That’s a lot of numbers and techno-words, but what does it all mean? For that, let us turn to our review (opens in new tab) from 2021: We slapped an 88% score on it, declaring the Strix Scar 15 “one of the best 15-inch gaming laptops we’ve tested this year.”
We were similarly effusive earlier this year, calling the 300Hz display “positively unchained,” and the CPU/GPU combination “nearly as good as it gets when it comes to gaming laptops today.” That’s a tough recommendation to beat.
Do note that the listed purchase price on Newegg is $1799.99. To get the promised $1699.99 price, you’ll need to apply the “Zip11” discount code at checkout.
Newegg’s website says the code will bump 11% off the purchase price but also indicates that it’s a “limited offer”: The limitation, sadly, is that the discount is capped at $100. Pity, but it’s still a seriously good deal on a seriously good laptop.