ASUS ROG Strix Scar II Gaming Laptop, 17” 144Hz IPS-Type Full HD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6GB, Intel Core i7-8750H, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB PCIe SSD, RGB KB, Windows 10 - GL704GV-DS74

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3/17/2018: Update after sending my notebook to Asus under RMA. Asus has refused to repair my notebook and tried to bill me a for a new unit. A technician at Asus damaged my notebook and they are blaming it on me. I escalated to top management and was told they would provide me a 20% discount to buy another one! Unbelievable, but this tells me the current Asus management is out to rip off people! do NOT buy their products! 2/25/2019: After using this laptop for a few weeks, the laptop has failed to power on, just out if the blue. I was recovering Windows, it hung, I pressed the power button for 4 seconds (to force power off). The laptop shut down, but will not restart no matter what I do. It is going back to Asus for RMA. After reviewing many, many laptops, I decided in the SCAR 2 updated with RTX. Keyboard is a real one, not a super flat rediclous, plastic chicklet you get on other notebooks. However, unlike the last generation, this units came with a single 16 GB DIMM (not dual channel config) and a super slow Intel 660 SSD! Unbelievelable! A super fast gaming rig and Asus went cheap on the SSD! Buy expecting to fix this.

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Id love to give this laptop a better review, but I cant, because it never got past the initial setup. The first one I received within a couple of minutes had numerous discolored vertical lines in a two inch slice of the screen, which persisted through reboots and were visible in BIOS and in a separate boot environment. The replacement I received looks to have been previously returned based on the manufacturer tape being split and covered with regular shipping tape, and it too had a screen issue. Backlight bled up from the bezel, which may not be a dealbreaker if this was a $300 laptop, but Im not paying $1800 for a laptop with a screen with ANY defects. Once is a fluke, two in a row is probably indicative of a manufacturing problem. I have an existing Asus ROG laptop and have used Asus parts for numerous gaming desktops, but this quality control issue is seriously worrying. I would not recommend buying this for another generation or two.

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I will be updating this review as I use it, but I wanted to give my first impressions. First off, after unboxing and updating, I ran all the standard hardware tests (dead pixel check, keyboard check, cpu/gpu stress tests) and found no issues. That was nice since I was concerned about ordering online with UPS guys tossing it around. For a gaming laptop, its not super heavy, though it feels more solid than most laptops Ive worked on. The low bezel screen looks gorgeous and feels solid. Opening from a corner doesnt feel like Im torquing it much at all, and it rests easily where I leave it. The trackpad may not feel as luxuriously anti-friction as a Dell XPS, but neither have I complaints. I will say the keys feel much nicer than my old Toshiba. Not surprising as it was half the price. One thing which is nice but unnecessary is the sound. Gamers are likely to use headphones anyway, but I was impressed by the volume. I actually had to shut it down overnight instead of leaving it to run all its updates and restarts because it makes what my gf calls a "Fruit Ninja" sound effect when booting up. I find it satisfying, but Ill probably need to silence it from the bios eventually. Speaking of sound, this *is* a gaming laptop, so if you want something to quietly take notes in class... Maybe dont? Its not horrible, but the fans are quite noticeable when its not idling. This should go without saying, but for the love of Azathoth do not block the vents with a blanket. Its bad form to strangle such a nice computer. It came with a code to get Just Cause 4, so I plan to try that out in the next week and update my review with how it actually performs in game. I started out playing Pokemon Uranium while other things downloaded and I may ironically get sucked into a graphically minimal game first. God I hope the next real Pokemon is more like this... What was I taking about? Oh yeah. For now Ill just say that running FurMark stress test on 1920x1080 res and UHD settings it stabilized at 68 degrees and >80fps. Overall, I think this thing is gorgeous, feels premium, and appears to have solid specs. For reference, I have the 17" w/ RTX 2060 (6GB), NVMe SSD, and 1x16GB RAM. If you want more storage, I recommend going with that model and filling out the spare bay with a 2TB FireCudda SSHD for $80 rather than upping the price much more for less storage.

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First off, I am not a gamer. I purchased a gaming laptop to edit 4k videos in, run Adobe filters, run intense trading algorithms. That being said, I HATE the keyboard. The AWS & d keys are white, which looks so tacky. Next the font of the keyboard is wierd and gamer like but a normal person can hardly tell what the letters are the font is so far off normal. Lately the delete key is not over the backspace key its over 1 key, why on earth change that, I have to go looking for it all the time and because I can hardly read the keys am always missing it. The camo design is also super cheesy the fake carbon fiber too. The computer is fast, its as big and heavy as my 5 year old Toshiba satellite that I am replacing, I was expecting a 17" laptop to be thinner after 5 years especially now that the CD rom is gone. All in all its a good laptop I just wish whoever designed the keyboard would be fired or maybe executed idk. I also think its annoying that not even a gamer designed laptop can be free of a ton of bloatware. I mean really does Asus make that much money from annoying its customers with all the unneeded programs preinstalled. The battery life is awful too. The shortest of any laptop I think Ive ever had. Ok so bottom line its not perfect but I like the quality and speed of this laptop.... just keep it plugged in and dont look down! The end.

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I just received my Strix Scar II with an RTX 2070... fortunately, Ive not seen any of the BSOD horror stories I see in the low star reviews here. Ill update after more time has passed. Overall the machine is pretty nice, and gaming is nearly as fast as on my desktop, but the pretty severe back-light bleed, and the clunky ASUS software (especially the keyboard RGB) leave me a bit underwhelmed by this laptop at the $2200 I paid for it in Feb 2019. That said, it is one of the less expensive options with this hardware config, and perhaps these compromises are what let them hit that price point. Pros: - great gaming frame-rate, decent screen, very responsive.... this thing feels nearly as fast as my 1080 Ti desktop. - reasonably slim and durable form factor - lots of USB-A ports (which I need) - BIOS has a setting to disable the annoying ROG brand POST graphic sound. - the membrane keyboard feels decent and is VERY quiet. Cons: - there is pretty massive screen backlight bleed in the corners (FHD 144hz 3ms screen)... it doesnt really affect functionality, but in a $2200 laptop i expect better - The power button LED is blaring super bright red... Im going to need to black-marker it or something - fans run loudly at odd times when the laptop is not doing anything intensive .... they calm down, but I dont care for the way the laptop feels like its a jet taking off just because I powered it on - software-preload came in an abysmal state. drivers were old, on a laptop that was *just* released in the last few weeks. audio was popping. unclear how to update ASUS software. I finally removed some of it, updated some of it, and got it sorted. Audio seems fine now. - setting up keyboard RGB was confusing. I couldnt find the right tool, so I installed "ROG AURA" from their website, but this was the wrong tool, laptops need "ROG AURA Core"... after installing this I was able to separately configure the 4-keyboard-regions, light-bar, and back-of-screen logo like I wanted. - the keyboard layout is a bit weird, especially the arrow keys.. - the camera is not only in the lower right of the screen, but its not angled up, so to actually get my face in frame, I have to tilt the screen uncomfortably far back... i suppose its better than no webcam, but its not reasonable for regular use. Fortunately i dont use that much on a laptop. - there is no hardware keyboard remapping tool... something thats pretty important for gaming. I used SharpKeys to do windows registry remapping (capslock->control), but this doesnt work properly with League of Legends for some reason... on my desktop I use a gaming keyboard with a remapping driver and it works great.

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Let me start by saying almost everything about this laptop is great. The design is sleek and pleasing, it doesnt scream "Im a gamer", it is lightweight, the parts all feel like good quality parts, and the performance is unbelievable. Coming from an outdated GTX 960M laptop, using this felt like a dream come true. Unfortunately, right from the minute I booted the PC up, I was met with a very obnoxious static/electronic/beeping noise coming from within the case. I thought it might go away, but after some research, I found that I was experiencing coil whine, which, from what I understand, is basically vibrations of small components of the motherboard, and results from cheap outsourced parts. The coil whine produced by the laptop is far too audible for me, and is definitely a dealbreaker. For a less expensive PC, maybe, but when Im paying 2k+ for a brand new, top of the line gaming rig, I wont tolerate these kinds of things. Ill definitely be returning it. Additionally, from the few other reviews Ive read on Amazon regarding the new RTX (2060, 2070, 2080) series of this laptop, others are experiencing the same issue; so its probably a widespread issue with this model. For that reason, I would strongly advise against buying this laptop or any of the Strix Scar II RTX series. Search "coil whine" on YouTube if you want to hear what its like trying to operate this machine. There are far too many solid value RTX machines on the market right now to tolerate coil whine. All in all, I am very disappointed, as aside from the coil whine, this laptop is near perfect for my needs. Oh well, time to give MSI a try ;)

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If you are looking for a budget friendly gaming laptop for mobile gaming I suggest giving this laptop a try and at $1,800 I’d say it’s a great steal because it’s a great tool for everyday use school and work for both light and heavy use that use a new storage option called an M.2 that loads data faster than traditional Solid State Drives (SSDs) which are already fast but suggest upgrading the 512Gb M.2 SSD to a Samsung 1Tb M.2 NVME and add a traditional SSD in the unused storage bay and add a 16Gb laptop RAM stick to maximize potential of this beauty oh and to transfer the m.2 512Gb SSD to a Samsung m.2 1Tb will need free online software to transfer the operating system and all files needed to function properly for specific ASUS ROG files and functions. I hope I helped! ^ w ~

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The amount of updates you have to perform is ridiculous it took literally half a day to get everything up and running on the computer. After all was said and done I got the blue screen 3 times...Under load it gets pretty loud you will be able to hear it across the living room. When you plug in the charger there is a static sound coming from the laptop. The startup sound is really unnecessary and annoying. I have contacted Asus but if I have to ship it out to them I’m not shipping it for repairs I’m shipping it for a refund. For a $2k laptop it was a really disappointing buy.

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Great Laptop for Gaming except for its noise. Its really quick and powerful and runs any game Ive played flawlessly. Its also super light weight if you are on the go a lot. To be honest I almost returned it though. I had to keep it because I waited to long and was outside the 30 days. The real down side is the noise. Holy crap the fans are loud when youre gaming. The cooling seems to work well though and if you wear headphones when gaming this is 5 stars.

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I bought this system knowing it only had 512 Meg SSD, but everything I read online stated you could add another hard drive. This is false, you cannot install another internal drive. There is a slot, a bracket but no connector to hook a cable to... There is an upgrade document that says you can do all of this.. This is my 5th Asus Laptop.. Youve lost a customer.

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