Enter the ASUS ROG Strix Scar 17 X3D, which itself is a titan of gaming and power in its own right, and with good reason.
Earlier in the year, AMD announced that it would be bringing its 3D V-Cache technology to the laptop space, a promise that manifested itself into the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D, which itself is a variation of the currently existing 7945HX. Naturally, to house the new powerhouse CPU, AMD clearly needed a laptop that would be able to handle all of its power, and then some.So, let's get this out of the way: the ROG Strix Scar design that you see here is pretty much par for the course with ASUS.
But that's not going to be an issue, especially when you consider the rest of the components that reside inside this Scar 17 X3D. Paired with the 7945HX3D is an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 discrete graphics with a maximum TGP of 175W. Simply put, this variant is a real monster of a mobile GPU, with plenty of power to give in any game, especially when it's not running at 4K resolution. More on that later.
Lastly, there's the weight of the Scare 17 X3D. At 3kg, it is definitely a very solid desktop replacement that sits firmly in place, and only ever budging whenever I need to make a slight adjustment to its placement and position on the table.At this point, there isn't much I can say that you, dear readers, would've already surmised in your head about the Scar 17 X3D.
On average, every title on my gaming benchmark list registered average framerates above the 80 fps mark. Heck, Cyberpunk 2077, with all the visual trimmings afforded to it via NVIDIA's latest DLSS 3.5 upscaling and Ray Reconstruction denoising technology - the latter a feature that is only available with the game's GPU-intensive path-tracing mode turned on - maintained close to 100 fps on average and had 1% lows of 87 fps throughout my playthrough.
Operating temperatures here are surprising, to say the least. Prior to my testing of the Scar 17 X3D, I was expecting the CPU, specifically, to achieve the same boiling point peaks as its team blue rival. But that clearly hasn't been the case. At peak performance, the 7945HX3D never even broke past the 90°C barrier and in fact, hovered just below the threshold. More astounding than that, however, is the fact that the RTX 4090 inside this beast never went any higher than 75.3°C.