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The Strix Scar III is quite the impressive gaming laptop, offering strong performance, a 240Hz panel, long battery life, a clicky keyboard and decent speakers. The laptop easily barreled through our battery of tests and even managed to last over 5 hours on our battery test. Overall, the Asus ROG Strix Scar III is one of the top gaming laptops you can buy right now. But in order to make our best gaming laptops list, the system needs to score at least 4 out of 5 stars on our reviews and deliver on the things shoppers care about most. Over the course of our evaluations, we focus on overall and gaming performance. We’re also checking for design, keyboard, audio and display quality and especially value.
You can spend a lot of time delving into specs, but here are the key components to think about. If you just want really good mainstream performance, go for a Core i5 CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD and a 1080p screen. From there, you have the 17.3-inch desktop replacements that like their smaller counterparts are becoming super svelte. However, weighing upwards of 8 pounds, those big boys are made for your home gaming station. When we bring a laptop into our laboratory, our goal is to see how it would work if you brought it into your home or office. While we use a number of industry standard benchmarks such as Geekbench and 3DMark, we focus heavily on real-world tests that we have developed in-house.
The 4K performance is improved over its Pascal architecture-based predecessor, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, with its support for Scalable Link Interface . In a demo of Doom Eternal, the two cards were pitted against each other, and the RTX 3080 was around 50 percent faster than the RTX 2080 Ti. At 4K resolution and all settings maxed out, it ran the game at more than 100 frames per second most of the time, which is massively fast for a title where there’s a lot of stuff happening on screen. Nvidia produces a reference RTX 2080 Ti board design that it sells to its partner companies. Those companies, such as EVGA, MSI, PNY, and Zotac, modify the reference card with their own power and cooling solutions, sometimes adding extra features into the mix.
But savvy PC fans should still consider the RTX 2080 Ti if they can find it at a bargain price. Basically the GeForce RTX 3080 is significantly more powerful than the RTX 2080 Ti. The only caveat is that there aren’t many games that can really push the RTX 2080 Ti, unless it’s running the latest games at max settings, 4K resolution and with ray-tracing enabled.
Intel has recently unveiled its 11th Gen H-Series chips, stay tuned for refreshes of some of our favorite gaming laptops as well as a few new entrants. But most of all, gaming laptops are great for dedicated gamers with mobile lifestyles or looking to save more space than a desktop could. The gamut ranges from college students hoping to play anywhere on campus to businesspeople who want to play during a commute. Whatever you have planned for your machine, there are a lot of intricacies to mobile PC gaming, so it helps to do your research. But with so many laptops to choose from, things can get pretty complicated.
None of the games we tested were able to hit an average or peak fps value near the native refresh rate of the Acer X27 monitor; the technology just isn’t there yet. All the games are running at ‘maximum’ quality, within reason—meaning, I didn’t use super-sampling or any resolution scaling. I did enable all the advanced graphics settings in GTA5, however, and HBAO+ under the post-processing settings in The Witcher 3. I’ve also tested with HDR output enabled in the five games that support it, though testing with HDR modes was limited to the gigabyte gtx 1060 3gb for now . Several games use more than 8GB VRAM at the tested settings, which will seriously punish older cards with 4GB or less memory.
Nvidia shook up the exterior of its GeForce RTX Founders Edition just as much as the interior. Say adios to the single-fan, blower-style design established long ago for reference designs from both AMD and Nvidia. Interestingly, though, performance between the RTX 2080 Ti and the RTX 2080 was roughly on par using our Civilization VI test. With the 4K Ultra settings enabled, the Ti variant scored 74, compared to 76 on the non-Ti chip. Performance was similar using the 4K Medium, 1440p Ultra, and 1440p Medium settings, with both chips posting results within range of each other.