Asus’ ROG brand has never been one to skimp on external lighting, but these latest laptops come close to creating a full-on light show on their lids. The company’s latest Strix lineup, especially the ROG Strix Scar, has flashed more LED “AniMe” lights on its cover than on the back of the latest ROG Phone 9. The ROG Strix Scar 16 and 18 will be at the top of the heap.
However, if you don’t mind the lighting, there’s still a lot to like. The Strix Scar 16 and 18 have Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX up to the laptop version of Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 with 175W max TGP and 24GB of VRAM. As for its display, OLED hopefuls will need to settle for a 2560 by 1440 mini-LED screen with a 240 Hz refresh rate. At least Asus promises that this screen will be brighter and supports Nvidia G-Sync and Dolby Vision HDR.
An AniMe backlighting array crosses the bottom right corner, and you can set it to play a number of preset images or animations. In the forum, I saw firsthand how the pre-installed program allows you to add your own GIFs to the backlight and adjust the RGB light bar around the chassis.
These are heavy laptops, coming in at 6.28 pounds on the light end, but these desktop replacement devices can support up to 64 GB of DDR5 RAM and 2 TB of SSD storage. Even better, Asus has made it very easy to disassemble and replace these components. The battery and RAM sticks are held inside with latches that take a few seconds to remove instead of requiring a special screwdriver.
ROG also introduced its newly redesigned Flow Z13, a Windows-based gaming tablet with AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU. This chip should provide solid gaming performance from its large 2.5K (2560 by 1440) 180Hz tablet screen. Asus said it includes a vapor chamber and Arc Flow fans to keep the tablet cool with a large laptop chip inside. And, of course, it comes with a foldable keyboard and stands for your average iPad.
I’m still not sold on gamer-specific tablets or phones for anyone but die-hard Genshin Impact players. There are plenty of pint-sized gaming options, especially with all the great laptops on offer, like Asus’ ROG Ally X.
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