CES 2021 | Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 ditches Comet Lake-H for an unlocked Ryzen 9 5900HX with liquid metal and RTX 3080 Mobile

Last year's Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 powered by the Core i9-10980HK and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super Mobile left us largely impressed with its features and performance even though it did have higher noise levels. This year, Asus has chosen to go the AMD route and has upgraded the GPU to Ampere Mobile.

Asus is targeting eSports gamers with the ROG Strix Scar 17. Featuring a 17.3-inch panel with a 360 Hz refresh rate and a 3 ms response time, Asus said that the Scar 17's panel reduces frame delays by 33% when compared to 240 Hz displays. A QHD 165 Hz option is available too. All Strix laptops in 2021 will feature displays with Adaptive-Sync to minimize screen tearing.

Asus said that the RTX 3080 Mobile in the Scar series runs at a 115 W TDP with room for another 15 W available via Dynamic Boost. On the CPU side of things, Asus has adopted AMD's latest Zen 3 Ryzen 5900HX Cezanne processor that offers eight cores and 16 threads. The company claims that the CPU can offer sustained performance at 54 W when the GPU is active or get up to 80 W on its own for CPU-intensive tasks. In any case, the Ryzen 9 5900HX is unlocked so users can also try their hand at overclocking.

Also available are RAM choices up to 64 GB DDR4-3200 in dual-channel mode and 2x M.2 NVMe SSD slots that support RAID 0. The Scar 17 offers a maintenance hatch that allows easy access to user-replaceable components.

Another new introduction this year are optical mechanical switches that the company claims reduces the response time to just 0.2 ms while also offering a 1.9 mm travel and lasting up to 100 million keystrokes.

A 90 WHr battery provides the needed juice. Asus said that the battery can last up to 12.2 hours web browsing in the Scar models. The ROG Keystone II is back this year and can be used for various functions including launching games or as a secret Shadow Drive.

The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 will be available form Q1 2021 in North America. Pricing information will be available at a later date.