First look: Asus ROG GL503 Strix Scar Edition

Gaming has become a multi-million dollar spectator sport and notebook manufacturers are hopping onto the bandwagon with a host of interesting offerings. The Asus ROG GL503 Strix Scar Edition gaming laptop is one such interesting proposition that has been purpose-built from the ground up to act as the de facto gaming notebook for professional gamers who specialise in first person shooters.

We got the chance to get an up-close look at a production model of the Strix Scar Edition and it looks like a real beauty indeed. Named after the Fabrique National SCAR rifle which was created for consideration by US Army Special Forces and which is currently in limited issue, the ASUS ROG GL503 Strix Scar Edition is fortunately a lot easier to come by.

Externally, the notebook comes with a relatively mainstream matte black finish that looks rather fetching but where it departs from mainstream gaming notebooks is that it’s relatively slim and light at 2.3cm in thickness and weighing at about 2.5kg.

In terms of hardware, retail units shipping to Malaysia come with the works in order to tackle first person shooters. The 15.6-inch IPS display has a 144Hz refresh rate, a 9ms response time, has an 800:1 contrast ratio and Full HD resolution as well as NVIDIA G-Sync support – a feature that doesn’t come cheap, mind – for seamless onscreen visuals.

Paired with this is a top-shelf Intel Core i7-7700HQ Kaby Lake processor, 16GB DDR4 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX1070 graphics with 8GB GDDR5 VRAM and a 256GB PCIE 3×4 NVME M.2 SSD paired with a 1TB Firecuda SATA drive. Needless to say, this hardware setup ensures that the ROG GL503 Strix Scar Edition is VR ready too. Keeping it all cool is a refined thermal venting design that integrates a series of 12V fans that spin faster than normal 5V blades while heat pipes help to vent heat from critical areas.

The notebook also integrates their ROG Gaming Center desktop app that lets you see important information about your notebook at a glance like CPU and GPU performance and which also enables you to boost fan cooling during intensive gaming at the touch of a button.

Droolworthy, yes but where it knocks things out of the ballpark is in the more subtle aspects of its design. When you pop the top lid open, you’ll notice that the Strix sports a full sized chiclet-style keyboard complete with a full sized numeric keypad. The keyboard itself has 4-zone backlighting, and most important of all, has been optimised for FPS shooters in every aspect of its design.

For starters, the space bar has been specifically made larger for easier access and the WASD keys – the most critically important direction keys for an FPS game – have been reinforced to survive and function perfectly for more than 20-million key presses.  Each of the keys also features an ergonomically comfortable 0.25-mm deep keycap curve as well as N-key rollover for more accurate button presses.

This impressive hardware sets you back a cool RM9,299 though a cheaper variant is available with mostly similar specifications bar the inclusion of 8GB RAM which is 8GB less than the stock version. You also get a more modestly specced NVIDIA GeForce GTX1060 graphics card with 6GB GDDR5 VRAM while the 15.6-inch 1080P display also ditches G-Sync tech; all this clocks in at a cheaper RM7,299. It looks like an extremely promising offering indeed and well suited for its intended task to run through FPS games like a hot knife through butter. Stay tuned for a full-on review when we put this baby through its paces.