The Asus ROG Strix Scar features multiple “AniMe” lights

Asus’ ROG brand has never skimped on outdoor lighting, but these latest laptops are getting closer to creating a full light show on their lids. The company’s latest Strix lineup, specifically the ROG Strix Scar, has more LED “AniMe” lights on its cover than on the back of the recent ROG Phone 9. If the only thing you require from your gaming rig is excessive lighting, then the new ROG Strix Scar 16 and 18 will be at the top of the heap.

If you’re not into lighting, though, there’s still a lot to like. Strix Scar 16 and 18 have Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX and up to Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 laptop version with 175 W max TGP and 24 GB VRAM. As for its display, OLED hopefuls will have to settle for a 2560 by 1440 mini-LED screen with a 240 Hz refresh rate. At least Asus promises this screen will be extremely bright and support Nvidia G-Sync and Dolby Vision HDR.

The AniMe backlight array tilts to the bottom right, and you can set it to play several preset images or animations. At the briefing, I saw first-hand how the pre-installed system lets you add your own GIFs to the backlight and adjust the RGB light strip around the chassis.

These are hefty laptops, weighing in at 6.28 pounds on the light end, but these desktop replacements can support up to 64GB of DDR5 RAM and 2TB of SSD storage. Even better, Asus has made it much easier to disassemble and replace these parts. The battery and RAM are held in place by latches that take seconds to remove rather than requiring a specialized screwdriver.

ROG also debuted its newly designed Flow Z13, a Windows-based gaming tablet with an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU. This chip should offer solid gaming performance from its large 2.5K (2560 by 1440) 180Hz tablet screen. Asus said it includes an evaporative chamber and Arc Flow fans to keep the tablet cool with a powerful laptop chip inside. And, of course, it comes with a foldable keyboard and stands typical of your average iPad.

I’m still not sold on gamer-specific tablets or phones for anyone but the most hardcore Genshin Impact players. There are more options for pint-sized games, especially with all the excellent notebooks available, such as Asus’ ROG Ally X.

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