Asus has just announced the heavily rumored ROG Strix SCAR 17 X3D, which sports AMD’s brand new Ryzen 9 7945HX3D, the first mobile CPU armed with a 3D V-Cache.
What this means is a monstrously fast gaming machine that looks sure to set our benchmarks on fire when we get our hands on it. Let’s take a closer look at three reasons why this could very well be the fastest gaming laptop in the world.
1. An AMD beast is born
Let’s talk about the secret sauce to this monster laptop: the brand new AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX3D — packing 16 cores and 32 threads, and a boost clock up to 5.4GHz. The key difference here to the current Strix Scar 17 comes down to that X3D in the name, which is a dead giveaway that this is the first laptop CPU from AMD to rock the company’s 3D V-Cache.
There is now a full 64MB of L3 cache layered on top of the processor, which turbo boosts performance when it comes to working through certain calculations quicker and more efficiently.
The end result is what AMD is claiming to be the “world’s fastest mobile gaming processor,” which translates into an average 20% speed increase when combined with the RTX 4090 GPU. Looking at a more specific test run by the company, we see an 11% bump in performance in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 70W TDP, and 23% at 40W.
In other words, not only is this beast mode powerful at high wattages, it’s also far more efficient at gaming performance at lower levels too. Also, you’re getting up to 32GB of DDR5 RAM and 1TB of storage. This looks primed to eat Intel for breakfast.
2. Keeping its cool
Of course, to keep things running smoothly in a gaming laptop, you need proper thermal management. Asus has pretty much nailed it with Conductonaut Extreme liquid metal on the GPU for up to 17x better thermal conductivity, and a full-cover vapor chamber that covers 43.3% of the total area.
This is sure to keep everything at a regulated temperature and eliminate any risk of thermal throttling.
3. X3D exclusive ‘for the foreseeable future’
As PC Gamer reports, AMD’s Donny Woligroski confirmed that the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D will be exclusively available in the SCAR 17 X3D “for the foreseeable future.”
That means this powerful new generation of mobile gaming chip is exclusive to this system. You won’t find it anywhere else for a while. That new 3D V-Cache technology will only be in this laptop. While it sort of sucks to not see this come to new systems from the get go, it’s a helluva big selling point for this one.
Outlook
All of this does come at an equally monstrous price. No US price has been confirmed, but you can pick it up on August 22 in the UK for a whopping £3,799. That’s going to sting, so it’s fair to say that the SCAR 17 X3D is going to be for the pros only.
Simply upping the CPU clock speed has diminishing returns, which is what makes the 3D V-Cache such an interesting prospect — an additional attachment to further speed up the processor.
It’s fair to say we can’t wait to get our hands on this beast and see whether AMD’s claims are to be believed.
