Specs at a Glance
CPU: Core i9 12th gen 12900H | GPU: RTX 3070ti 8GB 150W RAM: 16GB DDR5 RAM | Display: 15.6” 1920×1080 300Hz | Storage: 1TB SSD | Battery: 82Wh | OS: Windows 11
Introduction
The ROG Scar 15 G533ZW by Asus is a laptop that proudly screams gaming thanks to its aggressive gamer aesthetic and RGB lightning. If you are interested in something you can easily take with you in a class or a board meeting without getting too much attention, then you should consider something stealthy, like the Gigabyte Aorus 5 SE4.
The Scar 15 G533ZW isn’t much different from last year’s Scar 15 when it comes to design and construction. Instead, many changes have been made under the hood, where Asus decided to move from AMD Ryzen to Intel’s new Alder Lake processors and introduced DDR5 RAM.
Asus also bumped up the specs in the graphics department by including the Ti variants of Nvidia RTX 3000 cards. And they also refined the I/O a bit by including an HDMI 2.1 port and Thunderbolt 4 ports.
Chassis Built Quality & Design
As we said earlier, the ROG Scar 15 G533ZW is not that different from its 2021 variant. Similarly to last year, it features a black anodized aluminum lid that looks clean at first but quickly becomes filled with smudges as you use it. Also, Asus toned down the RGB on the lid by lighting up only the perimeter of the ROG logo to give a very subtle look. This gives the logo a clean look without too much on your face.
The rest of the chassis is made of plastic. This may give the impression that Asus compromised on quality when building such a premium laptop with plastic. However, that doesn’t compromise the quality and rigidity of the Scar 15 itself. The Scar 15 G533ZW is solid and robust, with very little flex in the overall chassis, including the lid and the keyboard deck.
Speaking of the keyboard deck, like last year, Asus has this dual-tone design on the keyboard deck. The Scar 15 G533ZW keyboard deck is divided into two parts, where the other part is translucent, allowing you to peak inside the laptop’s internals. And the other half is plain ol’ black plastic.
The Scar 15 G533ZW is almost exactly the same in weight and size compared to its predecessor. Weighing 0.1kg more than its previous model at 2.4kg. The size is pretty much the same, measuring around 10.2” inches in length, 10.2 inches in width, and 1.07 in height.
But do remember that the Scar 15 G533ZW is the younger brother of the bigger Scar 17, weighs much more, and is a bit bigger to accommodate the bigger 17-inch screen.
I/O & Ports
The I/O department is where the Scar 15 G533ZW improves from last year. On the rear side, we get two USB C 3.2 Thunderbolt ports which were absent from last year due to being a Ryzen machine. As you would expect, you can charge the Scar 15 G533ZW and connect it to multiple displays via USB C.
Along with the HDMI 2.1 port that can do 4K 120hz if you plan to connect the Scar 15 G533ZW to a TV for some couch gaming, which wasn’t possible with the last year’s HDMI 2.0 port. We also get a 2.5G Ethernet port that is more than enough for local transfers from a NAS and a simple charging port.
On the left side, we get two USB 3.2 Type-A ports and a combo audio jack. As for the wireless comms, we get a slight upgrade on the WiFi side with WiFi 6E and improved Bluetooth 5.2.
Considering that the Scar 15 G533ZW is a powerhouse, it’s disappointing that it doesn’t have an SD card reader that would have come in handy for a creative individual.
Keyboard & Touchpad
Keyboard
This time Asus decided to go traditional and implemented a chiclet keyboard instead of optomechanical switches from last year’s Scar 15. Asus has done a fine job with its keyboard layout. The keys are well-spaced, which makes keystrokes a lot easier. I like how Asus has not cramped the arrow buttons because on other laptops, it often happens that you accidentally press them while typing, and your whole page moves.
On the right, Asus has dedicated a separate column for media keys. On a traditional laptop, you would find them placed on top of the keyboard around the Function keys, but we honestly don’t mind it, and they get the job done.
As for the typing experience, the keys feel alright. The travel is just enough to give satisfying feedback as the keys actuate fairly quietly. And obviously, it can’t match the experience of a mechanical keyboard, but it can allow you to type faster and get the job done if you are typing a word document.
The entire keyboard features per-key RGB backlighting which you can customize according to your liking in the Armory Crate software. The Function letters, however, do not light up with the backlight, and you would probably face difficulty using them in the dark.
The keyboard lacks a dedicated Numpad, which Asus addresses by implementing it into the touchpad via capacitive buttons, which can be turned on or off via the top right capacitive area.
Touchpad
Asus implemented a glass touchpad in the Scar 15 G533ZW similar to last year’s model. The touchpad is quite spacious and has a very smooth surface. And it also tracking is also spot on. The clicky buttons on the touchpad feel a bit clunky, but it still delivers quite firm taps on the lower half of the pad.
Speakers & Webcam
Speakers
The Scar 15 G533ZW features two down-firing woofers at the bottom of the laptop with two additional tweeters under the display. This allows the Scar 15 G533ZW to produce fairly rich and crisp sound with clear mids and highs and noticeable bass, and it allows them to also get fairly loud.
Webcam
Well, uhh…there isn’t one. The explanation that Asus gives for not including a webcam is that since this laptop is targeted at gamers and enthusiasts, they expect them to use higher-quality external cameras. So including a camera in the Scar 15 G533ZW would be redundant. So if you plan to attend occasional zoom meetings on this, spend a few dollars on a decent webcam.
Display
The Scar 15 G533ZW is available in two display variants. Both of which are 16:9, matte and non-touch. These are an IPS 1080p 300Hz display and an IPS 1440p 240Hz panel. We are going to talk about the 1080p panel here.
Though the Scar 15 G533ZW has sturdy hinges, the display only goes back up to 110 degrees which is a bit disappointing.
We don’t have much to complain about the 1080p panel itself. Scar 15 G533ZW 1080p display successfully delivers vibrant and punchy colors with decent contrast, making it great for gaming and media consumption. The display can also be used for professional creative work thanks to its fairly good color accuracy.
The 1080p display is not the greatest in covering the wider color gamut, but it does a decent job. Covering 99% of sRGB along with 98.7% of DCI-P3 and 86.2% of Adobe RGB. This should be more than enough for someone who does occasional creative work on Premiere Pro or Photoshop. The color accuracy can be a bit off of the box, so we recommend using a colorimeter to properly calibrate the panel. The display’s brightness is also acceptable and usable, maxing out 350 nits.
The input latency is also acceptable, ranging from 7.52ms on normal settings, however that could be reduced to 3.57ms with the Overdrive mode. This makes the 300Hz display great for FPS esports games such as CS GO or Valorant, thanks to the low input latency.
Performance
Asus went with the new Intel Alder Lake processors this year. Our unit packs in a Core i9-12900H, which is 14 cores 20, threads processor that can boost up to 5Ghz. This annihilates the last year’s Ryzen 9 5900HX in benchmarks and gaming.
In Cinebench R23, the Core i9 beats the Ryzen 9 by being 25% faster in both single and multi-core scores, scoring 1980 in single-core and 17340 in multi-core. Core i9 also beats the Ryzen 9 in Geekbench 5 by being 19% faster in single-core, scoring 1930, and 46% faster in a multi-core, scoring 12910.
Remember that we got these numbers on while the device was plugged into the wall. If you remove the charger, you will get significantly worse performance. And we don’t recommend you to run intensive workloads on the Scar 15 G533ZW while it’s on battery power. As it will barely last an hour, we will discuss the battery life later in detail.
We can see that multiple AAA games were hovering around 140FPS at max-out settings. You can comfortably get over 200FPS if you lower down settings to medium or low settings if you wish to utilize the 300Hz display as much as possible. FPS games like Doom Eternal sat above 200FPS. You can expect similar results from other FPS games like Valorant, CS GO, or Fortnite. The 300Hz is best utilized in these games.
- The Witcher 3 (DX 11): 145FPS AVG
- Far Cry 5 (DX 11): 140FPS AVG
- GTA V (DX 11): 135FPS AVG
- Doom Eternal (Vulkan): 254FPS AVG
- SOTR (DX 12): 130FPS AVG
- Cyberpunk 2077 (DX 12): 67FPS AVG
- RDR2 (DX12): 100FPS AVG.
The MUX switch has also contributed significantly to the Scar 15 G533ZW performance this year. Though the difference varies from game to game, we noticed that overall when games were running on discrete graphics, there was an increase in FPS. The MUX switch has also contributed to this laptop’s battery life, which we will discuss later.
As for temps, both the GPU and CPU remain comfortably quiet at around 60 degrees. However, the GPU’s temps quickly rise to mid-70 degrees while the CPU approaches 90+ degrees, leading it to thermal throttle. This is even though the fans were fully ramped up and going all out. Fans got noticeably loud, and we recommend you to wear headphones at that point, so the fan noise doesn’t get in the way of your gaming experience.
Misc Stuff
The Scar 15 G533ZW comes with two ROG Keystones that are NFC keys that you can use to load up different performance and RGB profiles through the Armory Crate app. You can even hide a storage partition that can only be unlocked via this keystone. Asus calls this hidden shadow drive.
I personally don’t see myself using this keystone feature and mostly see this as a gimmick. However, if you plan to use something like this, you can get the Scar 15 G533ZW.
As for the other ROG stuff, the Scar 15 G533ZW also features customizable armor caps that can add a bit of personality to your laptop. The box comes with three different caps, but you can customize them and 3D print custom caps from the Asus website to give your Scar 15 G533ZW a distinct look. I won’t say it’s a killer feature, but I can’t deny that it’s kind cool.
Battery
The battery life is a mixed bag. If you lower all the performance settings, you can stretch the battery life up to 6 hours. This can be done in the armory crate, where you can play with different settings to change the power config, such as switching to integrated graphics or using something called Panel Power saver, where the Scar 15 G533ZW will switch the panel to 60Hz when it’s running on battery and turn it back to 300Hz when it’s plugged in.
But as it’s obvious with any gaming laptop, the 90Wh battery last under an hour when its running everything on performance mode, so it’s recommended that you do anything demanding while plugged in.
Expandability & Upgradability
Thankfully, the Scar 15 G533ZW comes with two RAM slots and two M.2 slots. The RAM slots are occupied with 16GB DDR5 4800Mhz, which is more than enough for gaming. Though if you plan to do something intensive that requires a lot of RAM headroom, such as video editing or code compiling, you can easily upgrade the RAM with no issues.
The same could be said for the 1TB PCIe Gen 4 NVME SSD. If you plan to expand your game library or simply want to expand your storage, you can easily do that with no issues by installing a Gen 4 SSD.
Conclusion: Should you buy the Scar 15 G533ZW?
The Scar 15 G533ZW is a compact version of the 17-inch Scar that packs a solid punch. The Scar 15 G533ZW improved upon last year’s version by bumping up the performance, a MUX switch, an improved buttery smooth display, and a standard chiclet keyboard.
It also includes decent I/O, which can be useful for connecting external peripherals such as an Ultrawide monitor or to a 4K 120Hz TV, along with fast networking potential thanks to the 2.5G LAN port or the Thunderbolt interface.
However, the Scar 15 G533ZW lacks in a few departments, such as lacking a webcam or biometric verification on such a premium device. Also, this laptop gets fairly hot, which leads the CPU to thermal throttle. Though I would say that the Scar 15 G533ZW has acceptable battery life, it’s significantly worse than last year’s AMD variant.
And if you are someone who hates RGB, then you might hate this laptop considering how much RGB can be found all over the chassis, though, to be fair, any other gaming laptop with this level of specs will most probably have RGB.
Other options to consider
At this price point, you could also consider the MSI Raider GE66, which has a 1440p display, an SD card reader, and a webcam. It also a slightly better Core i9 12900HK processor. However, this laptop is known to have a faulty SSD driver that causes a drop in performance. Do note that a driver update can potentially fix it.
You can also consider the MSI Vector GP176, which features a cleaner minimal chassis and lacks RGB, making it perfect for someone who uses their laptop at work, allowing it to blend perfectly with other office laptops. However, it lacks Thunderbolt and USB PD, and its battery life also sucks.
The Alienware M15 R7 is also worth considering, which has similar specs to the Scar 15 G533ZW, but it 1UPs it certain departments like including a 1440p 240Hz display or by having the bare minimum like a webcam. It also shares some unlikable similarities, such as not-so-good battery life.
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