Laptop CPUs Got 50% Faster! - Intel Core i9-12900H Review (ft 2022 ASUS ROG Strix Scar 15)
# ASUS ROG Strix Scar 15: A Deep Dive into Its Gaming Capabilities
## Introduction to the ASUS ROG Strix Scar 15
The ASUS ROG Strix Scar 15, unveiled at CES this year, represents a significant leap forward in gaming laptops. Equipped with cutting-edge hardware, this laptop boasts the latest 12th Gen Intel CPU, 32GB of DDR5 memory, and an impressive 240Hz Quad HD display. While the GPU details are under NDA for now, the focus is on its stellar Intel processor, promising enhanced performance and efficiency.
## Hardware Breakdown
At the heart of this gaming powerhouse lies the Intel 12th Gen i-912 900H CPU, a top-tier processor designed for enthusiasts. This laptop also features 32GB of DDR5 memory, offering ample space for multitasking and intensive applications. The display is a standout feature with its 240Hz refresh rate and Quad HD resolution, making it ideal for gamers seeking sharp visuals and smooth gameplay.
## Intel's Mobile Processor Lineup
Intel has expanded its mobile processor lineup into three categories: the H-series for high-performance laptops, the U-series for lightweight devices, and the P-series as a middle ground. The Strix Scar 15 houses the 12900H, one of the most powerful in Intel's H-series, with six performance cores, eight efficiency cores, and 20 threads. This configuration ensures superior multi-threaded performance, making it a formidable choice for content creation and gaming.
## Performance Benchmarks
The 12th Gen Intel CPU shines in benchmarks like Cinebench R20 and R23. It outperforms previous models by up to 50%, particularly excelling in multi-threaded tasks such as rendering. Single-core performance is also noteworthy, offering a 30% improvement over older CPUs. These enhancements make it a standout choice for tasks requiring raw processing power.
## Power Consumption and Thermal Management
The 12900H's increased performance comes with higher power demands, peaking at 115W—significantly more than its predecessor. Despite this, the laptop manages thermal loads effectively, keeping temperatures around 90°C in Turbo mode. The cooling system impresses with its efficiency, ensuring minimal noise and maintaining comfortable operating temperatures.
## Noise Levels
During stress tests, the Strix Scar 15 operates surprisingly quietly. In Performance mode, it achieves a mere 32.5 decibels, setting a new standard for gaming laptops. This quiet operation enhances user experience during productivity tasks, making it suitable for both work and play without compromising on performance.
## Battery Life Considerations
While the Strix Scar 15 excels in power and performance, battery life is not its strongest suit. Delivering around 7.5 hours on a Netflix binge, it lags behind AMD counterparts like the 2021 Strix G15. However, for a gaming laptop, this duration is respectable and indicative of balanced design priorities.
## Conclusion: Waiting for More Insights
With the release of new AMD mobile processors imminent, potential buyers are advised to wait for comprehensive reviews. The Strix Scar 15's Intel CPU offers impressive performance, but competition from AMD may further elevate expectations. Stay tuned for an upcoming full review that promises deeper insights into this remarkable gaming laptop.
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This article provides a detailed exploration of the ASUS ROG Strix Scar 15, highlighting its strengths and areas for improvement, offering readers a comprehensive understanding of its capabilities in the gaming landscape.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso this right here is a brand new gaming laptop from asus the rog strix scar 15. uh it was announced at ces this year and it comes with a lot of new hardware so it has the latest 12th gen intel cpu the i-912 900h 32 gigs of ddr5 memory for the very first time a 240hz quad hd display and a brand new rtx 3070 ti gpu now unfortunately the gpu is still under nda for a few more days so i cannot really talk about the gaming performance but i can talk about this new older lake mobile processor from intel so today we're going to see how well it performs how power hungry it is and how it will impact your battery life as well as thermals and noise so let's begin this video is brought to you by seasonic and their prime series power supplies these top quality power supplies are very efficient they're whisper quiet extremely reliable and my go-to choice for most of my test rigs and builds around here and to make the deal even sweeter seasonic wraps it all up in a cozy 12 year long warranty check them out using the links in the description below so intel is launching quite a few mobile processors and as usual they kind of split them up into several categories so you have the h series or the high performance cpus that are made for enthusiast laptops like this car right here then you have the u series that have lower power and are meant for thin and light laptops and then you have the p series which kind of falls in between the two now the 12900h that's in this laptop is at the top of the h-series list along with the i-912 900 hk and it has six performance scores eight efficiency cores and 20 threads the new i7 processors the 12 800 h and the 12 700h have the exact same core layout but their boost speeds are slightly lower which means that some cheaper systems that use these i7s should be able to get close to the results that we will see today but the i712 658 for example has fewer cores and fewer threads and if we look at the i7 from the u series it has only two performance cores so you really need to make sure that you know what you're buying when you're getting a new laptop just saying i7 or i5 is not really enough to know what should you expect from it but let's look performance now the best i can do here is to compare this laptop to several other laptops that i've tested in recent years first of all it is impossible just to compare laptop cpus directly because other parts of the laptop like the memory and the cooling solutions also affect performance but most of these laptops in the list are quite similar as they're all kind of performance focused models and i guess that will be you know close enough now starting with cinebench r20 this new model absolutely destroys the best cpus from last generation it is 40 faster than the fastest laptop in this graph so far which is the m16 with an i9 11 900h and it is 50 ahead of the ryzen 9 5900 hx in the rog strix g15 from last year it also flat out embarrasses the i7 11 370 h that was launched a year ago and that offers about third of the performance of this new i9 it doubles the score of the 10 and 980 hk in the msi ge76 and it scores three times higher than the scar from 2019 that had an i7 9750h in cinebench r23 which i started using more recently it is about 50 faster than the ryzen 9 5900 hx and again it is a huge upgrade from the scar from 2019. now this cinebench also runs longer than the r20 so these results are much more consistent as you don't have laptops first pushing their limits for a minute or so and then throttling and i would say r23 catches that better in blender which is a real world application that relies heavily on your cpu we can see the same thing it completes almost 30 faster than the fastest laptop before it so if you do a lot of rendering for example you can really cut down the time required to do it now single thread performance looks fantastic as well so in cinebench r20 i got a score of 728 which is about 20 faster than the m16 that has the 11 900 h and around 30 faster than the fastest amd ryzen 5000 series cpus and this should translate into great gaming performance as well but as i said at the start i cannot really talk about gaming performance just yet but the cpu performance is just fantastic because uh getting a 30 to 40 increase performance in one generation is actually extremely rare uh but i would say there is a reason for that so a large part of that extra performance comes from a much higher power consumption and if we look back to intel spec sheet we can see that the 12 900 h can run up to 115 watts which is quite a bit more than the 45 watts on the 11900h but the spec sheets don't always tell the whole story so the m16 with the 11900h was typically using around 70 watts while this car was actually going up to 120 to 130 watts during a multi-threaded stress test and that is a huge amount of power for a laptop so in a way they're like desktop older lake cpus so they will happily consume a ton of power if you let them but they will still perform really well if you also restrict them a little bit and we can see that when we swap the laptop's profile from turbo to performance mode which is a bit more balanced i would say so cpu power draw gets limited to around 70 to 75 watts which is very similar to the 11900h and kind of allows us to do a bit more of a fair comparison between the two and while the performance is a bit lower than in the turbo mode it is still a lot faster in multi-threaded applications than anything else from last gen plus it maintains the same high single thread performance as in the turbo mode but that was also expected so i would say no matter which mode you pick it is still a huge improvement but what surprised me the most was how well this laptop handled that high cpu power now many high performance laptops are usually struggling with cpu thermals and we were usually seeing temps in high 80s and high 90s with some laptops even coming close to 100 degrees celsius on their cpus and that's with cpus using less than 70 watts while here even in the turbo mode with a cpu burning up to 120 ish watts the scar holds it at around 90 degrees celsius with the fans doing 47.3 decibels at 50 centimeters distance now that would be a pretty typical result for older models but i would actually say it is pretty impressive considering the 50 watts of axis heat that this laptop has to deal with and it gets a lot better in performance mode with the cpu being at 83 degrees celsius and measuring only 32.5 decibels at 50 centimeters distance now i have never heard a gaming laptop make this little noise during a stress test even one of the quieter laptops i tested last year so the razer blade pro 15 measured around 37 decibels here now obviously this is more of a complement to asus than to intel but it is still a huge quality of life improvement and it's so nice to not have your laptop fans blow constantly while trying to work or while trying to edit a video for example so usually with every new generation of laptops they also had a better battery life during idle or light tasks and even though a battery life is even harder to compare between all these different specs we can at least get a rough indication and it looks like the 12 gen gaming laptops will not be outperforming the last gen when it comes to battery life so in a light netflix test i got around seven and a half hours which is not bad for a gaming laptop and it is a lot better than my scar that barely survived too but the 2021 strix g15 with the ryzen 9 and otherwise similar specs lasted for over nine hours so for now it looks like amd might still beat intel when it comes to battery life anyway uh that is actually it for today again a laptop is so much more than just a processor and we'll have to wait for a few more models to come out and a few more ndas to expire to really get a complete picture here but based on this machine alone i would say that these 12 gen mobile cpus are incredibly promising and a huge upgrade over anything that we've seen before but before you just rush off to the store and buy yourself one i do think you should wait a tiny bit longer to see what amd will do with their new mobile processors which are actually also launching pretty soon either way i think it's a very interesting year for laptops and i cannot wait to get my hands on a few more thank you so much for watching this video today if you're interested in a full review of this scar laptop with all the proper gaming tests and results it should go live in a couple of days so make sure that you're subscribed to this channel so you don't miss it bye guys and see you next oneso this right here is a brand new gaming laptop from asus the rog strix scar 15. uh it was announced at ces this year and it comes with a lot of new hardware so it has the latest 12th gen intel cpu the i-912 900h 32 gigs of ddr5 memory for the very first time a 240hz quad hd display and a brand new rtx 3070 ti gpu now unfortunately the gpu is still under nda for a few more days so i cannot really talk about the gaming performance but i can talk about this new older lake mobile processor from intel so today we're going to see how well it performs how power hungry it is and how it will impact your battery life as well as thermals and noise so let's begin this video is brought to you by seasonic and their prime series power supplies these top quality power supplies are very efficient they're whisper quiet extremely reliable and my go-to choice for most of my test rigs and builds around here and to make the deal even sweeter seasonic wraps it all up in a cozy 12 year long warranty check them out using the links in the description below so intel is launching quite a few mobile processors and as usual they kind of split them up into several categories so you have the h series or the high performance cpus that are made for enthusiast laptops like this car right here then you have the u series that have lower power and are meant for thin and light laptops and then you have the p series which kind of falls in between the two now the 12900h that's in this laptop is at the top of the h-series list along with the i-912 900 hk and it has six performance scores eight efficiency cores and 20 threads the new i7 processors the 12 800 h and the 12 700h have the exact same core layout but their boost speeds are slightly lower which means that some cheaper systems that use these i7s should be able to get close to the results that we will see today but the i712 658 for example has fewer cores and fewer threads and if we look at the i7 from the u series it has only two performance cores so you really need to make sure that you know what you're buying when you're getting a new laptop just saying i7 or i5 is not really enough to know what should you expect from it but let's look performance now the best i can do here is to compare this laptop to several other laptops that i've tested in recent years first of all it is impossible just to compare laptop cpus directly because other parts of the laptop like the memory and the cooling solutions also affect performance but most of these laptops in the list are quite similar as they're all kind of performance focused models and i guess that will be you know close enough now starting with cinebench r20 this new model absolutely destroys the best cpus from last generation it is 40 faster than the fastest laptop in this graph so far which is the m16 with an i9 11 900h and it is 50 ahead of the ryzen 9 5900 hx in the rog strix g15 from last year it also flat out embarrasses the i7 11 370 h that was launched a year ago and that offers about third of the performance of this new i9 it doubles the score of the 10 and 980 hk in the msi ge76 and it scores three times higher than the scar from 2019 that had an i7 9750h in cinebench r23 which i started using more recently it is about 50 faster than the ryzen 9 5900 hx and again it is a huge upgrade from the scar from 2019. now this cinebench also runs longer than the r20 so these results are much more consistent as you don't have laptops first pushing their limits for a minute or so and then throttling and i would say r23 catches that better in blender which is a real world application that relies heavily on your cpu we can see the same thing it completes almost 30 faster than the fastest laptop before it so if you do a lot of rendering for example you can really cut down the time required to do it now single thread performance looks fantastic as well so in cinebench r20 i got a score of 728 which is about 20 faster than the m16 that has the 11 900 h and around 30 faster than the fastest amd ryzen 5000 series cpus and this should translate into great gaming performance as well but as i said at the start i cannot really talk about gaming performance just yet but the cpu performance is just fantastic because uh getting a 30 to 40 increase performance in one generation is actually extremely rare uh but i would say there is a reason for that so a large part of that extra performance comes from a much higher power consumption and if we look back to intel spec sheet we can see that the 12 900 h can run up to 115 watts which is quite a bit more than the 45 watts on the 11900h but the spec sheets don't always tell the whole story so the m16 with the 11900h was typically using around 70 watts while this car was actually going up to 120 to 130 watts during a multi-threaded stress test and that is a huge amount of power for a laptop so in a way they're like desktop older lake cpus so they will happily consume a ton of power if you let them but they will still perform really well if you also restrict them a little bit and we can see that when we swap the laptop's profile from turbo to performance mode which is a bit more balanced i would say so cpu power draw gets limited to around 70 to 75 watts which is very similar to the 11900h and kind of allows us to do a bit more of a fair comparison between the two and while the performance is a bit lower than in the turbo mode it is still a lot faster in multi-threaded applications than anything else from last gen plus it maintains the same high single thread performance as in the turbo mode but that was also expected so i would say no matter which mode you pick it is still a huge improvement but what surprised me the most was how well this laptop handled that high cpu power now many high performance laptops are usually struggling with cpu thermals and we were usually seeing temps in high 80s and high 90s with some laptops even coming close to 100 degrees celsius on their cpus and that's with cpus using less than 70 watts while here even in the turbo mode with a cpu burning up to 120 ish watts the scar holds it at around 90 degrees celsius with the fans doing 47.3 decibels at 50 centimeters distance now that would be a pretty typical result for older models but i would actually say it is pretty impressive considering the 50 watts of axis heat that this laptop has to deal with and it gets a lot better in performance mode with the cpu being at 83 degrees celsius and measuring only 32.5 decibels at 50 centimeters distance now i have never heard a gaming laptop make this little noise during a stress test even one of the quieter laptops i tested last year so the razer blade pro 15 measured around 37 decibels here now obviously this is more of a complement to asus than to intel but it is still a huge quality of life improvement and it's so nice to not have your laptop fans blow constantly while trying to work or while trying to edit a video for example so usually with every new generation of laptops they also had a better battery life during idle or light tasks and even though a battery life is even harder to compare between all these different specs we can at least get a rough indication and it looks like the 12 gen gaming laptops will not be outperforming the last gen when it comes to battery life so in a light netflix test i got around seven and a half hours which is not bad for a gaming laptop and it is a lot better than my scar that barely survived too but the 2021 strix g15 with the ryzen 9 and otherwise similar specs lasted for over nine hours so for now it looks like amd might still beat intel when it comes to battery life anyway uh that is actually it for today again a laptop is so much more than just a processor and we'll have to wait for a few more models to come out and a few more ndas to expire to really get a complete picture here but based on this machine alone i would say that these 12 gen mobile cpus are incredibly promising and a huge upgrade over anything that we've seen before but before you just rush off to the store and buy yourself one i do think you should wait a tiny bit longer to see what amd will do with their new mobile processors which are actually also launching pretty soon either way i think it's a very interesting year for laptops and i cannot wait to get my hands on a few more thank you so much for watching this video today if you're interested in a full review of this scar laptop with all the proper gaming tests and results it should go live in a couple of days so make sure that you're subscribed to this channel so you don't miss it bye guys and see you next one\n"