Asus’ ROG brand has never been one to skimp on external lighting, but these latest laptops come close to putting on a full-on light show on their lids. The company’s latest Strix line, specifically the ROG Strix Scar, packs more “AniMe” LED lights on its lid than on the back recently. ROG Phone 9. If the only thing you demand from gaming gear is extra light, then the new ROG Strix Scar 16 and 18 are at the top of the pile.

However, if you don’t care about the lighting, there is much more to like. Strix Scar 16 and 18 have Intel Core Ultra 9 285HX and up to Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 laptop version with 175W max TGP and 24GB of 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 that this screen will be brighter and support Nvidia G-Sync and Dolby Vision HDR.

The AniMe backlighting array slashes the bottom right corner, and you can set it to play multiple preset images or animations. In a briefing, I saw firsthand how the pre-installed system allows you to add your own GIFs to the backlights and adjust the RGB light bar that surrounds the chassis.

These are heavy laptops, clocking in at 6.28 pounds on the light end, but these desktop replacement devices can support up to 64 GB of DDR5 RAM and 2 TB of SSD storage. Even better, Asus has made it easy to disassemble and replace these parts. The battery and RAM sticks are held in place with latches that take seconds to remove rather than requiring a special screwdriver.

ROG also debuted the newly designed Flow Z13, a Windows-based tablet with AMD Ryzen AI Max + 395 APU. This chip should provide solid gaming performance from the tablet’s large 2.5K (2560 by 1440) 180Hz screen. Asus says it includes a vapor chamber and Arc Flow fans to cool the tablet with a large laptop chip inside. And, of course, it comes with a foldout keyboard and stand 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 gaming, especially with all the best handhelds on offer, such as Asus’ ROG Ally X.

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