This ingenious ROG gaming laptop is user-upgradeable — no screws required

By Luke Larsen Published January 6, 2025

Asus has announced a number of new gaming laptops at CES 2025, but one of the standouts this year has a unique feature: a completely tool-less upgrade system that you can easily access yourself.

The redesigned ROG Strix Scar 16 and 18 both use a simple, magnetic latching system that lets you open the bottom panel and access the internal components within seconds. In particular, you can reach the RAM and M.2 SSD and swap them out, without even requiring a screwdriver. You can pack up to 64GB of DDR5-5600 memory inside, as well as up to 4TB of PCIe 4 SSDs in RAID 0.

It did take a bit of force to click it into place, but once I tried it a few times, it was a breeze to pull off.

The battery is also accessible, as are the three system fans, for the purpose of cleaning. In a world where, increasingly, components like memory are not user-upgradeable or even easily repairable, I have to commend Asus on bucking the trend and actually finding an easier way to give PC gamers more control of their system internals. Very few of the best gaming laptops you can buy offer user-upgradeable memory, for example.

Speaking of which, once you’ve got the bottom lid off, you’ll see that the system uses a large custom vapor chamber for cooling, as well as a sandwiched heatsink. Asus says it also has a liquid metal solution on both the CPU and GPU, all resulting in a reduced noise levels of 45dB.

Of course, there’s more to this gaming laptop than just a locking mechanism. It also sports the same ROG Nebula HDR display as last year’s model, using a 2.5K resolution mini-LED panel with over 2,000 dimming zones. The peak brightness of the display is 1200 nits, ensuring that it can deliver some top notch HDR content. The screen also has a refresh rate of 240Hz.

The ROG Strix Scar 16 and 18 both come with an Intel Core Ultra 9 258HX processor, and up to an RTX 5090 graphics card. These are chunky laptops, not at all like the thin-and-light ROG Zephyrus laptops, which also received an upgrade this year at CES.

The outside of the laptop stands out too, thanks to the programamble AniMe Vision (formerly named AniMe Matrix) array of lights on the lid and the RGB light bar across the bottom of the chassis.

In addition to the new ROG Strix Scar, Asus is also launching updates to the ROG Strix G16 and G18. These are one step down from the high-end features on the Strix Scar, but still maintain a lot of the same performance features, including options for the latest chips from either AMD or Intel, paired with an RTX 50-series GPU. It can handle up to 32GB of RAM and uses the same Tri-Fan cooling system as the Strix Scar.

The ROG Nebula Display isn’t mini-LED like the Scar Strix, but still gives you a high-resolution 2.5K screen with a 240Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time.

Asus hasn’t announced official pricing or release date for the new gaming laptops in North America yet, but they should be launching some time later in Q1.