This extravagant gaming laptop could ruin other screens for you

My eyes have seen the PC gaming promised land, and it’s a beautifully bright world without a shred of blurriness. It’s warm, it looks lovely, and it’s impeccably sharp. Also, it’s expensive as hell.

I’ve dipped my toe in this world by testing a pre-production version of the upcoming Asus ROG Strix Scar 18, which was recently announced ahead of Computex 2026. It’s a gigantic 18-inch gaming laptop that comes with a top-of-the-line 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX CPU and can be fully kitted out with an RTX 5090 Laptop GPU and 128GB of RAM. Asus sent me a model to test that’s maxed out on all specs except storage (it’s got “just” 4TB). And of course, the company isn’t announcing any pricing yet — not even for a base RTX 5080 model. We all know, thanks to RAMageddon, it’s going to be gut-punchingly expensive.

But what makes the Strix Scar 18 especially unique is its screen: a 4K, 240Hz display with an anti-glare matte finish and a special feature called Extreme Low Motion Blur (ELMB). The Mini LED panel has over 2,000 dimming zones and up to 1,600 nits of peak brightness in HDR mode. It’s when you turn HDR mode off that the magic actually happens. This allows you to use ELMB and have all those dimming zones automatically split up the display into smaller horizontal bands of pixels, refreshing them row by row very quickly — kind of like a traditional CRT.

How ELMB works compared to a traditional screen, according to Asus’ promotional video.

Image: Asus

The result is an amazingly crisp picture that shows almost no motion blur during fast action in games. And it achieves this without black frame insertion — a more common method to reduce motion blur that causes a flicker effect and can negatively affect screen brightness.

And as you’d expect, this thing is an absolute beast when it comes to playing the most graphically demanding games. I loaded up Cyberpunk 2077 in 4K on Ultra settings with ray tracing turned on and DLSS set to Balanced, and it maintained a respectable (though beautiful) 45fps. That boosted to about 70fps with DLSS turned to Ultra Performance, but you could easily throttle down some other settings or engage frame generation for much higher frame rates. A less graphically demanding competitive shooter like Counter-Strike 2 could run at high settings and maintain 180 to 200fps.

It’s the “frames win games” kind of titles like Counter-Strike and even MOBAs like League of Legends that the ELMB display complements the most. If you want to have the fastest twitch-level response to what you see onscreen, you want the clearest picture possible — and that means a fast-moving image free of motion blur. But even if you’re not an esports player with god-tier reflexes, it’s quite satisfying to play fast-action games with this level of sharpness and clarity. And when you don’t need it, you can switch off ELMB and turn on HDR to get eye-searing levels of brightness during more cinematic games.

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The speed of this panel is entrancing.

ELMB’s smoothness is very difficult to capture in photos or on video (though I tried my best in the images below). But here’s a simple, repeatable method you can follow along with. At the very least, you can see how your monitor or laptop display handles the same torture tests and compare it to what I describe while doing the same on the Strix Scar 18’s ELMB display.

(Disclaimer: These torture tests feature colorful fast-moving graphics. If you’re prone to motion sickness this could make you a little queasy. User discretion, yada yada. Be cool. Don’t sue us.)

• Make sure your screen refresh rate is set to its highest setting. (If you’re on a laptop, plug in the power adapter to prevent any battery saving from slowing down your panel.)
• Load up the Video Game Motion test on Blur Busters’ site (use this direct link).
• Click the full-screen icon in the top-right corner of the auto-scrolling test window. The top half should be 240Hz and the bottom should be whatever your native refresh rate is set to.
• Once the frame rate numbers turn green, the test has loaded and stabilized.
• Now, look closely at the details of the characters scrolling across the frame.

Can you follow the action across the screen and clearly read the character names in this scene from Dota 2? On a normal screen, the motion is a blurry mess. But on the Scar’s ELMB panel, it’s all crystal clear. If I track the action across the screen (before giving myself a headache with these fast-scrolling speeds) I can read names like Lion, Vengeful Spirit, and Dragon Knight with ease. I can also make out what level each hero is and exactly how many bars of health they’re down. If I flip off ELMB to use other features like HDR, things are still somewhat legible but noticeably blurrier, even with the screen’s 240Hz refresh rate. I can no longer make out hero names, health bars, and levels as easily. I have to really focus my eyes and rely on my perception to think, “Oh yeah, that looks like it says Sven.” And by the time I do, it’s off the screen. The action’s gone, and if this were a competitive online game that probably means my reaction time would be slightly slower too.

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The Blur Busters UFO test. In the following pictures, I photographed close-ups of the fast-moving alien while tracking its movement across three different panels to show what ELMB can do. All of these images show 240fps on the top bar (it’s the one you want to focus on).

Here’s one more to try, the classic UFO test:

• Once again, set your monitor / laptop display to its maximum refresh rate (and plug your laptop into wall power).
• Load up the Blur Busters UFO test (direct link).
• Click the full-screen icon in the top-right corner and let it stabilize.
• The trailing UFO on the top row should be set to your screen’s native refresh rate, with slower ones tiled below it.
• How much detail can you see in the alien and its ship when you follow it across the screen with your eyes?

On the ELMB display, I can easily make out the alien’s three eyes. I can even see that each red panel of the UFO has three distinct vertical lines. It’s all clear as day. When I look at the same test on the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 laptop I just recently reviewed, which has an excellent 2880 x 1800 / 120Hz OLED display, the alien’s eyes and white panel lines of the spaceship are all blurred. My eyes can’t separate them from each other, even at the G14’s fairly fast 120Hz. Does that mean the Zephyrus is terrible at fast-action gaming? No, but the ROG Strix Scar 18’s ELMB display is better at this stuff. The G14 is a jack-of-all-trades display, while the Strix Scar is purpose-built.

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You turn on ELMB in Asus’ Armoury Crate app. Sadly, there’s no keyboard shortcut to quickly toggle it on and off while in a game. That’d be endless fun.

The ELMB Strix Scar 18 can outclass other OLEDs in the motion blur department, too — even speedier ones. I was surprised to find I couldn’t make out the alien’s three eyes on a 27-inch Asus ROG Swift PG27UCDM, which is an excellent 4K / 240Hz gaming monitor. An HP Omen Max 16 with a 2560 x 1600 / 240Hz 16-inch OLED came closer to the ELMB. The Dota 2 test looked pretty crisp on it, with text almost as legible as on the Strix Scar 18. But for the UFO test, the alien’s three eyes and the white lines on its spacecraft remained a bit blurry, even though they didn’t fully melt together.

Most people are not going to notice this stuff while playing games, not unless they had an easy side-by-side comparison. If your game nights consist of socializing with your buddies over friend slop, none of this matters. Even if you’re a pretty sweaty Marathon player, a nice OLED on a more down-to-earth laptop will treat you just fine. Asus is bending over backward to squeeze every drop of performance out of a Mini LED panel for the type of people who have a very specific eye for the tiniest details.

It’s a Strix Scar. You gotta have some fun with the light show.

The reason you have to settle for Mini LED on an 18-inch gaming laptop in the first place is actually quite simple: No display supplier makes an 18-inch OLED. Asus, Razer, Alienware, etc. all use some form of LCD in their 18-inch gaming laptops because companies like LG Display and Samsung Display don’t offer an OLED in that size. Instead, you get varying degrees of extra nice-to-have features, like the dual-mode screen of the Razer Blade 18 that goes from 4K / 240Hz to 1200p / 440Hz, the native 300Hz of the Alienware 18 Area-51, and now the ROG Strix Scar 18’s ELMB. There could be more blur-free laptop LCDs on the horizon if Nvidia’s similar G-Sync Pulsar tech eventually makes its way over to smaller panels, but for now it’s only available on a few 27-inch 2.5K / 360Hz desktop monitors.

The Strix Scar 18, on the other hand, will arrive sometime soon and it’s full 4K. But like all over-the-top gaming laptops, it’s only going to be for the most hardcore sect of the most deep-pocketed gamers. I shudder to think what it will cost after the ROG Zephyrus G14 and ROG Zephyrus Duo already debuted at their respective savings account-draining prices. RAMageddon is hitting everything hard, and Asus is just posting through it. Last year’s ROG Strix Scar 18 with an RTX 5090, Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX, 32GB of RAM, and 2TB SSD still costs $4,500 — and that’s with an ELMB-less 2.5K Mini LED.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this new fully kitted-out 18-inch ELMB model I’m testing will cost $6,000 to $7,000. But that’s the kind of cost you’ll have to expect now if you want to be at the cutting edge. Especially if that cutting edge is most visible in tiny details, like a little alien flying by in a UFO.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge

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