In July, AMD announced it would be adding 3D V-Cache to its flagship mobile processor and that it would be arriving in a decked-out Asus gaming laptop in August. Now that day has finally arrived and we can see the benefits of adding V-Cache to a laptop chip. Just like with its desktop predecessors, that extra L3 cache can have a decent impact in some games but not all. As expected, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 is a beast of a machine. But even though we have reviews now, we still don't have any pricing info, which indicates its price tag will be as extreme as the notebook's performance.
To quickly recap, this Asus notebook is the only way to get your hands on the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D CPU, but there's a chance AMD might make one or two more mobile V-Cache chips soon, including an eight-core, 16-thread version. The flagship chip is the only option for now, with 16 cores and 32 threads and a turbo clock of 5.4GHz. It features an asymmetric design like its desktop counterpart, with one CCD hosting 96MB of V-Cache, and the other offering 32MB for 128MB of L3 combined.
One interesting feature of the Ryzen 9 7945HX3D CPU, according to Anandtech's review, is that you can disable the non-V-Cache CCD to let games only use the X3D chip or switch it around and only use the standard CCD without V-Cache to enjoy higher clock speeds. With V-Cache, some games don't benefit at all, but some games show significant boosts in gaming. As always, it does very little in content creation applications and is slightly slower than the regular chip due to its lowered clock speeds. It's paired with a mobile RTX 4090, so Asus spared no expense.
Hothardware got its hands on the ROG Strix Scar and took it for a test drive and compared it with the non-X3D variant, where everything is the same aside from the extra L3 cache. In some titles, such as Middle Earth: Shadow Of War, F1 2021, and Guardians of the Galaxy, the V-Cache version easily outpaced the standard version at both 1080p and 1440p, landing it at the top of the benchmark charts as the fastest combo around. Some games just can't benefit at all, such as Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
The big downsides to this laptop seem to be its battery life and fan noise. Nobody expects a desktop replacement with hot-running components to last a long time on its battery, and the ROG Strix Scar is no exception, hitting just 83 minutes in the battery test. That's par for the course for this type of notebook, however. The reviewer also noted the fans can get quite loud, hitting 55dBA in their noise test. However, the GPU never went above 71C either, so it's a trade-off.
As we wrote above, even though Asus sent this notebook to reviewers, it still doesn't have a price. Given its components, we can imagine it'll be in the neighborhood of $4,000 or so, so it'll only be of interest to the most extreme users. Still, it's a watershed moment for mobile gaming, leaving us to ponder whether AMD will begin adding V-Cache to more mobile CPUs in the future.
