Asus Zephyrus G14
Asus is leading AMD’s charge to mobile dominance.
Considering the hardware on offer, the Asus Zephyrus G14 is thinner and lighter than you may expect. Coming in at just 0.7 inches thick and weighing just
3.53 lb, this is extremely portable for a gaming laptop. It’s not as thin and light as, say, your average XPS 13, but it doesn’t need to be.
Even compared to other thin and light gaming laptops like the Razer Blade 15 and the MSI GS65 Stealth, it’s just as thin and even lighter than either of them, thanks to the magnesium alloy-equipped chassis. If you are after a thin and light gaming laptop that’ll fit in your bag without weighing you down, the Asus Zephyrus G14 is it.
Being thin and light isn’t everything, though, and the laptop needs to hold up elsewhere.
The Asus Zephyrus G14 has a general aesthetic that might be bordering a little much on the capital-G Gamer for some folks, but it’s not too bad. The lid of the laptop is divided diagonally, with one half covered in these little dots. There is a version of this laptop that has these light up with white LEDs, and while we’ve seen that version at a ton of trade shows, that is not present in our review model, so we can’t report back what kind of impact this has on usability or battery life.
There are a ton of vents all over the place, along with a very angular look. The way we see it, having all of these vents is ultimately a good thing for a device that’s packing hardware on this level. When you’re looking for a device to either play the best PC
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games or get some creative work done, you don’t want to run into thermal limits.
The chiclet keyboard is extremely well spaced and comfortable to type on. This is surprising just because of how small of a footprint the device actually has. However, there will likely be some folks that are turned off by the softer feel of the keyboard, as it’s not as tactile or clicky as some gaming laptops out there with mechanical keyboards.
What we really like about the keyboard, however is the dedicated buttons at the top. We don’t know about you, but the ability to change volume on the fly without messing around with combining the Fn key with one of the Function Keys at the top is a nice touch. There’s also a dedicated key for opening Armory Crate, which will let you control system performance and RGB lighting with supported Aura Sync-ready components. This is a nice touch, but because there’s no RGB on the system we reviewed, we couldn’t use our creativity to really put it to the test. For the record: we want RGB on everything.
Performance
Wow, is that AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS something. Packed with 8-cores and 16-threads with a base clock of 3.0GHz and a boost of 4.3GHz, this is a speed monster. In all of our CPU-heavy testing workloads, this processor absolutely smashed the competition.
Even compared to the full-fat and overclockable Intel Core i9-9980HK found in the Alienware m17, we’re seeing wins for AMD. For instance, in Cinebench R15, the AMD-powered Zephyrus gets a solid 1,782 points, compared to the Alienware’s 1,182. That’s a whopping 34% jump in performance, found in a laptop that’s literally half the price of the Alienware m17 configuration we reviewed last year.
The fun doesn’t end there. In Geekbench 4 not only does the
Zephyrus obviously win the multi-core contest with 29,907 points, beating the Core i9 by 24%, but even comes within margin of error when it comes to its single-core score of 5,265.
A lot of this is possible because of the move down to the 7nm AMD Zen 2 architecture on mobile. This, plus some creative engineering from the folks over at AMD, has allowed this processor to offer truly desktopclass performance on a laptop that weighs just over 3lb.
But, of course, the Asus Zephyrus G14 is a gaming laptop, so gaming performance is perhaps more important than raw CPU power. And, well, thanks to the RTX 2060 Max-Q included here, the Zephyrus kills it in games too – up to a point.
With a 3DMark Time Spy score of 5,872 and the ability to run Metro Exodus on Ultra settings with a decent 38 fps frame rate, you can expect solid gaming performance here. And, we’ll even reiterate: we’re able to get a steady 120 fps in the recentlyreleased Doom Eternal.
Packed with 8-cores and 16-threads with a base clock of 3.0GHz and a boost of 4.3GHz, this is a speed monster.
Battery life
AMD Ryzen 4000 CPU performance is definitely a huge reason to pick this laptop up, but battery life is far more interesting. But first, a bit of background.
Generally speaking, when it comes to gaming laptops, we’ve got to a point where we don’t even expect them to break three or four hours of juice. If we’re lucky, we’ll see a gaming laptop hit five hours, but it’s incredibly rare that we’ll ever see one that you can use to work all day away from a charger.
Those days are over. In our movie test, where we loop 1080p video back to back, the Asus Zephyrus G14 lasted an incredible eight hours and 10 minutes. The HP Elite Dragonfly, a laptop that is sold based on its battery life scores eight hours and 11 minutes in the same test. Plus, that’s with a CPU that has less than half the TDP of the AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS – and with no dedicated GPU, either. The Asus Zephyrus G14 is an absolutely incredible gaming laptop. Top performance, best-in-class battery life and a fast screen, all in a laptop you can easily carry around wherever you go.