I expect the G14 to be of a high standard. I have had a good look at all the Zephyrus G14 models over the past few years and have been impressed each time. It's the laptop I recommend to friends when they ask me for a mid to high end gaming machine. It can game, work, look good, and is cheaper than the Razer Blade. It can game, work, look good, and is cheaper than the Razer Blade. In every respect except that one, the new 2022 model is still one of the best all-around packages money can buy.
However, the exact model I received for review is not that much cheaper than the new Razer Blade 14, so I cannot recommend it; Asus was unable to provide me with the exact price of this model in all regions, but some prying determined that I am looking at about the $2,500 / £2,000 mark for this laptop with all the bells and whistles that can be offered.
And don't get me wrong, there is a lot of silicone under the hood of the Zephyrus G14 to justify its price tag, at least to some extent.
At its heart is an AMD Ryzen 6900HS. This is one of the top chips in AMD's Ryzen 6000 series, but it's not AMD's best; it has 8 cores and 16 threads in the Zen 3+ architecture, boostable to 4.9 GHz (it actually boosts occasionally), which is more than acceptable for me.
It also has onboard Radeon graphics, the new Radeon 680M, with 12 RDNA 2 GPU cores, which considering Valve's Steam Deck Aerith APU has only 8 and excels at 800p gaming , this is a pretty big number.
More importantly, however, Zephyrus has a Radeon RX 6800S discrete GPU.
This Radeon silicon has one major mission: to hit G14's 120Hz refresh rate as often as possible during gaming. Thankfully, AMD's RX 6800S more than meets that requirement in many games, and even reliably exceeds the usual 60 fps in many more.
That said, it has its work cut out for it; the Zephyrus G14 has a 2,560 x 1,600 display, which is 16:10, so there is plenty of screen room for web browsing and photo editing. However, this means that the GPU has to work extra hard to maintain frame rates.
The RX6800S made quick work of the benchmark suite, and we must say that we were sincerely impressed with the G14's gaming performance overall. We ran all of our tests in standard Performance mode without the more aggressive Turbo preset, and while it underperformed the RTX 3080 Ti on the Razer Blade 17, the RTX 3080 Ti is a much larger laptop and much more expensive.
When running smoothly, the G14's high-refresh, high-resolution panel also looks fantastic. This model's IPS display is bright, colorful, and shows great detail.
What surprised me, however, was the G14's battery life. It has one of the lowest life spans of any modern gaming laptop we have recently tested, lasting only 53 minutes. This is only two minutes longer than the Razer Blade 17, which packs an RTX 3080 Ti and an Intel Core i7 12800H into a metal chassis.
The G14 also loses the quality of being surprisingly cheap for what you get, even if you do get great performance.
Perhaps one of the reasons for this is that it comes with 32GB of DDR5 RAM, 16GB of which is soldered to the board and the remaining 16GB is attached via SO-DIMMs that can be removed from the underside of the laptop. This is not cheap memory; DDR5 prices have barely settled since this memory standard was introduced last year, and 32GB is a large amount of high-performance memory compared to most gaming PCs today.
DDR5 is a welcome addition to the mobile gaming market, but it will come at a price premium while it is early in the new technology cycle; DDR5 will not contribute significantly to gaming performance, but until prices come down (hopefully), we will have to hold out for now!
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The G14's productivity and CPU performance deserve praise here as well, helping the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS chip reach its full potential. Single-threaded Cinebench scores are impressive, multi-core scores are reasonably high, and the G14's PCMark 10 scores were also very high, although you probably won't notice a practical difference between top laptops during video calls.
The 2022 G14 also has some other improvements that I like, besides faster and better silicon.
One of my favorite things about the G14 is in its name. Its blend of screen area and compact size makes it a midway design between the bulky 15- and 17-inch models, and it doesn't compromise as much as the 13-inch model feels.
A key feature of the G14's 2022 model, however, is that the 14-inch size conforms to a 16:10 aspect ratio, larger than the 16:9 panels of earlier models.
The new G14 dominates the entire available bezel space by a fraction, almost completely covering the laptop chassis from top to bottom. And before you think that this extra space won't be much use for games, it's actually relatively common to see it in game options menus these days; even the Steam deck has adopted 16:10, so it's clear that Valve's cool kids are all for it.
You'll find that most games are happy to run at the slightly less common 2560 x 1600 resolution, without black bars or anything of the sort. However, even if you have to play a game at the usual 1440p, that doesn't mean the end of the world.
The other major improvement in this model over the previous one is the inclusion of a webcam on the top bezel. This is a 720p webcam, with decent color and is fairly well calibrated out of the box. In other words, you won't be at a loss for meetings or Discord. Contrast, however, is not very good, and detail is lost in low-light settings. However, this is not too surprising for a compact laptop cam.
In that light, the chassis has not changed much from the new 2022 model, but it is surprisingly well built and clean; at 312 x 227 x 19.5 mm and 1.72 kg, it is not the bulkiest, but it is not the thinnest laptop. It also has a model with AniMe Matrix LEDs on the back. This is definitely a breathtaking feature for those seeing it for the first time, but it is a bit disproportionate to the overall design of this sleek gaming laptop. This laptop would be better suited for work and play without it, and it is a bit of a pain to disable at night unless the entire laptop is unplugged.
I was unable to access any of the settings to fine-tune this rear lighting in the Asus Armoury Crate app, so I'm hoping this is a software issue.
Overall, the G14 experience is fairly easy and straightforward. I used it for about two weeks and had no major problems, and although there are some design negatives, Asus has more than made up for them with positives. The biggest drawback, however, is its price, which is unfortunate. At the very least, we hope that a less expensive model of the Zephyrus G14 will make more of an impact: a scaled-down GPU, perhaps no high-end CPU, and only 16GB of RAM would make it a more suitable device for the more thrifty.
For my part, I'd rather put a little more love into a sub-$2,000 model than this more expensive option. This particular model has the looks, not to mention the performance, that make the G14 so appealing and easy to recommend, but I'm not entirely sure what makes it so appealing. At least not as much as other models I've used over the past few years.
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