The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 is no ordinary gaming laptop. It is quite special. Not only does it have a beautiful 14-inch chassis made of machined magnesium aluminum, but it also represents a radical shift from the conventional wisdom that Intel has been the chip of choice for serious laptop performance. That is no longer true. That's because the Asus Zephyrus G14 is the first product to feature AMD's latest chip, the Ryzen 9 4900HS. And this CPU could change everything.

AMD is doing well in the desktop space, where its core count is putting pressure on Intel, but it has not reached the laptop market. But it has not extended to the notebook market, where the Ryzen 9 4900HS is an 8-core, 16-thread monster that runs at a nominal 3.0 GHz, but can turbo up to 4.3 GHz and has a TDP of 35W. The fact that this much power can be put into a thin and light laptop like this Asus Zephyrus G14 is truly incredible.

I ran this chip through the usual series of tests and a few special processor benchmarks just to be sure, and was completely underwhelmed. A quick look at Cinebench R15, as an example, shows a multi-core result of 1,864, compared to only 1,235 for the Intel 9750H, etc. The same is true for encoding X264 video, which registers 34fps when encoded on this machine, while the Intel can't reach 24fps. This is usually reserved for desktop use. This is the kind of performance usually reserved for desktops, and it blows my mind.

But before I disappear completely down that particular performance rabbit hole, it's worth returning to the fact that there is more to this laptop than just the processor. Inside the meticulously crafted chassis is also a 1TB NVMe SSD, 16GB of DDR4-3200 memory, and a vibrant 1080p display that operates at up to 120Hz and offers a full 100% sRGB color space that is Pantone certified. In an ideal world, the SSD is a PCIe gen-4 model, but in reality it is PCIe 3.0. Still "fast," but not the fastest.

You'll notice that we haven't mentioned graphics power yet: the AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS has integrated graphics, but when it comes to proper gaming, you don't want to go anywhere near that. Fortunately, this is not the only polygon-crunching silicon on this machine. It has 1920 CUDA cores and a boost clock of 1185 MHz.

Since a laptop with an RTX2060, even one with a top-of-the-line CPU, is quite a bit of money, it's worth digging a little deeper into the gaming performance offered here. The good news is that most games run at their highest settings at native resolutions and enjoy silky smooth playback. This is because the GeForce RTX 2060 is the perfect combination for 1080p panels. Where things get a little trickier is when you start dealing with ray-tracing titles.

As an example, I used Shadow of the Tomb Raider for a while, which supports ray-tracing shadows (hint: it's in the name), and these shadows have a huge impact on performance. Using the game's default benchmark with no rays traced at all and everything else set to "best," I recorded a respectable 64 fps.

However, when the ray tracing core is put to work, the performance drops to 55 fps, even with the "Medium" setting. Turning up the shadows to "High" allows for gorgeous light effects, but at 41 fps, it is not ideal. The "Ultra" setting averages 39 fps and drops to a minimum of 26 fps. A beautiful 26 fps, but hardly the frame rate we want.

What about DLSS? If you turn this on with the shadow set to high, the frame rate jumps again to 67 fps, but the image is blurry, so it's not for everyone. If DLSS 2.0 is applied to Shadow of the Tomb Raider, this is worth noting.

We had a similar experience with "Metro Exodus," which makes good use of global illumination: running in RTX mode, it was 40 fps, but with the high preset it was 53 fps. These AAA titles, even the RTX ones, can be played with everything maxed out, but you can tell that the RTX 2060 is being abused to its limits. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to fit anything more powerful into this tiny chassis, so the only way to get silky smooth performance is to play with these settings.

As for battery life, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 performed almost as expected. Running games with it unpowered, it lasted just under two hours, which is fairly normal for a gaming laptop; PCMark10's productivity battery test says it can last for 7 hours and 21 minutes.

Performance aside, there are many other innovations that make this machine higher than standard, such as the power button being integrated with the fingerprint sensor, which provides an efficient way to make sure only you can sign in. Also, when the laptop is opened, the lid raises the bottom of the unit slightly for a more comfortable typing experience and to help improve airflow.

Cooling all these top-notch components in a 14-inch chassis requires something special, and Asus has risen to the challenge. The heart of the cooling solution consists of five heat pipes covering the CPU and GPU, as well as the VRMs next to them. The fan is a modified version of the one found on the 15" Zephyrus, with alternating fin lengths to improve airflow while attempting to reduce noise levels.

At full power, this laptop can still get noisy, but you can control the noise and performance levels using the Asus Armory Crate software, which has its own button next to the audio controls above the keyboard. Here, you can choose from Silent, Performance, Turbo, and manual. We tested using the Performance preset because it offers the best balance between performance and thermal (noise). Raising the profile to Turbo gave a little more leeway for CPU-centric tasks, but did not have much of an impact on gaming (1-2 frames at most in our tests).

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 is in a bit of an odd place in that it is not a full gaming laptop. That is, it can definitely game, but you're paying a lot of money for a CPU that you can't really take advantage of unless you do more than gaming; it will happily handle 3D rendering and video encoding, but if you don't do that, you're not getting the most out of it. In other words, you're better off saving your money and going with something a little less CPU power intensive.