ROG Zephyrus G14 Review - A Great Gaming Laptop

Vemuda Techno - So today we have the much awaited ROG Zephyrus G14, which has been a very popular gaming laptop for very good reasons, and this 2022 update has some really good improvements so let’s check out what makes it so special.

1.  Design

I am a total fan of how the G14 looks, and this white color version just looks so amazing. The weight and the thickness of this laptop is really great for something that has powerful gaming hardware inside, and if you’re looking for something that you can use at the office that can also double up as a gaming or a video editing, this is really perfect.

Source: Rock Paper Shotgun

Now there are two versions of this laptop, there is variant with the cool AnimeMatrix  lighting, and this is the version that comes without it.

However, as cool as that AniMe Matrix lighting is, I think that this regular version is better, because you’ll probably get bored by that lighting in 2 days, and it is very difficult to impress girls with something like that.

But more importantly, that version is a millimetre thicker and 70 grams heavier, and I would personally not want to carry around another thing that is unnecessarily thick and heavy, and this version without the lighting also has this cool rainbow effect when light gets reflected on it.

2. Screen

We have a really nice display on the G14, it’s a 14 inch IPS panel with a QHD resolution of 2560 x 1200 because this is a 16:10 aspect ratio display, and on a laptop, I really prefer this over a 16:9 display because you get more height which is so necessary.

It also runs at 120Hz which keeps everything smooth. It’s also a 100% DCI P3 coverage screen, so you can also use it for content creation, and it also gets quite bright at close to 500 nits.

3. Keyboard and Trackpad

The keyboard feels really great to type on, and has a surprising level of travel for a gaming laptop keyboard, and the trackpad we have here is also one of the best trackpads that I’ve used.

It is very big, it’s made of glass, and it has a really nice texture. While the layout of this keyboard is great, it does not have a print screen button, which personally bothers me, but you should be able to find alternate ways to do that.

We also have single zone RGB lighting on this keyboard, but at least on this white version, turning the RGB on actually makes the visibility worse.

Even when your room is dark, the light from the screen really keeps the font on keys visible, so I would personally always keep the RGB off, but if you go for its black version, you’ll definitely find more use for it.

The lid can be easily opened with one hand, and it goes beyond 180 degrees, and we also have Asus’s ergo lift feature which tilts the keyboard at a comfortable angle and creates space at bottom for ventilation.

4. Input-Output and Speakers

On the left side we have a combo audio jack, an HDMI 2.0b port along with a Type C port that supports power delivery for charging and displayport out, and on the right side.

We have 2 USB Type A ports along with another Type C port that supports displayport out, and there’s also a micro SD card reader which I’d have preferred to be a regular SD.

The down firing speakers on the laptop are loud and they don’t sound tinny, and there also seem to be two tweeters on both sides, but they output very less sound out of them, so the audio is mostly down firing, but it is nice.

5. Performance

This version of the G14 that I have comes with a Ryzen 9 6900HS, which is an 8 core 16 threads processor that is really powerful.

The GPU on this model is the Radeon 6700S, and we also have a MUX switch this year which allows you to drive the display directly with the GPU, which gives you a boost in performance.

You should be able to get very good performance on esports games to take advantage of the 120Hz panel on this, but heavier triple A games will mostly give you a 60 fps experience, unless you turn the settings to medium or can take advantage of FSR, but if you want more GPU horsepower, you can go with its higher end version that comes with a 6800S.

6. RAM and Strorage

This version comes with 16 Gigabytes of DDR5 RAM, 8 GB of which is soldered, and you can take the total RAM capacity to 24 GB, so this can become a really good machine for video editing.

It was also able to export a 7 minute 40 second 4K video project in just 6 minutes in premiere, which is really great because I wasn’t sure how well the Radeon GPU will work with hardware acceleration in Premiere, but it seems to support that properly, and timeline performance on this was also smooth.

But we have a single M.2 Slot that comes with a 1 TB Gen 4 NVME SSD Installed, which is super fast, but you may need to use external SSDs for larger projects.

7. Thermals

The thermal solution on this version has been updated, and you can see that it covers the GPU and CPU nicely, and we also have ROG’s intelligent Vapour Chamber here that finished one of my college assignments for me.

Coming to thermals, I ran God of War for almost an hour, and both the CPU and the GPU were kept at around 90 degrees celsius, which is a decent result for a laptop as the clock speeds were well maintained with a very slight throttle on the GPU.

The keyboard temperature was also not unbearable, though it does throw heat directly at the screen, which resulted in a 13 degree difference between the bottom and top of the screen, but I think ROG must’ve tested this design properly.

8. Webcam

The G14 has a 720 webcam on its top bezel, and this is what it looks and sounds like. It does look good if you have a good amount of light, it also supports Windows Hello for facial recognition, and Asus also has their excellent noise cancellation built into these mics, which can also be very helpful.

9. Battery Life

Ryzen 6000 series brings some great improvements for power efficiency, and this CPU only consumed 25 watts of power while gaming.

Even with the same 76 Watt hour battery, I was able to get a battery life of more than 9 hours on this laptop , which is very impressive for a gaming device.

The 240 watt charging brick will add an extra 600 grams to the weight of this device, but you may not need to carry that when you’re just using it casually, and you can of course juice it up with any USB C Charger with power delivery support if up to a 100 Watts.

10. Conclusion

So overall as I said in the beginning, and Zephyrus G14 is an incredibly well rounded laptop this year, with a really great design, very nice screen, very good keyboard and trackpad, and very powerful hardware inside a pretty lightweight and compact body, making it one of the best choices for a Gaming Laptop or something to edit videos on.

And that was it for this post, let me know your thoughts about this in the comments, thanks for reading and I’ll see you in the next one.

We have also reviewed Acer Nitro 5 (2022) 

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