iTWire - Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 Australian Laptop Review (14th Gen)

Wednesday, 06 March 2024 11:23

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 Australian Laptop Review (14th Gen) Featured

By Nick Ross

Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 Australian review

Nick Ross

Over at High Performance Laptops, Nick Ross has just posted a full, Australian review of the 2024 Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 – one of the first laptops on the local market with a new, Intel, 14th-Gen processor. Here’s the reduced, rapid review:

Asus’ ROG Zephyrus laptops are designed to be stylish, portable and powerful laptops that excel both in the office and when gaming. The new, 2024 version looks very different to its predecessors thanks to a largely grey, milled-Aluminium chassis (which keeps it sturdy and light – but is a bit of a fingerprint magnet) plus, the replacement of its show-stopping, matrix-LED lid with a single, mirror-finished ‘Slash’ stripe which can display flashy LED patterns.

At $3,499 it offers reasonable value considering the high-quality fabrication and relatively powerful mid-tier components which include an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 GPU and a new, 14th-Gen, Intel ‘Meteor Lake’ Ultra 7 155H processor that operates from 1.4 to 4.8GHz and has 6 Performance cores, 8 Efficiency cores and 2 Low Power Efficient cores (which all run across 22 threads). It also has an NPU for Ai-driven tasks.

The Performance was upper mid-range and it’s able to play the latest games – although you may have to dial down the quality settings in those with more-complex eye candy. It’s reasonably powerful for rendering, but not the fastest either. That said, Asus is releasing multiple SKUs of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 and some feature top-tier CPUs and GPUs. However, even the well-cooled chassis – which is only 17mm thick – will likely struggle to stay cool and quiet with the more-expensive components.

In terms of portability, the 16-inch laptop weighs ‘just’ 1.9KG and has a power supply that adds just-over half a kilo more. The battery life is very impressive though, running office-software-based benchmarks for between 15 and 16 hours. The chassis should keep it safe when travelling but the hinge was a bit floppy.

In terms of ergonomics, the fast ‘Nebula’ screen is generally good but not perfect. The glossy coating will be an issue for office workers while multimedia performance is generally good thanks to its UHD resolution, decent contrast and monochromatic gradients. Stepped-transitions can occur in some colour fades, though, but it does support 100% of the designer-friendly DCI-P3 colour gamut. True blacks are a bit washed out but the 240Hz refresh keeps almost all fast-moving objects blur-free.

The quad-speakers are outstanding, the low-travel RGB keyboard is comfy and accurate and so is the trackpad. The Full HD webcam and triple microphone array (along with the Ai enhancements and Asus’ audio spatial settings) means it very good for web conferencing. The webcam also works with Windows Hello facial-recognition log-on.

Wired connectivity is very good thanks to USB-A, USB-C, Thunderbolt 4 and HDMI 2.1 ports. There’s also a UHS II SD card reader and an audio jack. Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 wireless connections are present but it would have been nice to see Wi-Fi 7 make an appearance.

Overall, it’s a very-decent, all-rounder laptop that many mobile workers who game will appreciate and so it’s worth of its Highly Recommended award. It’s not quite the standard bearer that we were hoping for from Asus ROG, though.

• Rating 4.4/5
• iTwire Recommended

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