2024 Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 Review

this is Lisa from mobile tech review and this is the 2024 edition of the Asus Rog zephrus G14 GA 403 for those of you who follow those model numbers uh you know it's been around for 4 years now this is 3.3 lb which is 1.5 kg it's a redesigned chassis still for both Gamers and content creators but maybe it's leaning a little more in One Direction now we're going to find out about that now so the G 14 has a stored history when it came out was it 2020 it was just one of the first 14-in gaming laptops other than the Razer Blade back when the Razer Blade used to be making the stealth which really you know it wasn't really that much of a gaming laptop Razer Blade 14 came later more of a gaming laptop for sure so it was pretty neat because it was fairly affordable it looked decent enough and it had some crazy GPU options given the small size that's kind of changed this year so there's going to be two camps of folks out there especially For You G14 if this Autos there's going to be the ones who say this is what I was always looking for oh my God it looks so good with this redesign it looks literally as classy as a 14-in MacBook Pro only with the little slash across the lid certainly competing with the razor blade 14 again and those of you who are going to say but last year's model last year's was crazy right yeah you can get a 4060 or an RTX 470 but you could go all the way to a 4080 or 4090 that was balls of the wall performance something that was largely you could say almost inappropriate in 14-in slim chassis laptop so ass probably said look most people are buying the 4060 and the 4070 maybe even the 4050 in the United States I only see a 4060 and 4070 available for this new model but um and the the the challenge of cooling in the 480s and the 490s was hard right so now we have the bread and butter 4060 470 both of them are 90 wat gpus that's not bad but it is down from last year's model so for those of you who reac people who are saying I want last year's model asusa said they're going to keep selling it this year so if you do want last year's model for that greater GPU performance CU you're about gaming more than anything else it's still there for you but for the rest of the folks who want something classy not so gamery better build quality all that sort now it's CNC aluminum the entire thing no plastic under bottom no magnesium alloy that's light but kind of flexy and it's even thinner I mean at Best Buy they have this plop down with the ultra books right and it fits right in visually it's just amazing cuz it looks classy and because it's that small but it does have performance for sure now we have the 4060 model here so the 4070 is obviously going to be 10% more performant oriented uh one thing that they did do is in a year when raiser last year reintroduced having Ram slots two Ram slots most of the other 14-inch notebooks don't have any and now this one does not used to have one which is better than nothing obviously so upgradeable Ram not a thing if you get the 4060 in the United States that comes with 16 gigs of RAM and they upsell you if you want to get 32 gigs of RAM which is kind of a bummer so you got to get the 4070 maybe you didn't really need the 4070 otherwise but you want to be future proofed or you are that professional audience that they're thinking about now who more often than Gamers honestly needs that Ram because you can currently running I don't know math lab AutoCat Ram intensive applications concurrently that sort of thing so that is what it is um they also don't have the scale of manufacturing say Lenovo or Dell who can actually offer individual singular upgrades and manage make that work in terms of cost and one thing is for sure the cost the price on these is really good the 4060 model with 16 gigs of RAM both of them have 1 tbte nvme ssds and an OLED display we'll talk about because that's a big deal too um it's 1,600 bucks for the 4060 and it's $2,000 for the 470 and already like at Best Buy they have the 460 on sale for $1,450 which is crazy good deal for this that OLED display let's talk a little bit about that now last year this G14 wasn't bad it had a nice mini LED display which has HDR so it's good just like OLED not quite the black levels of OLED but you get more extreme brightness capability so people who use it Outdoors are going to like mini LED and that was a older Tech though 500 local dimming zones and more dimming zones makes a big difference some of the latest the Sous Smalls I still use mini LED are up to up to 2 000 for example for black or blacks less haloing that's why but right here we have a 2.8k OLED display latest technology even has DC dimming so what does that mean pwm people hate pwm pulse with modulation the OLED screens kind of flash at you you get eye strain that sort of thing uh so this one here if you have it over 100 nits of brightness is going to use DC dimming instead so it mitigates that pwm problem which is nice so the display is 120 HZ short to make cameras happy obviously if you're playing playing Super Competitive Gaming uh where you need High frame rates you know maybe not but who's going to be buying a 14-inch laptop to professionally game no not so much anyway 120 Herz good stuff that um the supports still has gaming DNA here we have gsync on board which is nice you don't see that on the razor blade for example that it competes with and we have a Muk switch and we have advanced Optimus so more performance potential there though honestly testing games on both Advanced Optimus and on the dgpu only setting I got about the same results there so Advanced Optimus can be pretty Advanced the bad news is with the S you get these notifications more often about it switch it doesn't handle as seamlessly as some other brands do but whatever anyway good stuff is a glossy display that's what you get with all that it's unfortunate maybe glossy doesn't mean it's a touchcreen it is not a touchcreen so that's one thing I'm not thrilled about I prefer no glare when I'm gaming but gets reasonably BL it's OLED you know what I'm saying you're not going to get a 600 nit display here but you're getting a little above 400 nits which is nice enough experientially it's a nice looking display and it pairs well with the speakers you have six speaker audio here including two wers and wow I mean you know we always say with Windows laptops well it's not as good as a MacBook Pro guess what I think this is even better the base on this is good the volume the clarity of The Trebles a lack of distortion at higher volumes this is the perfect Netflix machine I mean between this HDR display and these speakers that's nice is it the perfect gaming machine well you can only go up to 4070 and only at 90 Watts so it depends on who you are if you're a purist who only wants the fastest and all that sort of thing you might want to look at something like a g16 for example with a higher end GPU and that sort of thing but for somebody who's looking for gaming on the go absolutely it's capable enough with the 4060 it's fine you can have most of the settings turned up I mean we even ran cyberpunk at 2560 by 1600 which is a little lower than native resolution but just so we're running it the same resolution we do with other QHD plus 16 X10 aspect ratio gaming laptops and uh when you have dlss frame gen on it's really very playable even on rate tracing low settings so it's doable personally me I would rather have the 4070 if I was gaming on this thing primarily but uh the fact that Nvidia Studio rather than GeForce drivers are pre-installed means they're thinking about creative types more the blender people the premier Pro people that sort of thing which it is very capable at and very fast it's good for that sort of thing certainly and uh 40 60 470 or plenty enough for that is a 4080 or 490 going to make a difference for video editing no it's not if you're doing hardcore blender yeah having an even higher end GPU could be nice but again it's a 14-inch laptop so it's it's very fast for Content creation purposes well this sounds all really great so what it's the catch right heat and Noise well they're actually better despite the fact there's no Vapor chamber this year it's a more simple cooling Solution that's also because well we only go up to a 4070 now they don't have to worry about the cooling as much so it it's fine we've got heat pipes here we've got liquid metal on the GPU and a noise on this running into performance mode in a Seuss Armory crate because turbo is way louder always with the Seuss products without really offering much of a performance benefit in performance mode it's the same as other 14-in gaming laptops that are available this year which is to say it's actually not bad surprisingly speaking when playing games it's more of the sound of water boiling then a roaring sound I'm it's good the speakers are more than loud and full enough to drown it out to the touch get a little hot on the bottom there in the middle towards the rear on the underside there you H yes you know you're not going to want to keep this on your legs when you're playing games you shouldn't keep any laptop on your legs when you're playing games but really ouchy yeah hot and the area above the keyboard between the keyboard and the display that gets super duper hot do not touch there I mean it's like you're going to touch it you're going to put your finger right away because it gets that hot but the wrist rest area and the keyboard area warm for sure warm but not burning hot speaking of that sort of thing uh they did with this design change get rid of the hot air blowing on the display which made people nervous if nothing else uh so now it vents out behind the display which is good but as designed drawback to that now it no longer opens flat to 180° it's about 130° well most people care I don't think so other little amenities you have a RGB keyboard you can pick any color you want but the whole keyboard is going to be that single color and on the lid now instead of the animatrix little dot dot LED light up thing they have what they call slash lighting which is a light bar across the top that's contrast you can turn that off if you want to don't worry there's a variety of only in white patterns that it can Flash whatever that's nice Windows hello 1080p IR camera reasonably competent that's nice so what about quality control the build quality is good on this all that sort of thing and the performance on it was fine we had have any overheating problems or anything like that GPU ran a little hot low 80s instead I usually see it capped around 75 cenr but anyway um ports you have a good Port selection here this is AMD so you don't have Thunderbolt nominally we do have a USBC report on the right and a USBC 4 with power delivery on the left ours happen to be defective it only did power delivery at wouldn't do data at all which seems to be like a constant theme ever since the G14 came out four years ago where these borked USB C4 ports I don't know and three ports even it it is what it is you have HDMI 2.1 on board you have usba ports as well of course a headphone jack and a Micro SD card slot which is better than nothing at all though I think content creators are still using full size SD cards I know we are because they're cheaper and it's easier to get the really fast kind in full size battery life on this well it's OLED that's always a little bit of a Hur but it does surprisingly well 73w hour battery that's pretty close to what the previous generation had 180 watt charger fairly compact smaller than the razor blades because that one's a 230 Watt and on productivity mixed use 200 200 knit of brightness that sort of thing we did about 6 hours which isn't too bad if you're just streaming video then you could probably do 9 hours or so as always if you're playing games or doing blender or AutoCat or something like that it's going to be way lower and performance will also drop too when it's unplugged as well so don't unplug it unless you have no choice all right to get into the internals 11 Torx screws two of them are hidden under little rubber covers that are held with a reusable adhesive I don't think suzu is being used or hostile there I think they just thought it was aesthetically more pleasing it's easy enough to take them on put them off anyway then pry up from the back it's pretty easy there's an inlet here for the ventilation and you can work way your way around with a guitar pick or something and take off the aluminum bottom panel and there it is and here are the internals battery here obviously to boy these are Big no wonder the audio is so good on this six speaker system so two the woofers right here surrounding it obviously we have three fan ventilation here good to see anything that pulls air over the vrm so the PCH is good maybe keeps the battery nice and less hot Ram is soldered on here as we know by now that's one of the sad things though it does allow them to use much faster Ram than they would if they had s so dim slots and the Wi-Fi card the mediate Tech card which is not loved by all typically speaking I it's upgradeable and replaceable it's socketed so you can go and put whatever card you want in there like an Intel card Killer card you know that sort of thing and we do have a single m.2 standard 2280 SSD slot here so if you needed to upgrade you could and it's enough space you can have a two-sided Drive in there not a problem competitors obviously the razor blade 14 um that one has Ram slots so that's a selling point it does not have an OLED option that's unless you don't want OLED CU you're worried about burning or something or you want that higher 240 Herz refresh rate that the blade has uh there are trade-offs the keyboard back Lighting on the razor blade is more even the you can see where they had to cut some corners on this G14 there like a single LED lighting each key which means that any secondary key maskings are really pretty dim and hard to see uh but the blade is like $700 more for comparable configuration so they're clearly going after them here with this class year build the blade obviously gets a performance win because it has 140 W GPU versus the 90 watt in the assus even if after 100 Watts it's kind of diminishing returns there by the way if you want a Smackdown between the blade and the G14 let me know in the comments then there's the 14-in MacBook Pro which you know obviously that's going to have better battery life you have an amazing lovely mini LED display on that but if you want to play games really you're still better off with the Windows laptop if you want to play Windows games you've got native playability there so it really depends if you're buying this for Content creation and all that sort of thing yeah I can see picking the MacBook Pro and then there's the new HP Omen transcend 14in which is also an OLED display 14inch laptop only with Intel CPUs also you can get RTX 4060 4070 but that's really pretty gimped out at 65 Watts that's the only heart there so for gamers you might really want to still look at the G14 or if you want to make the bigger spend the razor blade obviously I'm Lisa from mobile tech review be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more cool Tech videos and thumbs up if you like this vid

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Keywords: MobileTechReview, Lisa Gade, 2024 Asus ROG Zephyrus g14 review, asus g14 ga403 review, 14, gaming, laptop, oled gaming laptop, amd ryzen, razer blade 14 competitor, 14, macbook, pro, best small gaming laptop, 2024 asus rog zephyrus g14 benchmarks, how to upgrade asus rog zephyrus g14

Id: nV_2y_GSans

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2024