ROG STRIX G16 | Is the extra inch worth it?

for the longest time the laptop industry has comfortably settled into preset sizes for laptops usually dictated by their 16x9 displays there's the 13 to 14 inch minis the 15-inch standards and the 17-inch Ultrabooks but as the tech Road progresses we ask more and more of our devices and in 2023 we finally see that size template broken almost all windows gaming laptop manufacturers are standardizing their 16x10 display equipped laptops this year and for my first go with this bigger and supposedly better form factor I've got the Rog strix g16 here and we're here to answer one question are you really getting that much more laptop with an inch and almost 400 dollars on top of last year's offerings let's find out before we continue with this video I would like to remind you that if you are enjoying this content please leave a like And subscribe to my channel I'm a solo content creator and I do all this to make sure that all of you are informed about the products you're about to purchase every subscription helps keep this channel running thank you now on to the video as is usual with my reviews we start at the outside the Rog strix g16 comes in a combination build with most of the body in this hard textured plastic and the cover plate and the top plate in thin metal this is not the same kind of coated thicker aluminum that we see in the zephyrus line but it still feels pretty solid in the hand and this laptop being really large and thick really adds to that feeling it measures 35.4 centimeters wide 26.4 centimeters long and 3.4 centimeters at its thickest point so make sure that you've got space in your bag and you've got strength in your shoulders because this is a heavy burden to bear while walking around there are no creaks in the body nor in the hinges though and there is very little screen wobble there is a small amount of screen Flex though so you might want to be careful with that oh and the light bar makes a return here at the front it's bright and beautiful and it looks super extra as always the keyboard and trackpad are standard Fair it seems like a direct lift from last year's Trix g15 albeit moved around slightly it's still a pretty good keyboard with a moderate travel distance and the soft bottom out but they're not squishy enough to ruin my typing experience you do miss out on a fingerprint reader though the trackpad is huge and has finally lost the trackpad delay that plagued the strix g15 it is now totally responsive and has great Palm rejection I would like to point out though that some of rog's marketing material about the g16 might not be totally accurate if you go on the Rog website page of the g16 right now you're going to see that in almost all of the images of this laptop the Asus number pad is prominently displayed in all photos which isn't totally not the case for the unit with me nor with any of the units I've seen sent to other Publications this might be a case of some g16 models in other territories having this function but I highly doubt that having a numpad does not legally qualify or disqualify a laptop from being sold in any territory in the world so why would Rog take it out of some models I don't know this might be a marketing mishap but as if shooting this video the mistake is still visible on the Rog website let's head on over to the ports on the left side we have the 3.5 millimeter headphone and microphone Jack Combo two USB 3.2 Gen 2 type c ports that support 100 watt power delivery and DisplayPort 1.4 out we have an HDMI 2.1 out and an rg45 Lan Port as well on the right side we get two USB 3.2 Gen 2 type a super speed boards this port selection is really fine I always have to upload gaming laptops that have an rg45 port one thing I want to point out though is that the USB Type e ports are located where your mousing hand is so if you've got wired peripherals better make space on your desk I do understand rog's decision to put these ports here though as 30 of every side and the entire back of the laptop are just straight up vents now yes we've reached a point that we've hollowed out a good huge part of laptops just to cool the hot internals that we put into them but we'll talk about what makes this tricks g16 hot later on in the video before we tackle the top of it first Trix g16 marks the return of the webcam to the strix line after a four year long absence it is just a 720p webcam though but given the right amount of light it can actually look pretty okay it's perfectly usable for like basic streams and zoom meetings but yeah anything beyond that you're gonna have to get a better camera it does lack an IR sensor though so yeah no face unlock via Windows hello but the great AI noise canceling mics make a return and it's still great as ever alright this is where things start to get a little funky first off I want to mention that I fully support the move to larger 16x10 displays we've previously seen this shift of Standards from 16x9 to 16x10 and professional and greater laptops and I welcome it in the gaming space as well but with that said I find that there is a huge catch to the things I like and dislike with the screen on the strix g16 let's start off with the specs the Rog strix g16 display is a 16 inch 16 by 10 1920x1200 IPS display that runs at a 165hz refresh rate with a 7 millisecond response time it covers 100 of the srgb color gamut supports Dolby Vision HDR g-sync and is connected to a mux switch with Nvidia Advanced Optimus so far so good right it is a great performing screen that runs fast and has good enough color for most AAA titles my two gripes with it are it's lower than usual brightness which cannot fight a well-lit office never mind sunlight at a coffee shop and the bigger gripe it's got some bad backlight bleed I've seen this mentioned by a few other Publications and it's just straight up noticeable right at the first startup you can clearly see backlight inconsistencies now I kind of understand this because it is the first year that 16x10 screens are becoming standard across the gearing segment so production facilities for these larger displays still have some ways to go to perfect these larger panels like I said before this is a perfectly serviceable even enjoyable screen but man it just feels like a long step back from the wild out 300hz screen that we got with the previous generation strix g15 especially when we're paying more hard-earned money for this generation of strix G models as is usually connected with my evaluation of the display the speakers here's the sound test against my JBL Quantum Duo speakers [Music] [Music] [Music] as we can hear they are OK speakers at Best nothing close to the big detailed and wide sound that the ironically smaller and Slimmer zephyrus models can put out the sound is serviceable when it comes to volume and quality but it's much too mid-centric to be detailed and while it can do mid bass there's just no lower base to here it'll be okay for gaming but don't expect it to wow you during Netflix nights [Music] thank you the Rog strix g16 model with me is running the Intel Core i7 13650hx which has 20 CPUs running at 2.6 gigahertz with a boost clock of 4 gigahertz it's running the Nvidia rdx4060 laptop GPU with 8 gigs of gddr6 16 gigs of ddr5 4800 Mega transfers per second ram and 1 terabyte of nvme PCA E4 m.2 SSD storage the other variant of this laptop available here in the Philippines is practically the same with just a lower spec Nvidia RTX 4050 laptop GPU with 6 gigs of gddr6 and yeah what can I say it's got monster performance under the hood so it performs as well as you imagined during my unboxing video I tested this out on Battlefield 2042 at ultra settings and it comfortably averaged 70 to 80 FPS during that entire play test but we'll be talking about performance numbers later opening up the case we can see the all-new cooling system by Rog for its 2023 line of laptops it's now a three fan setup with two large fans at the back and one smaller fan at the front there are 7 heat pipes connected to the fans and locks which lead to a huge heatsink array that spans the entire rigor of the laptop also we can see here at the bottom that it's powered by a 90 watt hour battery which is in line with what we've seen with previous Trix G models we can also see here that you can add another Ram stick to Max it out at 32 gigs and you can also add another m.2 SSD here alright time for some numbers on the screen for the Rog strix g16 since it comes with two options for power delivery in the 280 watt full brick and the compact USBC power delivery 100 watt brick I tested everything in both and computed the performance difference just to see what kind of performance you're either gaining or leaving on the table if you went for either brick let's start with synthetic benchmarks this Trix g16 on 3D Mark 280 watt scored 10 465 points on GPU 13 824 points on CPU with an overall score of 10 860 points switching over to the 100 watt brick let's see what GPU score of 9579 points a CPU score of 10449 points with an overall score of 9700 points that's an 11 decrease in performance when switching from the 280 watt brick to the 100 watt brick on cinebench R23 the 280 watt brick brought about a multi-core score of 20 288 points and a single core score of 1835 points the 100 watt brick was able to eke out a multi-core score of 12 684 points and a single core score of 1742 points this is somewhat fascinating since you're losing about 37 percent of performance in multi-core but only five percent in single core performance so if you're going to be using single core programs while on the go it's not a bad idea to just go for the smaller lighter 100 watt brick for gaming I tested it out on four games dirt 5 cyberpunk 2077 Battlefield 2042 and Just for kicks valorant starting out with dirt 5 and 1200p ultra settings the 280 watt bricks scored an average of 84 FPS with a one percent low of 35 fps downgrading to the 100 watt brick just barely got the laptop through with an average of 77 FPS with a one percent low of 26 FPS that's an average drop of 8 percent with a one percent low Drop of 25 that's a lot and a drop from 35 fps to 26 FPS spells the huge difference between still playable and borderline frustrating performance in a fast-paced rallying game cyberpunk 2077 at ultra settings RTX on with dlss set to balance is a different story the 280 watt brick averaging at 66 FPS with a 1 low of 27 FPS compared to the 100 watt average of 61 FPS with a 1 low of 27 FPS that's an average drop of seven percent with a one percent low Drop of 14 not as drastic as the performance drop we've seen in dirt 5 but then again this relies more on the predictable performance padding and gains of dlss 2.0 than anything else [Music] Battlefield 2042 another notoriously CPU bound game continues the trend we saw in dirt 5 on the 280 watt brick it averaged 72 FPS with a 1 low of 39 FPS and on the 100 watt brick it averaged 54 FPS with a one percent low of 22 FPS yikes you're losing 25 on average frame rates and 43 on one percent lows this correlates to the drop that we see in the synthetic benchmarks where we see multi-core CPU performance take a large hit when switching from the 280 watt to the 100 watt brick Battlefield 2042 is heavily reliant on the CPU for those large-scale 128 player maps and it shows lastly we have valoran look valarette is an Esports title and as such is fairly easy to run on any kind of hardware on the 280 watt brick it averaged 360 FPS with a one percent lows of 290 FPS switching over to the 100 watt brick and that's as an average of 310 FPS with a 1 low of 266 FPS that's a drop of 13 performance on average FPS and the drop of 8 percent in one percent low frames it's in line with their findings from cyberpunk 2077 but I feel that this drop is totally negligible since all of those frame rate stats are way past the strix g16 165hz refresh rate so no matter which brick you go with you're getting Max performance out of the screen in valeran just to finalize this tally we see a total aggregate performance drop of 13 in average frames and a drop of 22 percent in one percent low frames when you're switching from the 280 watt brick to the 100 watt brick take this into account when you're planning to head out with the strix g16 and you don't know which brick you're going to need [Music] in the performance tally we saw how much that Intel Core i7 13650 HX was dependent on power input and the strix g16 but on battery we see a whole nother side of the processor how it can just separate the battery if needed in moderate work use it was able to last 6 hours and 37 minutes at the silent power setting which is pretty unheard of in gaming though it was able to last a little under an hour and a half in performance mode 1 hour and 26 minutes to be exact which is still somewhat impressive thermal performance on the other hand might leave some worries on the table idle temps sit at around 55c moderate use bumps that up to 69c and on turbo we see temps reach up to 94c on a pretty intense game of Battlefield 2042 fan noise is pretty wild too with this strix g16 adding another fan to last year's already pretty loud twin blowers here's a sound dust foreign as you can hear there is some coil wind to this model I've checked around Reddit and it looks like the 2023 models are quite susceptible to it as with most tech products that can get coil wine please buy this laptop from a reputable dealer with a good return policy so if you do experience coil wine with your model you can easily exchange it for one that doesn't have it for the first time in my experience of reviewing this tricks model line from Rog I'm a bit torn maybe I've been quite used to just saying it's a good value laptop just buy a webcam with it and you're good to go but the strix g16 feels somewhat like a wary cell to me let's look at the facts you're paying a bit more for a bigger screen but has a few flaws to it strong specs but run hot and run loud and a form factor that will break your back faster than before those are trade-offs that we haven't seen from this line before yes you still get guaranteed performance and if that's all you're looking for by all means just go for it but if you're looking for a complete comfortable worry-free experience this tricks g16 might just not be the perfect fit this is the dawn of new standards for the line though and historically the first gen of any product usually has some flaws that haven't been ironed out yet and that's what the strix g16 feels like so that's the Rog strix g16 do you have any questions about this laptop please let me know in the comments as always please like And subscribe check out my previous video and stay tuned to my channel for more Tech and Tech adjacent videos I'll see you guys next time bye

Channel: Kevin Evangelista

Views: 34,687

Keywords: rtx 4060, ROG Strix G16, Gaming Laptop, Ultra Settings, First Impressions, PC Gaming, ASUS ROG, New Gaming Laptop, Best Gaming Laptop, ASUS ROG Strix, asus g16, gaming laptop, high-end laptop, gaming performance, NVIDIA RTX, high refresh rate, gaming experience, gaming community, laptop gaming, ultra settings, gameplay, portable gaming, premium laptop, ROG, ASUS, asus rog strix g16, intel 13th gen, gaming laptop 2023, best gaming laptop, review, laptop review

Id: WonJyiMEvLg

Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Thu May 04 2023