Asus has entrusted us with one of the most beautiful devices in its lineup – the latest ROG Zephyrus G16 with a portable RTX 4090 and Meteor Lake CPU. Is this a dream laptop for gamers and creators? Here is our opinion:
Buy ROG Zephyrus G16
In the box we find a beautiful beast that literally honors the codes of the Zephyrus family. It’s slim, very elegant, and still very popular, with a sober, sophisticated and relatively versatile design. A wonder of design. Like other representatives of this family, named in honor of the Greek avatar of the wind, this product has the advantage of being particularly thin and light, with a thickness of almost 15 mm and a weight of 1.95 kg. That’s impressive for a 16-inch machine with a top. -Level hardware (see below).
Nevertheless, we can immediately see that Asus has not made the slightest concession in terms of construction quality. Without a doubt, this G16 fully deserves its status as a premium laptop. As always with the Zephyrus family, All finishes are absolutely perfect, from the hinge to the edge passing through the chassis body. This is without a doubt a true engineering gem.
screen
In recent years, Asus has raised the display bar with its gorgeous Nebula screen. And right out of the box, we’re not surprised to see that this G16’s screen is no exception to the rule. The manufacturer chose OLED instead of Mini-LED technology this time, but the results are still stunning. Judge for yourself. 2.5K WQXGA (2560 x 1600) panel in 16:10 format for best color difference performance (100% sRGB and DCI-P3 coverage, contrast ratio 1,000,000:1, Pantone certified, True Black 500 and DisplayHDR 1000). It also supports G-Sync technology, capable of delivering 240 frames per second with a response time of 0.2 to 3 ms.
in other words, Pretty unconventional screen This will wow all user profiles, from professional creators to the most demanding gamers.
The only possible criticism concerns the sheen of the panel, which can be quite annoying when the sun is shining brightly. Brightness above 500 nits may have made the device more comfortable in certain conditions.
Keyboard, trackpad, and audio
Thank goodness it’s one floor down. The keyboard is still convincing. Here again, this element radiates quality. Tactile feedback is clear and precise, key strokes are perfectly measured and very even. In both gaming and writing, typing is comfortable and accurate without the slightest bit of parasitic noise or balance issues. Simply great, but… It’s not perfect either.
Indeed, Asus has decided once again. sacrifice numeric keypad. If this choice is defensible on a 13- or 14-inch model, it’s a much more inexcusable drawback on the larger 16-inch device. This is a potentially prohibitive concession to many users, both players and creators. And at this level, it’s not the four multimedia keys on top of the keyboard that change things. It’s really sad…
But we console ourselves with the trackpad, which is also of excellent quality. It’s responsive, precise and still tactile, and it’s sure to win over even die-hard mouse fans, especially thanks to its extraordinarily large surface area. This is thanks to a vertical that starts just below the keyboard and extends to the bottom edge of the chassis.
We’ll also briefly discuss the audio part, which tends to be quite disastrous on laptops in general. I have to admit that this G16 really stands out at this level. Sound reproduction is very good for this category of devices. Aside from a few extraneous vibrations when pressed all the way down, distortion is surprisingly unnoticeable and the full spectrum is covered relatively well, allowing me to work without headphones during my multimedia testing. It’s clearly left too dirty to enjoy music in good conditions, and the coil buzzing noise that occurs when the hardware gets heavier ruins the party a bit, but it’s still appropriate to pay tribute to this fine performance.
Hardware and Performance
The model we received for testing was equipped with high-end hardware, namely a dedicated graphics card. RTX 4090 Laptop And a completely new processor Intel Core Ultra 9 185H. The latter, with 16 cores for 22 threads and capable of reaching 5.1 GHz on Turbo, sits at the top of the new family of chips on the Meteor Lake architecture.
Naturally, this G16 was suitable for running very demanding games. There is no need to go into details or look for nuances. This G16 is powerful enough to run any AAA title at top quality under excellent conditions, even with ray tracing maxed out. It also performs well for creative tasks. Our tests, which included small-scale 4K video editing and 3D modeling using multi-million point meshes in Blender, went smoothly.
But not everything is rosy. It’s a shame that the RAM is soldered on. Therefore, it is impossible to exceed the 32GB LPDDR5x-7467 that comes standard in our model. This is something even the most demanding creators should consider. But above all, even if the experience is completely satisfactory, here are the benchmark results: Raw performance is a bit disappointing. Compared to what you can expect from such high-end hardware…
For example, in 3DMark’s TimeSpy it falls more than 1500 GPU and CPU points behind the ROG Strix Scar 16 (RTX 4080 / Intel Core i9-13980HX) we tested last year. This observation is even more severe in Cinebench R23, a CPU-focused benchmarking tool. If this new Core Ultra is significantly better than the previous generation in terms of energy consumption, it will perform significantly lower than the i9 HX of the Raptor Lake generation. It scores 18,827 points in multi-core compared to over 30,000 points for the Intel Core i9-13980HX. Strix Scar 16! Really disappointing for such an expensive device.
You don’t have to look far to see where these differences come from. Manufacturers had to agree to the following: Installation in such a thin chassis requires significant limitations on the CPU/GPU couple.. It’s a very practical and elegant form factor, but it imposes too many concessions on thermal levels to make this ultra-high-end hardware profitable, and the performance/price ratio suffers dramatically (see below). This once again shows that these components have little relevance to this type of device. If you’re interested in this machine, definitely avoid the RTX 4090 model.
between
This model is very good in terms of connectivity. On the left is a Thunderbolt- and DisplayPort-compatible USB-C port, USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, and full-size HDMI 2.1 and 3.5mm jacks. The right edge features a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port, and a UHS-II SD card reader. In terms of wireless, this Zephyrus G16 supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. Everything you need is there… with one exception – I sorely regret that it doesn’t have an RJ45 Ethernet port. That’s always a little sad in a device suited to demanding gamers.
autonomy
It is difficult to expect wonders in terms of autonomy from a gaming laptop equipped with high-end hardware. But this G16 still stands above the rest at this level. he held Standard multimedia usage time is about 6 hours (Word processing and web browsing with Wi-Fi enabled). It’s not enough to get you through a full day without a charger, but it’s still comfortable for a device in this category.
Pricing and Availability
So we get to the annoying question of price. Test models appear in the following locations: €4799.99. It’s a price that’s hard to justify from every angle, and it’s perfectly fine if this model stands out due to its rather unconvincing performance/price ratio, especially for the RTX 4090 version. It’s still a great machine with obvious quality, so it might be a good idea to aim a little lower. For example, the RTX 4060 version is available from Darty for €2,699.99. It’s still expensive, but it’s already much more reasonable.
Buy ROG Zephyrus G16
On the other hand, Asus fans looking for more power would be better off switching to the atomic bomb that is the Strix Scar 17 X3D (see test).
Ultimately, the Zephyrus G16 is aimed at a public willing to pay a significant amount of extra money for a good, elegant and practical machine while sacrificing basic performance.
