ASUS - ROG Zephyrus 14" Gaming Laptop - AMD Ryzen 9 - 16GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 - 1TB SSD - Moonlight White

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus 14” is a no-nonsense laptop for the hardcore gamer on the go. First impressions of this laptop are how sleek and civilized it looks. The gamer aesthetic is subtle, looks and feels premium. ¼” thin bezels and minimalistic branding are also a big plus. Big fan of its notebook form-factor as well, making it very portable. Key stabilization is great on all keys and keyboard feels like any membrane keyboard. All keys have dimmable white backlighting which has customizable effects in the included Armory Crate software. Magnesium chassis has no deck flex with Dolby Atmos compatible, upward firing speakers. Another thing worth mentioning is the texture of the chassis feels comfortable when I rest my palms on it and will not attract smears and smudges. ASUS’s “AI noise cancellation” is advertised to block out unwanted sounds from the microphone array. Was not able to get this feature to work even after an audio driver update and reinstallation of the Armory Crate software. Next-gen RTX 3060 and Ryzen 9 5900HS shred through even the most intensive games at high settings. Paired with a 144hz, 1080p, variable refresh rate display, this trio creates a no-compromise buttery-smooth gaming experience. Don’t forget about workstation use, the Ryzen 9’s raw computing power is great for video editing, 3d rendering, and many more creative use cases. The SK Hynix NVME drive offers blazing fast read and write performance. Loads games in a heartbeat. During heavy workloads, the fans are significantly quieter than other gaming laptops I have used. All this computing power comes with a cost, heat. The laptop gets uncomfortably hot on the bottom and very warm near the keyboard during intense gaming. However, cooling system keeps the temps in check, peaking at 76° on the CPU and 71° on the GPU under load. This laptop has a myriad of thoughtful battery-saving features so you can enjoy longer cordless gaming sessions. For starters, Nvidia Geforce Experience has “batteryboost” optimized settings for games, which lowers the graphical fidelity of the games when on battery to save power while not sacrificing FPS. ASUS Armory Crate software also has preset “on-battery” and “performance” modes which automatically switch. Finally, the refresh rate of the display is locked to 60hz while on battery to greatly increase the battery life. Gaming on battery is still extremely smooth, even with all these features at work. One drawback of this laptop is the absence of an integrated webcam. In this day and age where video conferencing is the norm, this redaction blemishes what is otherwise a near-perfect laptop. Wi-Fi 802.11AX a big plus for future proofing or anyone who has latest AX (Wi-Fi 6) router. Incredible throughput with my Asus GT-AX11000 router. Synthetic Benchmarks: • 3DMark Timespy - Overall Score: 6404 (Great) - Graphics Score: 6161 - CPU Score: 8256 • Unigine Superposition (1080p High) - Score: 8494 - Min FPS: 52 - Max FPS: 78 - Avg FPS: 64 • Blender BMW Render (CPU) - Time: 03:38:86 • Blender BMW Render (GPU) - Time: 05:35:26 • Crystal Disk Mark - Sequential 1mb read: 3598 MB/s - Sequential 1mb write: 2844 Mb/s - Random 4kb read: 927 Mb/s - Random 4kb write: 359 Mb/s Real-world Gaming Benchmarks (All benchmarks were recorded with Nvidia’s optimized settings): • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019 - Min FPS: 79 - Max FPS: 139 - Avg FPS: 102 • Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War - Min FPS: 80 - Max FPS: 137 - Avg FPS: 104 • Escape from Tarkov (Customs Map) - Min FPS: 32 - Max FPS: 85 - Avg FPS: 47 • Rocket League - Min FPS: 202 - Max FPS: 251 - Avg FPS: 234 • Titanfall 2 - Min FPS: 55 - Max FPS: 146 - Avg FPS: 141 Hugely impressed with how much computing power and features can be packed into a small package. If you want to game all-out on the go, this laptop is for you.

I researched gaming laptops for weeks and to be honest this was not my first choice. The rumors of it overheating while under heavy loads were worrisome to me. The rumors were true and I was gaming at around 85C which seemed too much for me. After finding the solution which was to turn off the automatic boost built into the laptop. Because of this, I can 100% recommend this product. This 14' laptop with extremely powerful components in it gets up to 12 hours of battery life on a full charge. Absolutely blown away.

So this was bought for my girlfriends schooling. Perfect size, style, and performance. It’s Ryzen 9 is the best for multitasking and gaming. The 3060 provided enough power for an external 1440p 144hz 27” gaming monitor while playing Valorant and getting 144fps! Only reason for the loss of a star is about one month after owning the graphics card went out. The computer would be fine on an external monitor but when she would unplug it to take it to school, the screen would produce a rainbow error screen. We returned it and Best Buy easily exchanged it for a new one even outside of our return period. We ended up buying the one up from it with the 15.6” QHD screen and 3070 GPU. Other than this issue, we highly recommend this stylish yet powerful laptop!

Needed something for school and gaming because traveling around with a mid-tower is exhausting. :P I play a lot of Path of Exile which has a bazillion particle effects when you play with friends often crashing computers left and right. This laptop can really handle itself. I love the color of it too, makes it feel a little bit special.(who doesn't like feeling special sometimes) The screen actually lifts the base up off of the table leaving plenty of room for air flow, and if you're not the hulk with gamer rage, I think it doesn't have much chance of breaking. One thing that kind of sucks is you'll need a USB hub if you want to plug in all your own accessories. there's only 2 USB's on the right side of the laptop, so I use a hub for my keyboard, mouse and headset. HDMI port on the left along with the 3.5mm for headphones/headset. USB-C and charging port also on the left side. Haven't thought about upgrading it, I really don't have a reason to at this point. Nailing out my music homework using Ableton live and kicking some game req. butts. so I see no reason for upgrading at this time.

Pros: - Plays all modern games I've thrown at it on Ultra (Doom Eternal, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Forza Horizon 4) - Has fantastic audio, much better than my macbook pro - The screen at 144hz is very nice - The keyboard is good and doesn't feel so chicklet-y - Overall build quality is great Cons: - Too few USB ports, and they poke out on the right side, so if you put a mouse on the right side it collides with wires from anything else - The keyboard is silver and lights up, in some lighting conditions it makes seeing what key is what very difficult. - This baby gets hot! I highly suggest a lap desk and a cooling pad - Although it has decent specs, clock speed on the gpu and cpu are clocked at lower frequencies likely for heat managment.

I'm writing this review after using ASUS G14 laptop for 15 days now. I'm used this laptop for my research and computational purpose of fluid flow and I'm so impressed by this. I had a choice of purchasing Macbook pro but I feel this had better configuration and best value for money. I love its battery backup and follow its recommendation of 80% balanced charge and I get 8-9hrs of work done on a single charge including reading papers and running python scripts. Best part is it has much needed ports that helps integrate with my monitor and headset. I didn't have to buy anything additional. And, it feels so light, it feels like carbon fibre body works of car. Sp light yet so strong. Best laptop to carry around. One cons is it doesn't have webcam integrated but it has phone connect app, so i can use my phones camera for zoom meetings, but I already got extra webcam.

I want to go into a bit more detail than I see from others on this laptop and get into the pros and cons more deeply. A quick summary would be that this laptop offers great performance especially for the size of the machine. Early battery tests of some light mixed usage yields results of 10-12 hours, inclusive of YouTube video playback of 1080p content. This is with the screen brightness at 50% and the screen refresh rate automatically lowered to 60hz, instead of the native 144hz. The 5900HS beats, in my testing, an Intel Core i7-10870H, and matches in testing an i9-10980HK., while the 3060 matches or beats a desktop 2060 while stock. Delving into gaming, I tested Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p with the Highest Preset, and AA set to TAA. The game returned an average frame rate of 91 FPS. In Doom Eternal, with all settings cranked, the system gets over 130FPS on average, generally matching the 144hz refresh rate of the display. At full stock settings, the laptop returned an overall score of 7532, with a score of 7324 for the GPU and 8985 for the CPU. Overclocking the memory by 150Mhz and the Core by 200Mhz using Armory Crate, and with the fans manually set to 100% yielded an overall score of 7959, with the GPU scoring 7798, and the CPU scoring 9016. Temperatures are a bit interesting. With stock settings and running the system in Asus’ “Turbo” mode, the GPU stayed under 75°, and the CPU under 73°. Overclocked, the GPU pushed to 85° before setting the fans to 100%. Stressing both the GPU and CPU simultaneously in Turbo mode got the GPU to 77°, and the CPU to a toasty 96°. Setting the fans to 100% reduced the CPU temps to 86°, and the GPU to 71°. This was also using the same CPU and GPU stress testing. With an overclock, the 3060 performs relatively close to an RTX 2070 Super Max-Q, with Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmarks showing a better result of 95FPS. The response times of the display are a bit slower in practice vs other 144hz displays, but in games, I did not find it too noticeable. The fingerprint scanner is markedly improved over the last version of this laptop. Could just be drivers, but it definitely works faster and more accurately. The keyboard backlighting is better than the previous version of this laptop, with the lighting being much more uniform, but during the day it is still hard to see due to the lighting being white on silver keys. Otherwise, the keyboard feels great to type on, with deeper travel than one might expect from a laptop so thin. Removing the bottom panel allows the user to upgrade SSD, WIFI card, and 1 RAM module. 8GB is soldered to the motherboard. The speakers are great with surprising clarity and bass. Using the default performance presets, they can easily overpower the sound of the fans when gaming. I think this laptop is a great buy, with my only issues being the color of the backlight on the keyboard, lack of HDMI 2.1 (It has HDMI 2.0, but I think HDMI 2.1 would be more forward looking), and lack of ethernet, though the system has WIFI 6, and in my testing with a Netgear Nighthawk CAX80 Router, the system was able to achieve download speeds over 1400Mbps. The laptop does support USB-C charging, which works great, and the touchpad is fluid, and uses Microsoft’s precision drivers. All around, I think this laptop would be a great companion for editing, code compiling, and gaming. Some of the things I’ll be using it for. I’d definitely recommend this laptop.

Overall great laptop. If I had one nitpick spec-wise, I wish it had a slightly lower CPU in exchange for a better GPU. Some notes about using this after a month: The display may appear washed out when you first use it. This can be improved by disabling Vari-Bright within Radeon Software (see first image). It's a power-saving measure, but it definitely hinders the display quality. No webcam: I find this a great benefit, but many others may disagree. The keyboard backlight is largely unnecessary. In dim lighting, the backlight may make the keys even harder to read. (see second image) The bottom can be easily opened; the SSD and one stick of RAM can be upgraded (8GB are soldered onto the main board). Other information can be obtained through video reviews, so please look there if you have not already. Search for "Gigabyte Zephyrus G14 2021", and most videos posted after February 2021 should be about this laptop.