ASUS - ROG Zephyrus 16" QHD 240Hz Gaming Laptop - Intel Core i9 with 16GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080- 1TB SSD - Off Black

After having hinge failures on my MSI, I was looking for a better laptop experience. I'm not in this to benchmark, but this laptop delivered on every metric. The mini LED is fantastic, the build quality is on another level, the GPU is great, and the design of the laptop doesn't scream for attention. Both memory slots are also user replaceable. I upgraded both sodimm slots and added another SSD in under 10 minutes. The process was really simple. Only downside is it does attract fingerprints on the keyboard deck. The fan of the GPU can also get loud, but that's what's to be expected with a 4080. If you don't like it, it's simple to manually change fan speed and thermal thresholds so that the laptop fan doesn't need to spool those up so fast. If you want a well built Windows machine that is capable of running all the new titles, get this. If you want to have a cheap experience with the laptop and break the hinge just by closing the lid, then get an MSI.

The M16 is probably one of the best laptops I had. It can run games at the highest settings and high frame rates (e.g., RE4R Demo was 150+ fps during gameplay and reached ~240 fps during cutscenes…. it also ran Hogwarts Legacy with little to no stuttering but I don’t know the fps)— the i9 13th gen CPU and the RTX 4080 Laptop GPU work wonderfully together. Furthermore, it was really fast and the display was nice, even for a defect. HOWEVER, I had to return it because of the screen issues (ghosting or halo effect? It was weird, and made the laptop feel… old). I didn’t think the quality of it met up to its price, even with the open box discount (if you go for open box, either go in store or understand that your item will be a hit or miss). I would also say that the battery life kind of sucked—it would drain pretty fast when I was only using YouTube, which was a drag since it’s only Chrome. Also, I wish there was a fingerprint scanner like the ~2020 G14s but that’s okay. Regardless of these issues, the M16 is still an amazing laptop and I enjoyed using it while it lasted :)

This year M16 has a better design and reliability. The features were bumped up starting with the i9 13900h that behaves so well when unplugged. The single core performance on this is top performance. It remains intact when unplugged.In my experience multicore goes down around 27% when unplugged. Asus included 1x stick of 16 GB making it easy to upgrade to 32GB instead of replacing both sticks, thank you. The 4080 on this is crazy good for content creation and gaming on a slim chassis! I can’t find a similar competitor, there was a Razer 15 before but that change to a bulky Razer Blade 16. The tri-fan design somehow works well since noice levels are good execpt when pushing the laptop on gaming and using Turbo. But then again, there is manual mode.