ASUS - ROG Zephyrus G14 14" Laptop - AMD Ryzen 7 - 8GB Memory - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 - 512GB SSD - Eclipse Gray

---- Summary ---- Pros: - Thin and lightweight - High performance - Long battery life - Large and responsive touchpad - Spacious keyboard - Crisp and colorful display - Great value Cons: - Internal fans can get loud - No webcam ---- Review ---- Design: Asus got me hooked on this laptop right away. Even the unboxing experience reflects the time and effort put into the design. For example, when opening the box's lid, the ROG Zephyrus G14 slowly lifts towards you as if you're being presented with your next best laptop. It also allows for easy removal from the box. Maybe it’s just me who found this cool, but what I’m getting at is the attention to detail is noticeable and appreciated. One of the first things I noticed about Zephyrus G14 is how small it is, and I mean small in a good way. Many gaming laptops are large, bulky, and heavy. Whereas, this laptop is the complete opposite. I’m reminded more of a professional work or daily use laptop than a flashy gaming laptop, and that’s right up my alley. While I do love to game, I prefer a laptop that is portable and easy to use as my daily driver. Typing on the keyboard feels comfortable since it’s at a slight angle towards you, there’s no compromise in size, and all the keys are very responsive. Additionally, they’re backlit. I also appreciate the dedicated keys for volume, microphone mute, and ROG Armoury Crate for easy access above the keyboard. The power button is above the keyboard as well, and it doubles as a fingerprint sensor. Another aspect of the design that I like is the touchpad, which is large and responsive. The only thing I’d wish for is a webcam. While I don’t use one regularly, it would be nice to have one built into the laptop, especially since I’m using it as my daily driver. Even with that minor inconvenience, I’m a big fan of the Zephyrus G14’s design. I’d even go as far as saying it’s one of the best-designed gaming laptops I’ve seen on the market. Performance & Gaming: I won’t bore you with a bunch of benchmark test results. If you’re into that, there’s plenty of other reviews online that can be referenced. What I’ll say is that I’ve had a phenomenal gaming and daily use experience with the Zephyrus G14. The game I’ve been playing lately, Call of Duty Warzone, exceeds my performance expectations, and I tried out a few other games as well. All have performed very well, and the display of this laptop delivers a crisp, high definition image that’s full of color. The internal fans can get loud sometimes, especially while gaming, but I don’t feel that I’ve tested enough gaming laptops to say that they’re abnormally loud or not. Fortunately, there is a “Silent” setting in the ROG Armoury Crate software that does place more of an emphasis on noise reduction, and it’s pretty effective. Although I use headphones often, the speakers on the Zephyrus G14 sound great. For a laptop of its size with just a couple of small openings for sound, I was impressed. Battery life also impressed me. I average around eight hours of battery life for normal daily use and around three hours while gaming, but I’d recommend staying connected to get the most out of the gaming experience that the Zephyrus G14 has to offer. Verdict: With its compact design, high performance, and long battery life, the Zephyrus G14 pushes the limits. It’s not what I’d expect from a gaming laptop, in a good way. When I envision a gaming laptop that’s also portable and well suited for daily use, I can’t think of anything better. The icing on the cake is that this laptop is a great bang for your buck. Overall, the Zephyrus G14 is an exceptional laptop for gaming and productivity.

I always appreciate when a manufacturer puts some thought into how they package their devices. When you open the box, it lifts and tilts the laptop slightly to allow you to remove it. It's not much but a bit of clever box engineering, but it adds a touch of class to your first impression. The device itself is light, but feels sturdy and premium. Unlike most "gaming" laptops (which are often full of sharp geometry and LED lighting), this goes for a bit more of an "executive" feel. Although there are "gamer" details worked into the design, they're subtle. You could easily take this with you on a buisness trip without it seeming out of place, and fire it up for some gaming action in your hotel room. The shell is made from aluminum and solid-feeling plastic, and it just feels nice to use. There's a laser-engraved "Republic of Gamers" plate on the lid that looks classy and is a nice touch. This is the first 14" gaming laptop that I've used. I have a 15.6" MSI laptop and this feels almost infinitely more portable. I could easily throw it and it's charger into a bag and go. My MSI and it's massive power adapter need a full-size backpack to lug them around, so mostly it just sits at home. The cooling system appears to draw air down from in front of the screen and expells it from either side of the laptop, which is probably the most effective means of laptop air cooling. In periods of extended "testing", the laptop never got uncomfortably hot, and I was able to keep it on my lap. This is the third gaming laptop I've owned, but the first that's been able to accomplish this. The screen is super sharp to look at. I'm accustomed to looking at a 27" 4K monitor for most of my work day, and this screen has a similar pixel density (about 157ppi at 1920x1080) due to it's 14" size. I also feel that this makes games look better than you'd expect, even at lower quality settings. I felt that most games on medium settings looked great and weren't lacking for clarity or detail. Battery life is good. Not great, but good, which is about all I've ever been able to say for a laptop, especially a gaming one. By default, the Nvidia Experience software will work it's wizardry to maximize your battery life when not plugged in. It does this by limiting FPS to 30 and overriding your game's visual settings to put them somewhere in the neighborhood of medium. It's remarkably consistent at doing this, and maintains a solid 30 fps in whatever game I seem to be playing. Plugging the laptop back in near-instantly restores your visual quality to what you had it set at. Games are still very playable, of course, but you can easily tell that they're running at 30 frames. The primary benefit to this is that you can get about 2.5 to 3 hours of gaming on battery. You can absolutely turn this function off if you want (using the Nvidia Experience software) but the hardware in this laptop eats a lot of power, and like most gaming laptops, will chew through your battery in around 45 minutes without any power-saving measures. My personal thoughts on the matter are that if I'm unable to plug the laptop in, I want the battery to last as long as possible, so I'll leave this function on. It has two USB-A 3.1 ports and two USB-C ports, as well as a standard HDMI out and a combination headphone/mic jack. There is no webcam, which allows for a small screen bezel all the way around. I mostly mention this because webcams are basically standard laptop equipment, so if that's a dealbreaker for you, you'll have to look elsewhere. It has a fingerprint reader, which I like to use and works about as well as you'd expect a fingerprint reader to work. Sometimes it reads right away, sometimes it wants me to try again, three or four times, before it recognizes my finger. The laptop is snappy and responsive when performing tasks like surfing the web, and while I didn't test it much in this regard, I'm sure it can handle most office productivity apps with ease. But the most important part, of course, is how well it performs playing games. It's a gaming laptop, after all. Now, the GTX 1650 Super is an entry-level gaming solution, but it's also a good one. It's meant to handle 1080p graphics on medium to high settings at 30-60 fps, depending on the game's demands. On the surface, this is a good match for the laptop's 60Hz screen, and since 60fps is currently the gold standard for mainstream performance, that's what I'm going to target in this review. I tested 11 games, using the the following criteria: 1. The game must run at native resolution (1920x1080) 2. Vsync must be enabled (I hate screen tearing) 3. Performance must be at or near 60fps average All other performance based settings were negotiable, but I wanted to use presets for simplicity's sake. You can, of course, tinker with advanced settings in most games if you're the kind of person who enjoys that. Of the 11 games I tested, all were able to hit acceptably close to 60fps on at least medium settings, and most of them were able to maintain framerates higher than 45 on maxed settings at 1080p. I understand that "medium" is an unexciting term for graphical performance, but as I mentioned before, it still looks pretty darn good thanks to the pixel density of the screen, and most modern games look pretty good on medium anyway. These are the games tested, using the critera I mentioned above, and the highest "quality" preset where 60fps could be maintained during active gameplay. FarCry 5 - Normal Preset Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice - High Preset The Outer Worlds - Medium Preset Yakuza Kiwami 2 - High Preset State of Decay 2 - Ultra Preset Doom (2016) - Ultra Preset Nier: Automata - Medium Preset A Plague Tale: Innocence - Medium Preset Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Ultra Preset Tom Clancy's The Division 2 - Medium Preset Assassin's Creed: Odyssey - Medium Preset Overall, I think this is a fantastic little laptop. If you're looking for something light and easily portable that screams "executive" just a little louder than it does "gamer", I don't think there are any better options than this. The whole "work" facade does unfortunately run into some trouble with it lacking a webcam, especially if "work" for you requires remote meetings under the current situation. Of course, a USB webcam is always a possibility. In terms of value, I don't think it's hard to find more powerful (albeit larger, hotter, heavier and less portable) laptops for less money, so if style and a small form factor isn't something you care about, you might be better looking at other options. If you DO like this model, there are more powerful versions of it (one with a GTX 1660 ti and another with an RTX 2060 Max-q) that may actually be a better bang for your buck if you can swing the upcharge, but this is still a very solid piece of machinery that can handle most of what you can throw at it without any problems, and I'd definitely recommend it. I was provided this product by Asus through Best Buy's Tech Insider Network for the purpose of writing an unbiased review.

This is a great little laptop, just not for gaming. For a good gaming experience, you need good hardware, and the specs on this model just aren't enough. If you're a hardcore gamer though, you would know that right away just by looking at the specs. But since this is a ROG - Republic of Gamers - model, it needs to be brought up. For testing, I decided to try out a racing game that's almost 2 years old now, Forza Horizon 4. It's a fairly demanding game, but not the newest and latest. As soon as I opened it up I got warnings that this ROG Zephyrus didn't meet the hardware requirements. It still let me start it up though, and then another warning popped up that the graphic settings had to be adjusted to "Very Low" in order to run, but it still may not be smooth. I was able to play the game in these settings, and honestly, the laptop kept up. The graphics were obviously not great being in "Very Low" settings, but I was able to drive around the open world and race no problem. So for the serious gamer, there are better options out there. If you're NOT a gamer, or only play more casual games, then this laptop does pretty good. It handles everyday tasks no problem. Being a software developer, I spun up a server and small application and did a little bit of coding. It handled it without any issues. Pulling this out of the box, its presented very nicely, with the laptop being lifted up as you open the lid of the box, a nice touch to be honest. Lifting it up its a solid device and seems to be built very well. The casing though (other than the outside of the lid), doesn't really have that premium look to it. But really its what's inside that counts anyway. It's a smaller laptop so the keyboard isn't that great, but the keys have decent travel and feedback. The trackpad however is a bit stiff when it comes to clicking. I found myself wanting to connect a bluetooth mouse asap. I did have an odd thing happen though when first using it. I plugged it in to charge for a few hours at first like the starter guide suggested. I then moved to my office, plugged it back in and all of a sudden Cortana from Windows started talking, BEFORE I even opened up the laptop! It just started up on its own, and the power button is on the inside so you can't press it without opening the lid, which I didn't do. Weird. The power button also has a fingerprint scanner. During setup it asks you to move your finger around to get a good read of your print. Not sure how well this works though. Last couple times I powered the computer back up, it told me it couldn't read my fingerprint and forced me to use my pin to login instead. One negative that is very noticeable is the fan. From the moment this computer is turned on, it runs. Even when the CPU usage is at 0%, it runs. When you unplug it and run off battery, it doesn't run as fast and loud, but it still always runs. Plugged in and it's annoyingly loud. As a developer I have multiple computers, my work computer runs 2 external monitors and has a LOT of programs running at any given time, yet remains silent, not the case with this computer. Turning the computer off gives you a sense of relief when you no longer have to hear the fan running. On a very positive note though this has amazing battery life. After being charged to 100%, I unplugged it and put on some videos and threw them on a loop while I was working. After 8 hours of playing videos on battery alone, it said I still had over 2 hours of use left on the battery! All the while with the fan even running non-stop (although more silently since it was unplugged). Overall this a great little computer. Great for everyday tasks, business use, and even as a development machine. When it comes to gaming though it's a bit lacking, but the fact that this falls under the ROG umbrella of gaming machines, it has to be mentioned.

I fell in love with this laptop as soon as I pulled it out of the box. Not only is it a beautiful piece of hardware, it's practical as well - gaming on the go is nice but not if you're breaking your back to carry the thing around. This laptop is light, pretty, quick, and powerful all in one package. That's rare, particularly for a laptop. In fact, it's so rare that this is the first laptop I haven't been disappointed in. I've been able to play AAA games on this machine flawlessly. NieR: Automata, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Borderlands 3 have all run extremely well. On top of that, the snappy SSD means it's great for things other than gaming as well. The laptop boots up faster than my phone, which means that in the time I've had it it's become my go-to device to pull some quick info off the internet. Speaking of which, the blazing fast WiFi capabilities of this thing put every single other device I have to shame save for the one wired computer. There are a few flaws to it, however. Most of them are minor things - the lack of an owner's manual was off-putting to say the least as I'm pretty sure I'm still not getting everything I can out of this computer, and the fingerprint sensor is a temperamental thing that I still haven't been able to use successfully. At times it can get quite hot and the fans are loud, but that's just a fact of life. The one fatal flaw this laptop has is that the SSD it comes with, while fast, is only 500GB. That's less than my launch edition Xbox One. Even my old gaming laptop from 2013 has more storage. However, I'm prepared to forgive this because of how the laptop excels in basically every other area, and the fact that it appears to be easy to upgrade as opposed to most other laptops which tend to break if you open them. This laptop does have a few odd quirks. For one, while it has an excellent microphone array and Dolby Atmos surround sound, there's no webcam. At least, not that I've found. I like that, but some may find it off-putting. Additionally, the fingerprint sensor isn't actually marked, and it took a bit of guesswork to find it and set it up (not that it worked anyway, but maybe my fingers are just sweaty). Also, apparently there are LEDs integrated into the lid, but if that's true I haven't the faintest idea how to set that up or make them do anything. Again, the lack of an owner's manual has been a real annoyance. Finally, the lights on this laptop are just a soft white instead of RGB like most gaming systems seem to be these days. This is a thing I really appreciate, but again may be off-putting to some. Despite its flaws, using this laptop has been a real pleasure and I find that I've been neglecting my custom-built desktop in favor of it. *Most* things are easy to figure out about it or are self-explanatory, and the rest can be looked up online. I'd definitely consider the ROG line of computers for future purchases.

Now at Best Buy ($1100), this entry level, yet speedy 14-inch ASUS gaming laptop makes the most of what’s inside and shows itself to be an unexpectedly excellent performer. Speaking of what’s inside: “ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 Laptop: Enjoy everyday gaming with this ASUS notebook PC. The AMD Ryzen 7 4800HS processor and 8GB of memory deliver fast and smooth performance during intensive gaming, while the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card renders high-quality videos for enhanced videos and games. This 14-inch Full HD ASUS notebook PC has a 512GB SSD that provides storage for all types of files.” Let’s dissect, starting with the processor. AMD is on a roll with their Ryzen processors. The base AMD Ryzen 7 in this laptop has downright respectable performance! “Only” 8 GB RAM may seem skimpy. Consider its job, however. The basic NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card with 4 GB of its own onboard RAM performs what would have required not only higher performance in the AMD processor, but also more RAM dedicated to that main processor. It gets the job done well. While on the topic of RAM, it is soldered on the motherboard. On other laptops, there might be a removable door on the laptop bottom, under which would be found the customary two modules, usually supporting up to 32 GB. While removing screws on the bottom panel will reveal a single available slot, I recommend leaving it alone on this laptop. Performance is adequate for most basic gamers and beyond. After all, this is an entry-level machine. Performance will fool you into thinking there is more power under the hood. The matte finish display on this model looks just fine. Sound is nothing short of amazing, owing to Dolby Atmos processing and well-designed speakers. I was in disbelief. I could have sworn there were speakers way out to the sides and behind, but there were none. Sure sounded that way. I asked a friend to sit in and listen. The reaction was as expected. A quick head shake, look to the sides, exclamation of shock and amazement. This is so much fun. A pair of microphones is built into the top of the screen bezel. With a 512 GB capacity SSD (Solid State Drive), there is adequate storage for more than gaming. When opened, the design of the display hinge provides a rear lift for better keyboard approach position as well as a greater air gap underneath for more efficient cooling. Pressed into high performance operations, there will be some heat! One feature absent on this series is a webcam. Also absent is touchscreen capability, though this is not important to me. Battery life is specified at 10 hours, though I did not perform the requisite tests to validate battery claims. Anecdotally, it does not appear to be a power hog. Despite my initial misgivings about 8 GB RAM, I am pleased to report that game play functions perfectly normally. Fortnite? Looks and performs just fine. Blade & Soul? Check. Nice, very nice. The excellent gaming action enhanced by Dolby Atmos sound provides an entirely pleasing overall experience. The same can be said for the streaming video experience with Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and others. Nothing at all to complain about. Only praise is due here. Everything being relative, is the action as sharp, seamless and snappy as on a high-end gaming rig feeding a wide screen, high end display? No, it is not. However, as a multipurpose and capable gaming laptop with a $1,100 pricetag, it more than fills the bill, even considering the extra cost of an inexpensive USB webcam. Sweet laptop, very sweet. ASUS provides US customers with a one-year warranty. Buy with confidence, and enjoy.

This is an amazing laptop, BUT this particular configuration is worth it only if you’re getting it for 800$ or below. At its original price, I would not recommend this at all.

Tried a variety of games (no AAAs), Civ 6 runs excellent even far into a game, battery life is excellent, computer dissipates heat really well. The largest gripes I have about the laptop is no usb c charging, fans can get pretty loud, and the 8 GB of ram seemed to get bogged down pretty quick when trying to game with anything going on in the background. Overall, solid machine! oh side note, the packaging was really awesome :).

i! I am thankful that I have the opportunity to test and evaluate this sweet machine. I am not a kid anymore and I remember when the first Acer computers I encountered back in the mid-80's and they have come a long way. I used to think Acer=cheap but not anymore. This is a classy machine. The screen is beautiful, the keyboard has large keys and the touchpad is large, as well. The on/off switch also doubles with a fingerprint reader. The machine seems to have enough ports to accommodate most people's needs. You can read the specs elsewhere on Best Buy's page. or even on some of the other reviews. I got this laptop thinking it was primarily a game machine. For some, that might be true. For my purpose, it seems to be an very good home pc with some great entertainment features - specifically the video and sound hardware. I've only had this machine a few days in my possession so I am not quite ready to call this a full review. I intend this machine to be used for video editing, slideshow presentation, web browsing, email management, and word processing. I probably should test some games and I have been pretty much out of that loop for a while now. If someone has a suggestion, I'd be glad to know it. Everything seems to be much better than average as a home pc. I'm sure there are more powerful specs in gaming laptops but for the price I would have no problem recommending this laptop except for the most demanding gamer. I am writing this on August 9, 2020. I will be back at the end of the month to give my full report.