Customer Ratings & Reviews

Felt cheap.. honestly like a 1200 dollar toy. It’s small and compact and powerful if that what you want but the screen is so small. And battery life bad. I rather just cloud game on my surface 4 15 inch.. to me that a perfect laptop . And feel worth the price

Screen is too small. Probably would be good for a business laptop or gaming laptop with a screen

Do not buy - there are much better laptops out there for less $$$. The actual performance is good, but there are other issues. The case gets ridiculously hot where I can't even keep my fingers on WASD for more than a couple minutes (even the lower keys around the spacebar get extremely warm and uncomfortable). This happens no matter what graphics settings I use/no matter what game is being played. Random freezing happens multiple times per day where the only option is to hold down the power key and reboot. This freezing only happens when using a web browser - tried Chrome, Edge, and Firefox and happened with all three. I have reinstalled Windows a couple times, made sure updates for all software are good, etc. Talked to Asus and they are aware of the heat issues, but had nothing to say about constant freezing and gave no guidance. Again, the actual performance in games is pretty good, but the other issues that seem to have no fix override the performance completely.

I’m a little upset that it didn’t come with the anime matrix… big reason I was buying it.

This laptop is a 10/10. It runs games like Minecraft, Valorant, Fortnite and so much more at 240 FPS. The laptop is amazing. The speakers are excellent as well. The sound quality is better than any other laptop I’ve had. The 144Hz monitor is very clear and outputs great quality. Is it very compact and easy to pack up and take anywhere. The battery life is great and lasts for hours with continuous game play, but if it’s left plugged in it gets really hot and needs to be left to cool down. This is hands down the best laptop I’ve had and I highly recommend it for anyone who loves computer gaming.

The graphics card is being mined. It says it's deactivated in bios. I bench marked it and it said it had a AMD Vega 5000 1 gig card in it. It benched at 20%. Very poor. The AMD RYZEN CPU R9 5900 HS Is awesome. Very fast. Other than gaming the laptop works great. But you can't game on it unless you want to play solitaire.

This laptop will not turn on after purchasing one month ago. It's been used a couple times for our swimming pool business designs. It turned off in the middle of an important estimate with customers. We have never had this issue with this brand before. Best buy refuses to let us return it even though it's clearly broken after hardly any use. We won't be purchasing for personal or business needs after this experience from best buy.

Thought this would be a great machine, specs are great for the price. Unfortunately, when I attempted to use a WebCam via the USB, the entire display when black (not just the Camera App), and the laptop locked after 2 or three flashes of the display. On one occasion I had to reboot to unfreeze the display. Attempted two different WebCams to ensure it wasn’t a camera problem (also they work fine on my desktop). Not sure if this is a one-off problem, but returned it and going to buy something else given there is no easy exchange progress….and I don’t want that frustration. Hopefully the return goes smoothly.

Came quick, never messaged me that it was ready for pickup though

Had the computer about a month and the wifi card stop working… The keyboard flashing can’t really be turned off… my first PC since 2006 and I’m already missing the MacBook… this is hilariously bad

Nice but but need to get used to it sometimes invidia crashes

Generally, this laptop is the do-all machine that many are looking for. It’s very powerful, light, relatively thin, has an excellent keyboard and trackpad, has solid build quality, has great battery life, and is pretty aesthetically pleasing, all at a relatively fair price. However, due to the amount of work the user will need to put into the laptop to get it working like the dream it could be alongside a few issues that plague the laptop without any apparent way to fix them, I had to knock a star off. But overall, if you need a portable yet powerful laptop that can operate as a desktop replacement, the 2021 Zephyrus G14 certainly can be that. **From this point onward, I will be mostly dumping information from the notes I've taken. I've chosen to not include performance/benchmark numbers as there is a surplus of information about such things already.** *Starting with the bad, here are my issues with the laptop (Issues that can be fixed/bypassed will be marked with a (!)): (!) - Though this might not be due to the laptop itself, the laptop randomly exits sleep regardless of whether the lid is closed or not. Therefore, unless you can tolerate random wakeups and will utilize the G14 as a desktop replacement, you are essentially forced to hibernate the laptop and stop it from sleeping. (Set laptop to never sleep when closing the lid/after inactivity through Control Panel) (!) - This is standard practice across any laptop that can produce a lot of heat, but never use the G14 with the lid closed since you otherwise will damage the screen rather quickly. (!) - By default, the speakers will randomly pop while on battery and in silent mode. This is due to the fact that the wireless adapter is set to medium power savings when on battery while in silent mode. (As a fix requires a registry edit, visit the Zephyrus G14 subreddit to find the guide on how to disable this) (!) - (Likely not applicable to models with the Intel AX200) From my experience the Mediatek MT7961 that comes with the G14 is rather finicky with WiFi 6, with random drops when in voice calls through discord or intermittent rubberbanding when playing games. (For a potential fix, in device manager find “Network Adapters” and right-click on the MT7961. Click “Properties” and go to the “Advanced” tab. Change the property of “802.11ax/ac/n” to “802.11ac” to have it operate on Wifi 5. If your router supports a 5GHz Wifi band, I’d suggest changing the “Preferred Band” property to “Prefer 5GHz Band” and then connect to the 5GHz band) (!) - When the RTX 3060 is active and silent mode is set in ASUS Armory Crate, “Whisper Mode” is active and caps your framerate to at most 60FPS in games. Though you can disable it, it becomes re-enabled without any way to keep it disabled on every reboot or switch to silent mode from another profile in Armory Crate. Personally, I am not bothered by the fan noise created in performance mode, so you could bypass having to deal with whisper mode entirely by always being in performance mode whenever the RTX 3060 is active. (!) - Battery boost is enabled by default in GeForce Experience, but this (thankfully) can be disabled indefinitely. (!) - Temps on this laptop can get uncomfortably hot. From a few 1+ hour sessions, I recorded temps of 90+C CPU / 85C GPU. While these temperatures are well within specifications, disabling the processor from boosting saw drops of around 10C for both components with a minuscule drop in frames. (Again, this could be resolved by cranking the fans up and perhaps limiting CPU wattage to ~20W in manual mode, but disabling boost is the route I took. On that note, you can find how to disable boost through registry edits in the Zephyrus G14 subreddit) (!) - On the topic of heat, due to the compact nature of the laptop, the laptop becomes very hot to touch when gaming, though mostly near the function keys. This can be resolved by cranking up the fans in manual mode, but the fans can get too loud for my liking. - Maybe just my unit, but my laptop suffers from random second-long freezes, but only when right-clicking or middle-clicking on desktop and never when interacting with an application. I haven't been able to find what exactly is causing this issue, but it’s never bothersome as it very rarely happens. - Though it seems to have strangely fixed itself a week ago, for a while the fingerprint scanner wouldn't function when the laptop woke from sleep/hibernate. From event viewer, it was described as "offline due to a user-mode driver crash." - Maybe just my unit, but both USB-A ports on the laptop are VERY tight, so it is rather difficult to unplug and replug USB-A devices. This causes me to worry about the longevity about these ports when the friction causes visible marks on USB-A connectors. - There is a faint coil whine whenever the keyboard backlight isn’t on the bright setting or when the screen is dimmed, so whatever caused the coil whine in the 2020 G14 hasn’t been resolved here. However, it’s so faint that it’s really a non-issue. - The screen, while pleasant to look at due to its color accuracy, has slow pixel response times. Ghosting is definitely quite prevalent on this screen. If you know you can’t stand ghosting, you’ll either have to hook the laptop up to an external monitor or will have to pass this laptop up entirely. *Now onto what makes this laptop excellent: - Incredibly powerful and efficient hardware in such a thin and light package, especially concerning the processor. The 5900HS gives you desktop-class performance while consuming little power, especially when boost is disabled. The RTX 3060, while definitely gimped compared to its desktop counterparts and even to its higher wattage counterparts, is still excellent and far outstrips my desktop GTX 1060. Overall, if you have a system that is on parity or slightly better than my Ryzen 2700 and GTX 1060 desktop system, then you can definitely use the G14 as a full-blown desktop replacement, which is hugely impressive given the size and weight. - Temperatures drop quickly after load due to the liquid metal used in place of standard thermal paste. CPU temperature is sub-50C at idle with the GPU put to power saving mode. - Though this is common in modern laptops, you can rest assured as the battery is electrically disconnected once the laptop is fully charged. This means that if you plan to keep the G14 indefinitely plugged in, the battery will not undergo charge cycles and degrade over time. In addition, you can apply an 80% or 60% charge limit through the MyAsus application which can slow the degradation of the battery and thus increase its lifespan. - The left USB-C port of the laptop supports both 100W charging and DisplayPort that connects directly to the RTX 3060. With the former, this means you can easily charge the laptop at a reasonably quick rate with a 100W Charger (However, keep in mind that the battery will not be electrically disconnected like it would if it were charging with the provided AC adapter). With the latter, you can bypass Optimus (which can give you a sizable FPS increase) and game on your preferred monitor of choice, though this lower wattage RTX 3060 will likely begin to struggle at anything higher than 1440P/144hz at higher graphical settings. - As stated before, the screen’s color accuracy is apparent and is nice to look at. - The speakers sound decent and can get very loud when maxed out without popping or noticeable distortion. In addition, you can increase the max volume of the speakers by opening the “Dolby Access” application and selecting the “Dynamic” option in settings. - Although I’ve seen mixed feelings about ASUS Armory Crate, I’ve found it to work almost flawlessly, including the automatic refresh rate switching and dGPU disabling features. - Flawlessly switches between Performance and Silent modes when plugged in and on battery respectively. (Have to manually set these modes, but saves your choice) - Silent mode is excellent with the fans never spinning on idle or on light loads like browsing. When the RTX 3060 is disabled, you can easily use the laptop on your lap without being bothered by either heat or fan noise. - The keyboard has excellent tactility and a satisfying amount of travel. It also has n-key rollover, so there should be no issues with pressing multiple keys at once. - In my model, the keyboard backlighting appears decently uniform, but I’ve seen some complaints from other 2021 G14 owners about the backlighting, so be wary about variance. - The touchpad, while small, tracks similarly to the ones put into MacBooks, so otherwise excellent. - The fingerprint reader is excellent and almost never fails. As a bonus, your fingerprint is read the moment you press the power button, so you can press the power button once and you’ll immediately bypass sign-in. - Bluetooth connections are stable and don't start dropping until you are quite far away from the laptop.

Nice product!!! Easy to use for little & big kids!

I enjoyed it... a lot actually, one blue screen later and the wireless seems to have stopped working altogether. I used a wireless dongle to attempt to reinstall the adapter's driver to no avail. After which I checked the windows file system for corrupt images which it found none. Past that I reattempt the recovery image which wasted more of my time and failed. Oh, I forgot to mention this was after only having it for 3 days. I really would've given it a better review but having parts fail that early on sounds design-related more than just a stroke of bad luck. I can't in good heart give this a good recommendation. I returned it within a week of purchase. The potential was there for sure.

Backlit keyboard one of the worst. I've installed few battle.net games along Microsoft Office and this laptop has already hard locked up several times which required holding the power button four seconds. Would not recommened.

Unfortunately, this gets two stars. It’s the 3rd one I’ve had since Black Friday and the network and Wi-Fi drivers keep disappearing. First time I took to Geek Squad and they weren’t able to get the drivers restored.

Wi-Fi stopped working. In the system it shows there is no Wi-Fi card installed. Asus does not provide support for it have to go through Bestbuy as this laptop is bestbuy exclusive. Reset network settings and then reset the PC but nothing same issue. Since there is no Ethernet connection then once Wi-Fi stopped working you are out of luck. Luckily I am still under the return period so taking it back to Bestbuy.

The price to features are high but the product has so many issues beneath. I keep getting wifi issues, sound issues, and other minor issues now and then. Also, blue screen errors and many more

No camera. My wifi card went out within a year and I had to ship it in to get repairs. I heard clicking noise the week I got it.

i've had this laptop since 2021 and it's still running just as smooth and fast as day 1. it can handle any game i've thrown at it. it's light enough for me to carry in my backpack--still l generally leave it at home and only travel with it when i know i'm going to game somewhere else because ~3.5lbs adds up when i'm carrying other stuff. still incredibly portable. it can handle hours of gametime and doesn't get blistering hot. it's literally perfect. i cracked the screen on it recently though after 3 years and i like that there are affordable off brand screen replacements i can do myself. i've had practically no issues with this laptop. i will say i wish it wasn't so much of an energy drain, but i accept that it is a gaming laptop after all