Initially announced at CES 2020, it appears the review embargo for the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 has finally been lifted globally. Generally, reviews sing praises for the gaming laptop’s new AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS processor based on the Zen 2 architecture, which brings incredibly good CPU performance with excellent power efficiency.
In fact, even when compared to Intel’s best mobile processor in the market now, the Core i9-9980HK, the Ryzen 9 4900HS still compares very favourably. Just take a look at the results Linus Tech Tips got, which compared the Zephyrus G14 to much costlier, heavier, and bigger laptops with the Core i9 chip.
This is a very impressive feat, given the sheer portability of the ROG Zephyrus G14. Evidently, this octa-core, 16-thread CPU is the chipmaker’s most impressive mobile solution yet. To top it off, there’s still one vital area where the Ryzen 9 4900HS exceeds expectations: power efficiency.
All Ryzen 4000 series processors are fabricated on a 7nm process, which gives them superior performance per watt than their competition. In most reviews of the Zephyrus G14, the gaming laptop can return well over eight hours of continuous use on a single charge.
Of course, this was achieved not during gaming, but in productivity-related tasks. Many other factors are at play to achieve this level of battery life, but the 4900HS’ power efficiency definitely plays a big role here.
As for the Zephyrus G14 itself, it’s a really solid gaming laptop. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q GPU offers commendable gaming performance even in AAA titles, the 14-inch 1920 x 1080 IPS display has good colour accuracy, and its input devices (keyboard and trackpad) are great too.
That being said, it does have some shortcomings. For one, it doesn’t have a built-in webcam, which can be a nuisance to some folks. Besides that, the bottom screen bezel is fairly thick too, and many are reporting of loud fan noises, even in silent mode.
Granted, this 14-inch gaming laptop has some beefy hardware under the hood, and the cooling solution only has so much space to work with.
At the moment, we still haven’t heard from Asus Malaysia on the local availability of the ROG Zephyrus G14, even though we already spotted it in SIRIM’s database. Rest assured, we will keep a close eye on this, along with any tentative pricing of the compact gaming laptop on our shores.
If priced right, Asus could have a real winner here with the Zephyrus G14. For the sake of comparison, this laptop retails from $1,050 (about RM4,520) for the Ryzen 7 4800HS model with a GTX 1650 GPU in the US market, though this model will only hit store shelves sometime in Q2 2020.