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ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 Review: Compact, high-performance laptop with eye-catching design

The ASUS Zephyrus G16 is powered by the brand new Intel Core Ultra 9 processor 185H, which is literally among the first Meteor Lake processors under the new branding by Intel, dropping the ‘i’ and deemphasizing the processor generations. The G16 also sports the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU. Silicon just does not get any hotter than this. With a unit sales price of 4,07,990, this is an incredibly attractive device. Beyond just the hot silicon fresh off factory floors, ASUS brings a lot to the table with its own innovations.

Our review device shipped with just the laptop and the charging adapter, but if you pick one of these up, you can expect to get a sleeve and the ASUS ROG Impact Gaming Mouse as well. ASUS has kept the packaging simple and straightforward this time around, and has not done anything fancy such as packaging that doubles up as a laptop stand. Now, this is not strictly speaking, a gaming laptop. It fits squarely in the thin and light category, and is aimed at creators. This is just a sleek beast that is really good for gaming as well.

Build and Design

It’s just surprising how much performance has been packed into the 1.49 cm thin chassis that weighs 1.85 kg. The entire body is made up of aerospace grade aluminium. The design embellishments are mostly subtle, with the exception of the Slash Lighting array. This is a less power consuming version of the AnimeMatrix back that existed on some of last year’s models. Instead of half of the back side of the lid containing LEDs, they have been restricted to a diagonal line. By the way, ASUS may be getting rid of the AnimeMatrix display, so if you liked that one, it still makes sense to pick up last year’s G14 or M16 models.

The Slash Lighting array is a diagonal arrangement of LED lights on the back. ASUS has indicated that it will be adding additional capabilities for this display with software updates. These may be in the form of notifications or say showing progress of downloads. At the moment though, you can sync the Slash Lighting array to music playing back on the device. Users can also use Armoury Crate to cycle through a number of preset lighting modes, which are basically different animation patterns that are totally independent from what the device is doing.

There is an expansive trackpad beneath the keyboard. The keyboard is technically Chiclet style, but most of the keys are actually large and comfortable. Unfortunately, the arrow keys are squashed up. There are dedicated function keys above the keyboard, as well as a premium glass power button. There are a pair of wide tweeters on either side of the keyboard, with a pair of woofers towards the front just beneath the base.

There are no indicators towards the front of the device, with the lights for battery, charging and internet connectivity at the back of the device, below a silver Zephyrus logo. There is also the ROG branding with the stylised eye occupying a corner of the lid. The base of the device has rubber feet to keep the body elevated above whatever surface it is on. There are no vents to the side of the device, with all the vents at the back of the device. The vents are difficult to see even if you are specifically looking for it. The hinges are also hidden away at the bottom of the device. The design is incredibly refined.

A purchase decision can boil down to I/O slots, and ASUS has made a number of interesting choices here. To start with, you have a full-sized SD memory card slot, which was apparently a demand from users. The device sports a USB-C slot and a USB-A slot on both the left and right sides. On the right is the power port, which is a proprietary input, along with the HDMI port and a 3.5 mm audio jack. There is a LAN port or slot for a Kensington Lock, which may be necessary considering just how desirable this machine is.

One of the highlights of the device is the bright OLED display, which ASUS is known for packing into even lower end laptops. This is the first time that a ROG device is sporting a 2.5K OLED display with a refresh rate of 240Hz and a response time of 0.2ms. The display is Nebula certified, which is a strict internal certification by ASUS for displays that meet certain criteria. The reasoning behind this Nebula branding is that there are a ton of specifications for displays that vendors and customers might not really care about, and if a display meets all of the criteria, then it is certified as a Nebula display. The specifications change over time though, and there is no versioning yet, so this year’s Nebula specs are upgraded from last year.

Performance

The Zephyrus G16 easily handled anything we threw at it. The details, shadows, reflections, and draw distance all make games appear nothing short of spectacular. This is a great device to revisit old games that you really liked just to see how they look on newer hardware. The screen is not to be discounted here, the vibrancy combined with the contrast ratio goes a long way in making anything appear visually appealing. The display has an incredible resolution, and shines at rendering small text in busy environments. A bunch of synthetic and real world benchmarks are embedded below.

The device definitely punches above its weight when it comes to gaming performance. However, it is just not as good as dedicated gaming devices. The device is fast and responsive when it comes to using software, even with a lot of data loaded. The rendering times are short, if you are exporting video. If you work a lot with multimedia, then this device does not struggle or slow up, even under intensive load. Regular, everyday computing tasks are just a breeze. Some comparisons with gaming devices are embedded below.

One thing we have to mention is that the device tends to heat up quite a bit. Not only that, it gets hot everywhere, over the tweeters on the side, the trackpad, as well as the base, which can get uncomfortably hot. The vents are on the back, so if you have cables or earphones lying behind the device, they can get incredibly hot too, so that is something that you have to be careful about. The top of the base, towards where the vents are, also gets really, really hot. We never saw the safety kick in and the device shutting down, but it is still the winter. The audio can skip, and the mouse can behave erratically when the device gets hot.

When it comes to battery life, you can keep going for about five hours of regular office work, or four hours with the music on at about half volume. We really liked the fact that an alert for charging up the device shows up at around the 50 per cent mark itself. The laptop juices up incredibly quickly, reaching 48 per cent after half an hour, and 87 per cent after an hour. The charging cable uses a heavy duty plug, the kind that you would expect to see in a washing machine, but you can swap it out for a regular monitor cable and still power the device up. It might be a bit of a struggle to find a plug point of a suitable size at cafes, transport terminals or even offices and homes.

When gaming though, the laptop lasts for about 50 minutes from a full charge before dropping to 10 per cent. Now, this is roughly on par with other gaming laptops in the market, there are none that allow you to sustain gaming beyond an hour, especially if you have Discord comms running in the background, and are capturing or streaming your gameplay. In fact, there are some gamers who do not like OLED displays because of how power hungry they are, but it would be ridonkulous to not include one in this machine.

It is just ridiculous how good the sound is. In fact, it is borderline unbelievable that sound of this quality has been packed into a laptop. The magic is because of the downward facing woofers that throw sound in just the right direction. The sound of a plane flying overhead in Forza Horizon, or the doppler effect of a bike overtaking you in Ride 5 are replicated fantastically by the speaker setup. Playing racing games on the Zephyrus G16 is an incredible experience just because of how great the sound is, and not just because of the proccy, graphics and screen.

From the distance that you would normally use a laptop, the sound goes up to 85 decibels, staying just within the safe listening range. A centimetre from the front of the device, the sound goes up to 96 decibels, but no one would really listen to music from that close. We encountered some sputtering and clipping problems when playing Baldur’s Gate 3, especially during the cutscenes, but this may just be a problem of the game because we did not encounter the issue with any of the other games that we played.

The microphones and the speakers, along with the AI noise cancellation allow for videoconferincing, or gaming with voice comms possible without any additional hardware. It is possible to straight up stream using just the microphones on the device. The microphones are sensitive enough for you to say play Codenames on Clubdeck from a distance, in a quiet room while doing something else such as prepping food or cleaning.

One disappointing thing about the device is that the camera does not sport a physical shutter. We have no clue why ASUS did not opt for a physical shutter, especially considering last year’s devices had them. In fact, we are still absolutely fine with such high end laptops not having integrated webcams at all, considering that anyone that can afford the laptops can also afford better dedicated webcams. The camera performs okay-ish in low-light conditions, and is wide enough to not make your face look fat when you lean in close to the screen, but not wide enough to require prettifying too much of the room in the background for videoconferencing.

Verdict

The I/O setup is great, but then consumers will perpetually have a demand for more slots. I am not convinced so much by this apparent demand for a full sized micro SD slot, and feel that swapping that one out with an additional USB-A slot makes more sense considering cameras ship with a range of memory cards. Additional USB-C slots can always be put to use as well. I am perfectly fine without the dedicated LAN port, especially considering this is a thin-and-light laptop, and would not really be used in a competitive gaming scenario.

The charging adapter is on the bulky side, but it is possible to get a half sized one. With the smaller adapter, this is just a great laptop to travel around with. The battery life is surprisingly healthy for a device sporting such a great display and computing prowess, requiring you to top up only once for a whole day’s worth of work, as long as you do not jump into a game during breaks. The Slash Lighting array is definitely a conversation starter. If you are using this thing in a cafe, people are going to take a second look.

If build quality is one of your priorities then it just does not get better than this. This device is just a pleasure to look at and use hour after hour. This laptop makes a lot of sense for creators who work with local AI tools, because both the CPU and the GPU are oriented towards AI applications. For gamers though, there are bound to be better devices released further down the year, and it is not a compelling enough proposition to upgrade if you got a device last year. The generation-on-generation performance improvements are modest, but present. If you are looking out for a gaming laptop without the bulk, then the ASUS Zephyrus G16 is just perfect.