That is the thinnest and lightest 16-inch gaming laptop I’ve ever tested. It’s ASUS’s recent Zephyrus G16, but what form of compromises have been made to get it this portable? There’s one major issue that it’s good to learn about!
Design and Construct Quality
The G16 is accessible in platinum white or eclipse grey, which is what I’ve came. It uses a CNC aluminum chassis, which feels more solid in comparison with previous generations. Overall construct quality feels great with only minor flex to the keyboard and lid. Screen wobble could be very minor when typing hard; the hinges feel nice and durable even when ripping the lid open fast. Most laptops only have hinges near the outer corners, however the G16’s lid gets some support in the center too.
The lid stands out barely, making it easy to open, and the screen goes back about 130 degrees, which I discovered to be enough for normal viewing. The lid features ASUS’s recent slash lighting. Principally, there’s a line with some white lighting, and you’ll be able to customize it between a couple of different effects through the included Armory Crate software. Fingerprints don’t really show up on the lid or interior, but are easy enough to wash with a microfiber cloth after they do.
Portability and Weight
This 12 months’s G16 is smaller in all dimensions, and it’s incredibly thin in comparison with all other 16-inch gaming laptops we’ve tested. It’s very portable, only weighing in at 4lb or 1.8kg, increasing to five.3lb or 2.4kg with the 200 watt charger included. This makes it the lightest 16-inch gaming laptop we’ve ever had, and more in-line with the smaller 14-inch models that we’ve tested. That’s the case with the charger included too; I used to be surprised to search out out that Razer’s Blade 14 actually weighs more.
Specifications and Configuration
My configuration has Intel’s Core Ultra 9 185H processor, Nvidia’s RTX 4070 graphics, and a 16-inch 240Hz OLED screen. However it’s available with an AMD CPU, or 4050, 4060, 4080, and even 4090 graphics for roughly money.
Keyboard and Touchpad
My chiclet keyboard has 1 zone of white backlighting, but there’s an RGB option too, and all keys and secondary functions get lit up. Key brightness may be adjusted between 3 levels or turned off by holding function and pressing the F2 or F3 keys. You need to use the F4 Aura key to cycle between 3 different effects: static, respiratory, or strobing. The keyboard has 1.7mm of key travel, and typing feels nice with a subtle clicky feel.
The touchpad is large, smooth, and works well. It never felt prefer it was in the best way while typing since it’s in the center, and that’s possible as a result of there being no numpad to shift the keyboard over.
Audio and Speakers
There are front-facing speakers on either side of the keyboard in addition to subwoofers underneath on the left and right sides towards the front. They sound amazing. Easily the most effective gaming laptop speakers I’ve ever listened to. There’s loads of bass they usually’re still clear at higher volume. The latencymon results weren’t the most effective, but not as bad as we’ve seen from others.
Ports and Connectivity
As for ports, the left side has the ability input on the back, an HDMI 2.1 output, a Thunderbolt 4 Type-C port, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, and a 3.5mm audio combo jack. The fitting side has a full-sized UHS-II SD card slot, and USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A and Type-C ports. There aren’t any ports on the back, and the ability input uses a proprietary rectangle connector slightly than a typical barrel plug.
Unfortunately, there’s no ethernet port like last 12 months’s 2023 version because they made it thinner this 12 months. But at the least we’re getting a full-sized SD card slot this 12 months, because last 12 months’s version had a MicroSD card slot despite having extra space.
Each Type-C ports may be used to charge the laptop with as much as 100 watts, and it’s nice that you just’ve got the choice of selecting which side you desire to charge from. They each have DisplayPort support for connecting monitors, however the one on the left has the newer DisplayPort 2.1, which I believe is the primary time I’ve ever seen that in a gaming laptop. The one on the precise is the usual 1.4.
Internals and Upgradability
Getting inside requires taking out 11 TR6 screws of three different sizes, so keep track of them. For some reason the 2 towards the center on the back are covered by these rubber covers, but thankfully they’re at the least easy to remove. Getting inside was fairly easy with pry tools.
Inside we’ve got the battery down the front, installed M.2 SSD on the precise, a spare secondary M.2 storage slot on the left, and the Wi-Fi 6E card next to that. Wi-Fi speed was on the slower side in comparison with other laptops tested with the identical Wi-Fi card, but at the tip of the day this remains to be faster than gigabit speeds and is plenty for most individuals.
The speeds from the installed 2TB PCIe Gen 4 M.2 drive are decent, but not at the upper end of what’s available like another laptops. Each M.2 slots can fit doubled sided SSDs no problem. The SD card speeds were good, mainly maxing out my V90 card on the reads. The cardboard doesn’t click in and stands out somewhat, so watch out to not bump it.
Unfortunately, memory is soldered to the motherboard this 12 months and can’t be upgraded. Last 12 months’s model had one removable memory slot, but that’s gone now in favor of the thinner design. It’s available with 16 and 32 gig options, and although 16 gigs remains to be okay for many games, it’s difficult to justify in expensive laptops that you just’ll wish to use for years, so consider spending more for 32 gigs. On the plus side, soldered memory means faster LPDDR5X-7467.
The upgradeability rating is on the lower side, mostly as a result of the soldered memory. I also took off half some extent for the unusual TR6 screw type, which just makes it unnecessarily harder for individuals with common tools to access. It’s only some extent higher than their smaller G14 since the G16 has a second M.2 storage slot.
Battery Life
The G16 is powered by a 4-Cell 90Wh battery. Panel power saver is enabled by default, which routinely lowers the screen’s refresh rate to 60Hz while you unplug the charger to save lots of power. Because of this the screen flashes black, and it goes back to 240Hz while you plug back in.
You possibly can enable battery care mode through the MyASUS software to limit the utmost charge level to 80%, which helps improve the longevity of the battery. Or you possibly can also enable Eco mode through Armory Crate, which disables the Nvidia graphics and will help improve battery life in case you don’t need the power-hungry Nvidia GPU.
Battery life was excellent for an Intel-based laptop, lasting for 8 hours and 48 minutes in our YouTube video playback test. That is 82% longer in comparison with Alienware’s m16 R2, which has the identical CPU, GPU, and battery capability. It’s only really beaten by AMD or Apple laptops—an excellent result.
Thermals and Performance
The G16 with RTX 4050, 4060, or 4070 has 3 fans inside now, up from last 12 months’s 2, but one in all those fans is where the one memory slot was once. There are heat pipes shared between the CPU and GPU with thermal grizzly liquid metal on the CPU and paste on the GPU. The upper tier RTX 4080 or 4090 versions only have 2 fans but use a vapor chamber cooler as a substitute.
There are holes directly above the air intake fans, and air is available in through the keyboard too. Air only gets exhausted out of the back, and you’ll be able to’t even see the vents because they’re actually on the underside with the rear rubber foot blocking hot air from coming straight back in. This recent design means hot air doesn’t blast the screen like before, and with no side exhausts this 12 months, it also means no hot air blowing in your mouse hand.
ASUS’s Armoury Crate software allows us to alter between different performance modes, which from lowest to highest are silent, performance, turbo, and manual. Each turbo and manual modes apply this overclock to the GPU, but only manual mode allows you to customize it. Manual mode also allows you to customize CPU and GPU power limits, temperature limits, and offers you some control over the fan curves for all three fans. Each time we’ve tested manual mode, all power and temp sliders were maxed out with fans on 100% speed for best results.
The interior temperatures were superb at idle. The remainder of the outcomes are from combined CPU and GPU stress tests, which aim to represent a worst-case full load scenario. Closing the lid was a few degrees warmer as air goes through the keyboard, and the cooling pad I test with was capable of lower temperatures significantly—9 degrees lower on the CPU and seven degrees cooler on the GPU. You possibly can get an analogous temperature reduction by setting the fans to max speed as a substitute, but as you’ll hear soon, that’s also louder.
CPU clock speeds were the exact same in performance, turbo, and manual modes.
The lower temperatures in manual mode with max fans allowed the GPU clock speeds to run higher in comparison with turbo mode, though. In a GPU-only stress test, the 4070 would sit across the 100-watt power limit of this laptop, but games were typically running lower at around 85 to 90 watts. The 4070 would run cooler than the CPU in combined stress tests.
The control panel lets you toggle a feature that disables the integrated graphics, otherwise often called advanced Optimus, which offers a speed boost in games on the expense of lower battery life. This feature was disabled for the most effective performance possible, and the 240Hz OLED screen only works when the Nvidia graphics are getting used. There’s no mux switch in Armory Crate, so that you’ve got to toggle this selection through Nvidia’s control panel, but we found a helpful tip to force this toggle to seem on our Discord server.
The 16-inch model from MSI was around 3 FPS behind the G16 on this test, and although the Blade 14 was 2 FPS ahead of the G16, each are inside margin of error range, so essentially these three are performing the identical with the identical specs. The G16 was right on the typical of all RTX 4070 laptops I’ve tested with this game to date. A number of the thinner 14-inch models were performing worse, however the G16 was performing higher in comparison with Alienware’s M16 R2, which was struggling as the identical CPU and GPU combination.
Display
The 16-inch screen has a 16:10 aspect ratio, which provides us more vertical space in comparison with a more traditional 16:9 panel. The 240Hz OLED screen looks amazing with a particularly low average gray-to-gray response time of 1.9ms, and the 60Hz option was no different. Although OLED screens don’t get as shiny as mini-LED, my panel still gets quite shiny for OLED and is superb for indoor use. OLED screens are also capable of get true blacks, so that you won’t see any backlight bleed here. This panel also has higher color gamut in comparison with mini-LED alternatives.
OLED does have some downsides though, like burn-in. My panel has a pixel refresh mode that appears while you turn off the laptop to assist combat this, but it surely only runs when the laptop is powered off, so it’s as much as you to truly turn it off now and again as a substitute of letting it sleep. I also noticed OLED flicker at lower brightness levels with the screen displaying white, which could be an issue in dark environments. The screen also uses PWM, or pulse-width modulation, to regulate brightness.
When the screen is ready to maximum brightness, the brightness level can change at certain low percentages, like when many of the screen is dark, but a small a part of it’s shiny. It’s not ideal in case you’re attempting to get a precise brightness level for color-critical work, but when that’s you, you need to probably think about using an external monitor anyway. These limitations aren’t specific to ASUS though, in order that they’re still price knowing. There’s also no HDR with the OLED screen either. It could have been nice if we could pick a mini-LED option for people who prefer HDR content. Overall, I’m still joyful with the standard of this OLED screen. It’s hard to beat in terms of color vibrancy and response time.
Camera and Microphone
The camera is above the screen in the center and has a privacy shutter that’s easy to maneuver. The 1080p camera looks alright and is healthier than the 720p option in previous years, however the camera does still struggle when coping with shiny and dark spots. That is what the camera and microphones sound like. It’s sounding pretty clear. That is what it feels like while typing on the keyboard. I didn’t find the noise-canceling features super obvious, so I don’t think they’re that effective, but they’re there.
Summary
This 12 months’s G16 is a pleasant improvement in comparison with last 12 months’s model, especially when it comes to portability. But like all things, there are compromises. There’s no ethernet port, soldered memory means you’re stuck with what you purchase, the camera is basic, and a few may not just like the OLED screen despite its awesome response time. The G16 still performs well in games and doesn’t run too hot. So long as you’re aware of the restrictions, the brand new G16 remains to be a solid option for those after a more portable gaming laptop.
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