ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 Review - Subtly Powerful
If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times: ROG makes great gaming hardware.They know their audience, they know what we want, and they deliver this to us time and time again. With the Zephyrus G16, the Republic of Gamers delivered me something so good, I didn’t want to say goodbye.
General Use:
The Zephyrus G16 is a shining beacon of style and beauty. I am not kidding when I say I LOVE how this looks. It is sleek, it is stylish and it has just the right amount of RGB embellishments without being over the top. This isn’t your standard gamer’s laptop – this is for the fancy gamer, the classy gamer, the gamer that has a spare $3k to drop on a laptop.
The casing on it is smudge and fingerprint-resistant, so that chic aesthetic is safe from grubby little fingers.
RGB lighting can be fully customised through the Armoury Crate, and so can the lighting strip on the back. I did find that the lights were a bit buggy though – when I was trying to customise them it would sometimes take a restart before my changes would come into effect, and the lights on the keyboard would flash at random. I also set the lighting on the keyboard to pink, and as I typed this review I realised they had gone back to blue. However, when they functioned as intended, they were very bright, colourful and pretty.
The flatform keyboard is tactile and nice to use, but I definitely missed having a numpad. It felt weird to have a trackpad half the size of my hand but no number pad. The keyboard, though nice to type on, does get very hot when the laptop is plugged in.
Another slight annoyance I had with this was that the lights to indicate power/charging etc are located on the back- and unless you physically turn the whole unit around, you can’t see them at all. Seems like an odd design choice to me, but such a tiny thing isn’t going to sour me on this beautiful, beautiful laptop.
I spent a lot of time curled up on the couch with this machine. At just under 2kgs, it’s comfortable enough to sit on my lap, and with roughly 7 hours of battery life for general usage, I didn’t feel the need to get up and plug it back in too often. Obviously, the battery doesn’t last as long when gaming, but you can extend this a bit by choosing an appropriate power profile through the Armoury Crate. Heavy-duty games requiring more power can be played on Performance mode (self-explanatory) whilst less performance-heavy games can easily be played on Silent, saving power and extending your battery life.
Display, Performance & Audio:
Every time I use a laptop with a 240Hz screen I realise how inadequate every other screen in the world is. Nothing compares to a big, bright, smooth screen and the one on the Zephyrus G16 is top-tier. Everything looked GORGEOUS on this, even my character’s dead body didn’t make me so mad when it was illuminated so beautifully on the screen.
Speaking of my crappy gaming skills and how I kill every character I’ve ever had, let’s talk about how good this laptop makes my bad gaming look.
I tested a range of games on this machine; Black Desert Online, Cyberpunk 2077 & Tomb Raider to name a few. I died in all of them but I looked great doing it. The RTX 4060 in my review machine handled games perfectly; even Cyberpunk managed to stay at a steady 60FPS on high settings.
I especially love how smooth and fluid everything looks on this laptop. Colours are vibrant where they need to be and blacks are very black. The Armoury Crate software built-in also has a range of Display profiles, so I was able to tailor my contrast, brightness, colour saturation and more with the simple click of a button. The display profiles contain presets for all kinds of games, and I found they did genuinely enhance the look of them in a really lovely way.
Not only does the Zephyrus G16 make everything look amazing, but the sound quality out of the speakers is also exceptionally good for a laptop. When watching videos, voices were crisp and music was clear. Ambient noise in video games didn’t get muddied, loud explosions didn’t get distorted and sound remained clear at both high and low volumes. The laptop speakers lack some bass, but if you were ever in a spot where you needed quality audio without a headset, these would tick the box.
Though games look phenomenal on this laptop, if you’re trying to play anything where you need a low ping, you may need to buy an adapter. The ROG Zephyrus G16 has no ethernet port. You can utilise a USB to Ethernet adapter, but it’s something to be aware of. Especially if you a) live in Australia, the land of mediocre internet and b) play anything where having a wired connection is going to affect your enjoyment.
The Zephyrus G16 is a gamer laptop for people who want something that looks sleek and understated, but that packs a punch under the hood. It may not have all the RGB fanciness of your classic gamer laptops, but the power and hardware built into this thing leave no questions about its gaming performance. I love this laptop. I love this laptop so much that I don’t want to give it back. ROG consistently smashes out amazing gaming hardware and this is one you can safely add to the leaderboard.
Specifications:
Processor: Intel Core Ultra 7 155H 3.80GHz
Memory: 16GB
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060
Storage: 1TB SSD
Display: 16” OLEd (or TFT) 16:10 240Hz (2560×1600)
Webcam: 1080p IR Camera
Connectivity: Wi-Fi 6E 2×2 + Bluetooth 5.3
Battery: 90 WHr
Weight: 1.85kg
Ports
Left:
1 x Thunderbolt 4, DP2.1 (iGPU), 100W PD 3.0
1 x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A
1 x HDMI 2.1 FRL
1 x Audio combo jack
Right:
1 x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C, DP1.4 (dGPU), G-Sync® , 100W PD 3.0
1 x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A
1 x SD Card slot (UHS-II)
