Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) Review – Ryzen 9 7940HS + RTX 4090 Laptop TESTED

The Zephyrus G14 is an ever increasingly higher and higher end gaming laptop. It’s always been fairly premium, but it seems with this most recent generation, Asus have really taken it to the next level, by cramming not only an 8 core Ryzen 9 7940HS CPU in here, along with 32GB of DDR5-4800 RAM, a 1TB PCIe Gen 4×4 SSD, but also an RTX 4090 mobile chip. The CPU runs at up to 60W or so with a base TDP of 45W, and the GPU can run at up to 125W. That’s on the lower end for a laptop, thanks to how insanely thin this thing is, especially considering that hardware inside. Let’s take a good look at this thing, starting with how it performs.

In gaming at the native 1600p resolution at generally medium settings you can expect anywhere from over 300 FPS in esports titles like CSGO and Rainbow 6 Siege, to under 100 FPS in games like Fortnite and Microsoft Flight Simulator. This isn’t much if any faster than I’ve seen from the majority of gaming laptops I’ve had in recently, which shows just how limited the 4090 is in here.

At 1080p for the sake of comparison, in CSGO at full low settings the G14 struggles here. It is faster than the even thinner Schenker Vision 16 Pro, but it pales in comparison to any even moderately thicker gaming machines like the FOCUS 16 or PRO 15 from XMG. In Cyberpunk the G14 is in the same place, although this is a bit closer to the more full fat machines than CSGO. It isn’t the best look when an RTX 4060 mobile outperforms a 4090 mobile, but that’s what you can expect from something this thin and relatively low power. Microsoft Flight Simulator is in the same position as CSGO, sitting a bit under half way between the Vision 16 Pro and the FOCUS and Helios machines. 92 FPS average is still pretty decent, but it isn’t a resounding victory for the 4090 in here… Fortnite is better, almost matching the Helios Neo 16, albeit still almost 10 FPS shy of the 4070 based XMG Pro 15, but still that’s better. Hitman 3’s built in benchmark quite handily lets you break out the CPU and GPU performance, and when looking at the GPU performance we can see a clear trend. The higher end the GPU, the more performance you get. It’s still limited by the CPU and it’s TDP, but finally we see the slightest glimmer that the 4090 in here actually has some power behind it! Rainbow 6 Siege is back to the status quo though, with the G14 – even running with only the NVIDIA GPU enabled to make sure it wasn’t running on the iGPU by accident – running second to last. Lastly there is Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which on high settings shows some promise for the G14, running in second place only behind the higher TDP 4070 in the XMG Pro 15. 

As for that Ryzen CPU, it runs in the mid-field in Cinebench running at 16,331 points. The 13700HX is a decent bit higher at nearly 19,000 points, although the lower power 13700H in the Vision 16 Pro was a fair bit lower at 13,590 points. Single threaded performance is a little weak though, at 1547 points compared to closer to, or over, 2,000 points from the recent Intel chips. Blender has the 7940HS slipping further down the chart, now behind the M2 Pro and getting dangerously close to matching the now multi-year-old 6900HX too. What might explain that performance though is the fact that the 7940HS is the third most power efficient chip I’ve tested, behind the M2 Pro which drew 52 watts for the entire system while rendering in Blender, and the 13700H in the even thinner Vision 16 Pro. If Asus could give this thing some more juice – and cooling – it might do a little better.

One thing that Asus can’t drive any harder is the display. This is a frankly stunning 2560×1600 165Hz MiniLED backlit display that covers over 100% of the DCI P3 spectrum with over 500 nits of peak SDR brightness and a DeltaE of exactly 1. That is frankly incredible. Viewing content on this is amazing, both thanks to its inherent colour palette, and because the MiniLED backlight means with Multi-Zone control enabled – that’s basically full array local dimming – you get functionally infinite blacks among a sea of beautifully bright and vivid colours. Seriously, this has to be one of the best displays fitted to a laptop right now.

Of course you likely care more about the gaming metrics, namely response times. Because this isn’t an OLED, it still takes a while for the pixels to change colours. Asus reckons this takes 3 milliseconds on average. Even with the overdrive mode in the Armory Crate software enabled, the best average I could get was around 5 milliseconds of initial response time, or around 6.4 milliseconds including the overshoot time. Interestingly, that was with the local dimming mode disabled. If you include the local dimming mode, the errors get really quite strange… I mean look at this graph, it actually clips so that 92 RGB overshoot is actually higher – maybe 100, 100 RGB values too high. That’s with overdrive off by the way, but I guess the backlight with it’s local dimming overshoots like mad trying to get bright enough quick enough. I’d imagine running at a lower brightness level might improve that if you want to use the local dimming mode while gaming. 

It’s worth mentioning that the local dimming mode does have some haloing, and weirdly thanks to that overshooting it has quite a flicker to it. Look at the cube moving on screen here. The halo around it is flicking especially in front of the motion as the backlight races to light up the next zone as fast as it can. Weirdly this isn’t a quick of the LEDs themselves, looking at one of the response time graphs without my denoising function you can see that the light output flickers like crazy. Zooming in even more you can see it’s cycling fully on and fully off in an instant. It’s cycling at about 500 Hz as far as I can tell which is far too slow for this sort of flicker. That’d be a deal breaker for me, although there’s some strange behaviour here though as it isn’t quite 500 Hz, maybe 1000 Hz if you include the half wave at the bottom… What might confuse you more here is that I’m normally pretty sensitive to flicker, especially 500 Hz flicker from displays. I didn’t notice anything too wrong with this, so while my open source response time tool is capturing samples every 18 microseconds, it might be missing something that means it’s actually more like the 50,000 Hz that the other Asus MiniLED displays I’ve tested came out as. Either way it’s perhaps a cause for concern, but not quite a dealbreaker as it didn’t actually bother me while gaming.

Speaking of gaming, I must admit that this was a really good experience. The display is really nice to game on, the fit and finish is pretty premium, the keyboard is great for fast movement – my only negative here is that it’s a 14” display which is just a bit too small for me to comfortably game on. I’ve got to get pretty close to see well – old man problems I know – but that’s my one drawback. Otherwise it has a decent amount of performance on tap, and it doesn’t get too horrendously loud. Remarkably it actually keeps the keyboard plate fairly cool. It exhausts straight into the bottom edge of the display which feels like a weird choice but it’s not too bad. The display actually acts as a stand to lift the base up for better airflow and a nicer angle to type at. I do like that feature. 

Physical build quality is pretty nice. It’s definitely a premium machine, although there isn’t anything outlandishly quality here, it’s just… decent. IO is a little light, you get two USB type A ports – both on the right hand side which is pretty annoying as that gets in the way of your mouse – along with a total of three USB C ports, one of which is a USB 4 port. You’ve got HDMI, DC in, a combo audio jack, and a microSD card reader. That’s about it. I’d like to see an extra USB A port on the left side personally. 

Inside you’ll find a 76 Wh battery which affords a less than ideal battery life with this high end hardware and an impressively bright display, alongside a Samsung P9A1 Gen 4×4 SSD, one SODIMM slot with half of the 32GB of RAM in it – the other half is soldered to the board – and a massive vapour chamber cooler. That is very much needed to even remotely cool this hardware combo – and it actually does a pretty decent job. While gaming neither chip throttles too hard, and even while doing CPU workloads the 7940HS doesn’t hit it’s thermal junction temperature – something the Intel variants can’t always say.

The biggest drawback by far with the G14 is the price tag. This spec I have here will set you back a whopping £3,600. THREE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED POUNDS! For a laptop that gets outperformed by machines that are HALF the price! I sure hope that thinness is worth it to you, because otherwise you can get better performing machines that run cooler and quieter, all for considerably less money. This sure is one nice machine, and if you have the cash for it and care more about the size than outright performance, I think you’ll really enjoy it. For the rest of us, it’s likely a pass.