Review: Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024)

A beefy graphics card paired with the lovely 14-inch screen size at an affordable price? That’s the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, and when you add extras like an OLED display and battery life impressive for a gaming laptop, it’s hard for me to not fall in love with this thing.

The G14 is the smallest model in the Zephyrus line, so it’s extremely portable. You can outfit it with an Nvidia RTX 4060 or 4070 graphics card, depending on whether you want to save some cash or max it out. It feels as comfortable to use as the Macbook Air M1 (2020) that I use for work, but it comes with luxury features that make playing games—and even watching movies—a top-tier experience.

Work-Life Balance

The Zephyrus G14 isn’t built to be a powerhouse—consider a laptop like the Asus ROG Strix Scar 18 for that—but what power it does have is well allocated. The Zephyrus is powered by AMD’s Ryzen R9 8945HS, a powerful processor, paired with the RTX 4060 laptop graphics card—it tackles most games with ease and can even run some of the heaviest AAA titles reasonably well.

Both Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077 managed to maintain a respectable 50 to 60 frames per second on medium graphics settings at the laptop’s full 2,880 x 1,800 resolution. Starfield dipped to around 40 fps in areas like New Atlantis that have famously struggled to get very high frame rates. But this is still reasonably high given that Starfield is capped at 30 fps on the Xbox.

When adjusting the display to 1,080p, I could crank the graphics settings in Cyberpunk and Starfield up to high while maintaining roughly the same 50 to 60 fps. By staying on medium, I got over 60 fps in both games. I prefer the latter approach since smoother gameplay feels better for me than extra foliage detail, but there’s flexibility here to tailor the experience to your desires.

Like most gaming laptops, you won’t spend much time playing on this machine away from a charger. However, the G14 still impressed by getting nearly two hours of gameplay while running games like Cyberpunk. Overwatch 2 lasted closer to an hour and a half, which makes sense given that in faster-paced competitive games I tend to lean on getting at least 90 fps for a smooth experience.

When using the laptop for more typical work or casual use, I got closer to 11 hours of battery life, impressive among any Windows laptop. I could easily use the Zephyrus G14 as my daily driver and feel comfortable getting an entire day’s worth of work done on a single charge.

In terms of ports, the G14 feels designed to fit in both at the desk and on the go. It has a USB-A and USB-C port on each side, offering flexibility on where and how to plug in your peripherals. On the right, there’s a built-in Micro SD card reader. On the left, there’s a full-size HDMI out port, a 3.5-mm headphone jack, and a proprietary charging port. You can charge via the USB-C port on the left side in a pinch, but the included laptop charger delivers more power and is necessary if you want to play power-hungry games while plugged in.

At $1,600, the starting price for the Zephyrus G14 is reasonable for a gaming laptop of this caliber. The $2,000 upgraded model comes with 32 GB of RAM instead of 16 and bumps the GPU up to the RTX 4070. That’s a surprisingly small price bump for the added benefits. Either way, it’s hard to beat the value you get for the price.

OLED Superiority

I could look at the screen on this laptop for ages. It supports Dolby Vision, and HDR content looks almost unnervingly realistic and vivid. OLED displays are among some of the most beautiful panels, owing largely to the fact that, unlike most other display types, OLEDs don’t need backlighting. Every pixel lights up individually, so black levels in an image are wonderfully dark.

The OLED panel in the G14 reaches a peak of up to 500 nits, which can be searingly bright in dark rooms, but easy to see in bright rooms. I only started to struggle to see what I was doing when I sat outside in direct sunlight, and even then the screen was still visible.

The OLED panel clocks in a 120-Hz refresh rate, which is more than enough for most games although with higher-end, AAA games, the G14 often struggled to reach even that. As mentioned above, even while playing fast-paced games on medium settings, the laptop peaked at around 90 fps.

The difference between 120 Hz and, say, the 240 Hz of the higher-end ROG Strix Scar 18 or the Razer Blade 14 isn’t unnoticeable. However, I’m glad to see this is the area Asus chose to make a trade-off. There aren’t too many games that would benefit from frame rates higher than 120 fps and that the G14 would be capable of rendering that many frames for.

Futuristic Feel

The ROG Zephyrus G14 comes in matte black and chrome white. I tested the latter, and it looks slick. I almost wanted to change the RGB backlighting on the keyboard to pure white, just to emphasize the stylish, monochrome vibe of the laptop’s design, but I’m a sucker for color.

A slash across the laptop’s lid, fitted with an array of white LED stripes, gives the G14 a stylish, futuristic vibe without being too ostentatious. The Asus Armoury Crate app includes a collection of animation presets, which gives it a little extra flair. On the bottom of the laptop, there’s a small ridge that keeps it propped up off the surface of a table or desk and allows air to circulate and the fans inside to blow. The device can get pretty warm, especially when running graphics-heavy games.

Asus made the Zephyrus G14 feel understated enough to be a laptop that wouldn’t look out of place in an office (or coffee shop), while still allowing for all the heat dissipation that gaming laptops need. You won’t find ridiculous jagged edges or eye-searing RGB LED strips here. The fact that it’s powerful enough to play some of the most demanding games is the kind of bonus that makes this not just one of the best gaming laptops around, but one of the best laptops period.