Asus ROG Zephyrus M16 (2022)

Striking a superb balance between power and portability, this is our top choice gaming laptop

- TIM DANTON

Near-perfect colours and a superb peak brightness mean films look gorgeous

PRICE Core i9/RTX 3070 Ti, £2,167 (£2,600 inc VAT) from rog.asus.com/uk

The critical limiting factor of any gaming laptop is size. In short, how effective a cooling system can manufacturers squeeze into the chassis to keep the CPU and GPU cool enough to run at peak speeds? That’s why Alienware goes to such extremes with the sleek X14 opposite.

Asus takes a different approach, sacrificing some slenderness to provide room for a 120W RTX 3070 Ti graphics card. Mind you, the designers have worked hard to keep the footprint of this 16in laptop down to that of a typical 15in machine.

There are currently two UK versions of this 2022 update to the Zephyrus M16, one with a Core i7, RTX 3060, 1TB SSD and stingy 8GB of DDR5 RAM for £1,900, the other with a Core i9, RTX 3070 Ti, 2TB SSD and 16GB of RAM. Half of that memory is soldered onto the motherboard, the other is in a SODIMM socket you can access by removing 11 crosshead screws and the base.

Asus has squeezed a 16in screen into a 15in laptop’s footprint

There’s an empty M.2 slot if you need more than the supplied 2TB PCI-E 4 SSD, which scorched through our sustained transfer tests: 5,610MB/sec reads, 4,517MB/sec writes. Two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the left ensure speedy external storage, and you’ll also find a 2.5GbE connector, HDMI and USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port here. The right-hand side provides a microSD slot and second USB-A port; add Wi-Fi 6E and I can’t criticise this laptop’s connectivity.