Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

The new crown prince of 14-inch gaming laptops

- CHRISTIAN GUYTON

WE HAVEN’T SEEN a compact gaming laptop with this level of power for a while. 13 and 14-inch laptops built with gaming in mind seemed to be becoming a thing of the past, paving the way for two extremes; beefy gaming rigs with desktop-scale GPUs, and super-thin notebooks running on upgraded integrated graphics. Gaming laptops with a thin form factor are largely compelled to use of lower-power GPUs, like the respectable GTX 1650.

Not the Zephyrus G14, though. Here, we’ve got the slender Max-Q model of the RTX 2060 6GB, joined by AMD’s shiny new Ryzen 4900HS CPU, the current pinnacle of the mobile Ryzen processor line (although we wouldn’t be surprised if a 4950 arrived at some point). The 14-inch QHD screen means that the overall chassis is very compact and lightweight, so it’s easy to fit in a bag when you’re out and about. An ergonomic hinge tilts the keyboard toward you when you open the laptop up, making for a more comfortable typing angle and creating space underneath for air to be vented out.

The Ryzen 9 4900HS in our model is a powerful chip, easily capable of chewing through demanding CPU workloads at speed thanks to its eight cores and 4.3GHz boost clock. AMD’s auto-overclocking works better than ever here, keeping CPU performance at peak levels whenever possible. It seems that Intel may still have the edge when it comes to CPU-bound games, though. Our model comes with 16GB of high-speed RAM, although a 32GB version is also available.