Asus sponsored this video for me to tell you guys that- wait, that can't be right. It is! The new Zephyrus
G14 is slower than the old one and they sponsored us to say that
Exactly, yes!
Obviously I'm missing something here. Well, it does make a lot of sense when you start comparing it to the old one.
Oh
I see
Last year's G14 was available with up to an RTX 4090 mobile GPU
but what Asus has realized is that the vast majority of their customers in this segment
don't want to pay a king's ransom for a 4090 preferring the configs with a 4070 or lower and
what they, and everyone else also didn't realize was that the RTX 4070 mobile can suck back up to 140 watts.
But you get diminishing returns after about 90. So by locking into a 4070
they were able to make the new model four millimeters thinner and drop 200 grams of mass, which
makes a lot of sense.
For years brands have been saying that they've made the thin and light gaming laptop
but it's hard to find examples where they stuck the landing on both the size and the design like this.
Especially with them open.
We don't need that giant vent space under it anymore. And there's a number of factors that contribute to that perceived
niceness, starting with the CNC milled aluminum chassis.
Even though we're just looking at the keyboard, trackpad, and palm rest cover thing.
Look at that!
I've seen entire laptops with this much flex.
The trackpad is glass-topped not to mention absolutely flipping huge for a gaming laptop.
Man, these look awesome.
Oh man, I wish they left it like this
Here's the old model for comparison and speaking of the old model they have killed the fingerprint reader on the new one.
They are all in on infrared facial recognition now
which must have been a blow to the engineer who was extremely proud of their triangular fingerprint reader.
But guys I've been daily driving facial recognition lately and there's no comparison.
This is so much more convenient. And as someone who does most of my gaming on my desktop at home rather than on my laptop
I would say the same thing about the reduction in weight. Here, let's go ahead and put the old one on here
1.72 kilos
New one
1.48. Oh, wow, you guys undersold it. It's even more than they said. But Linus you might say I want
animations on the back panel of my machine and I want an RTX 4090 in my compact gaming laptop
so my number is higher than my friends.
Well, have no fear they are going to continue selling the old G14 for a bit
we'll have it linked down below.
But if you want more performance the way Asus thinks you should probably go is the brand new
Zephyrus G16.
We're gonna talk about how much faster it is in a little bit.
But first this is actually my first time touching this.
That is a sleek
machine, both of these new models have OLED panels a 3K
120 Hertz on the G14 and a QHD plus 240 Hertz on the G16.
Which I think you guys will probably know which one I prefer that's like right in the sweet spot
but even that is not what's special about these everyone and their dog has OLED laptops these days.
But these are the first with variable refresh rate tech.
But why did that take so long?
I mean we have variable refresh rate on TVs,
monitors, and even phones.
And variable refresh rate has obvious advantages for gamers
like smoother animations and reduced screen tearing.
Well, the reason is that it turns out getting variable refresh rate to work on an OLED laptop is
uniquely difficult.
See, with a normal IPS panel where the backlight is always on and then you're just
updating the image in front of it, changing the refresh rate doesn't affect image brightness.
But on a self-emissive display that all goes out the window.
You see OLED brightness is determined
partially by how bright each pixel is but also by how often each pixel fires and
for how long. They don't just shine continuously.
So if you've got a game that's running at a hundred frames per second and then that drops to 80 FPS
and you're using variable refresh rate, your screen refreshes go from a hundred times a second to 80 times a second.
Which means you're gonna end up with 80% of the brightness.
Then as your frame rate fluctuates up and down the image is gonna turn into a flickery mess
But then coming back to the TVs and the monitors again, how do they do it? It's actually really cool
they achieve variable refresh rate by
Recalculating the brightness of every pixel for every displayed frame. That's great
But it's very computationally expensive.
So it's not an ideal solution for a mobile device where you're gonna want your battery life and your power budget going towards
driving more gaming performance rather than driving
panel overhead and the even bigger problem is that in a lot of cases
these OLED TVs still have problems with flickering when there are big swings in frame rate.
So how do then?
Well instead of recalculating the brightness of each pixel
Asus locked the emission rate of the sub pixels at a bonkers
960 Hertz for the G16 and
480 Hertz for the G14
That means that when running at their full refresh rate that same frame is going to be displayed
four times in a row and then as the frame rate drops
Well, the pixels just keep on firing at that same blazing fast rate as many times as they need to so they just flash more
times displaying that same frame for longer, but at the same brightness.
Now as part of our investigation into Asus's claims we looked into
well
How about phones? How are they handling variable refresh rate? And as it turns out
It's kind of a hack. I mean it works and it is
variable, but only between a handful of refresh rates that have the emission timing pre-calculated.
This might also explain Valve’s cagey answer when I asked them why the Steam Deck OLED doesn't have VRR
It's really hard
Which is super cool.
But not cheap so on the G16 if you want to save a buck or you really want a matte display
There's also a QHD plus 240 Hertz IPS panel
However, having a beautiful high refresh rate panel variable refresh rate
All that good stuff is only as good as the frames that are displayed on it. So let's try them out!
Now we can't show you guys any FPS counters because
Thanks Intel and AMD
NDAs, but we are allowed to game on them and nobody told me I can't guess
And as you guys have probably seen in the past, I'm usually pretty good at it. So
While we got our Forza files validated on the AMD machine, let's check out wow
We're gonna have a problem here when I said I'm usually pretty good at this
I meant I can tell the difference between 40 FPS and 50 and 90
When it's running at what appears to be well in excess of 100 frames per second
It is very very difficult to tell.
And this is cranked with TAA?
Yeah.
And this is at native res? I mean it must be it's so sharp. Holy f*** does this ever look good?
HDR is enabled too and holy balls
Turning our attention to the AMD side of things
240 Hertz that's really smooth, but
It's always 120 Hertz. It's really clear that there's a point of diminishing returns here.
I can tell performance is a little bit lower but
Look at this
It's not the kind of thing that you would feel in gameplay at all. It's also not even that
Oh, this one's running at a higher res too? Yeah. Oh right just cuz the panel’s higher res.
It's not even that loud
Like you can hear it
But like, I kind of like this machine.
It's not even that much thicker than my framework. Is it a touchscreen?
No touchscreen. All right. Well, that's one thing
550 nits peak brightness though
Dang on an OLED that's a lot of brightness
You got that perfect black.
To achieve this kind of performance. The G14 is running up to a Ryzen 9 8945HS
so that's AMD's new hawk point CPUs, which are
Very similar to their
7,000 series CPUs, but with some AI bolted on because I don't know rabbits are old news and it's now the year of the AI
It can have up to an RTX 4070 and down to an RTX 4050 with a total of a hundred watts of system power, so that's
35 watts to the CPU
65 watts to the GPU and then 25 watts of dynamic boost to the GPU
So wow, that's up to 90 watts on the GPU friggin awesome.
The RAM is soldered runs it up to 6400 megatransfers per second
The battery is 73 watt hours, which hilariously is also smaller than last gen
I have good news though
The m.2 slot is not soldered so you can put in any drive you want and neither is the Wi-Fi slot
which if you've ever used the
MediaTek Wi-Fi chipsets that should put some AMD laptops you might want to actually replace with an Intel one
But it's a whole thing with Intel Wi-Fi and Intel laptops AMD Wi-Fi AMD laptop
Anyway, the point is on the G16 you get up to an Intel core Ultra 9 185H, which is-
Want to hold up the G16 for that? Where'd it go? Oh
Excuse me, the G16 which can be equipped with up to a core Ultra 9 185H which is
Something apparently a good one up to an RTX 4090 all the way down to an RTX 4050
It should be noted
The config is a little different depending on what kind of GPU you put in it a 4050 or 4070 is gonna get a heat pipe
cooler and then the 4080 and 4090 get a vapor chamber that increases the system power by 20 watts giving you up to
125 watts to the GPU in manual mode. Now Asus wasn't shy about saying look
You're not gonna be getting the most out of a 4090 with 125 watts available to it
And it will be faster than a 4080 but the performance jump will be pretty
questionable for gamers for the increase in price. So then our question was okay
Well, why do you offer that solution at all?
And the answer is that not everyone uses these for games and for professional
workloads the extra VRAM and the cuda cores of the 4090 could be well worth the increased price of admission
It's just down to your workload.
Benefiting everyone is the super fast
7457 megatransfer per second DDR5 memory that has everything to do with how close it is to the CPU, Intel and Asus worked
together on that it's got two SSD slots one and
two and
same battery, 73 watt hours?
90 watt hours, nice.
Coming back to the outside of the machines on the right side
We've got either a micro SD card reader or SD card reader
USB type-A as well as a USB type-C that is connected directly to the dedicated GPU through a mux
and then on the left side
We've got a headphone microphone combo jack, another USB A, USB 4 on the G14
Thunderbolt 4 on the G16 because that Intel sauce
HDMI 2.1 and Asus’ slim power jack TM now some of you
Including me might be confused as to why Asus bothered to create a whole new power plug
I mean the G14 only has a 180 watt power brick and theoretically USB C can deliver up to
240 watts so why didn't they just- Why didn't you just use that?
From their own internal testing Asus found that USB C
It's pretty good up to around a hundred and fifty watts
But unless you change something the pins in here were never
designed to handle this kind of power and they can only handle a max current of around 5 amps meaning that to deliver
240 watts you've got to run it at 48 volts and
And if you increase the voltage of your power brick up to 48 volts
And then step it back down to the 20 volts that most laptop motherboards run on that results in
24 watts of waste that is just going to heat whenever you're plugged in.
And you have to add the circuitry to deal with 48 volts in both the laptop and the power adapter and the whole thing gets rather
expensive rather quickly
Hence the Asus slim power jack TM. Do I really have to say the TM?
I think it's funny
It runs at the 20 volts that the main board needs and has large enough pins to throw more current into the device
making the whole solution cheaper and Asus claims they can deliver up to
330 watts with 99% efficiency and it's reversible similar to how the
ratchet on the LTT retro screwdriver is reversible
LTT store.com. Of course as interesting as all of that is what we really care about is the power of the speaker system
It's got six speakers total two tweeters plus four force cancelling woofers
And you guys are claiming what is this this will be the best sounding Windows laptop that is extremely bold
Considering that other manufacturers have made similar claims about their new CES 2024 laptops
The tweeters are apparently not tuned correctly yet. Whoa. Hi
But we still want to give it a quick sniff test with Crab Rave to see how we're feeling about these
very bold claims.
Crank it. Huh. Well, no, I wanted to hear it not distorted first
TBD
But I'm not gonna say BS yet. Sound pretty good. The extension actually pretty impressive
Did you say impressive?
No, I didn't say anything
Probably the coolest thing about it is that for the G14 pricing should be similar to the old model spec for spec with availability at
The end of February and for the G16 pricing should be similar to the old M16 model with availability in late January
Thanks to Asus again for sponsoring this video and being cool about having realistic talking points. It's legitimately
helpful to get these behind-the-curtains looks at the reasoning behind decisions that on the surface might seem kind of weird like
It's slower
But after you spend some time learning about it makes a lot of sense
Just like it would make sense to go check out would be another cool video for them to watch
Oh the one where we recently water-cooled an Asus Strix Scar 16. That was cool