- Calling it now.
In my hands is the best gaming laptop of 2022.
This is the all new Zephyrus G14,
and it's one of the seven laptops-
- [Man] Eight.
- Eight laptops that Asus sent us over for CES 2022
that run the gamut from incredibly practical,
all the way to, well I sure hope the engineers
had a lot of fun making it.
Like I had fun telling you about our sponsor, AMD.
Thanks to AMD for sponsoring this video.
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(upbeat dance music)
Out of the gate, we're gonna fix a recent screw up of ours
that was caused by communication snafu.
This is Asus mothership concept,
something that I had honestly assumed sort of died
as a weird skunkworks projects, never to be seen again.
But boy, was I ever wrong.
By removing these four screws,
that's right, you have to unscrew it, sorry.
We find the conclusion, or at least the next evolution
of the mothership saga, the Asus Flow Z13.
It's a 1.1 kilogram tablet that's just 12 millimeters thick
and has a Core i9 12900H.
That is 14 processing cores
with a maximum turbo of five gigahertz.
It's got an RTX 3050 Ti, featuring a MUX,
so this is a 40-watt GPU.
And the craziest part of this
is Microsoft has been struggling for years
to cool the Surface Pro.
How the heck did Asus manage this?
Well, they've got a vapor chamber
that apparently has 44% coverage of the main board,
as well as liquid metal for the cooling system
and using the kickstand allows for even more air flow.
Asus claims it will be only 32 decibels under heavy load,
40 decibels max, which is incredible if true,
and I can't wait to properly try it out,
but I can't because this is just a dummy unit.
It'll be available with up to 32 gigs
of DDR5 5200 mega transfer per second memory
and up to a one terabyte SSD.
- [Man] Well, there is one that's working behind you.
- There's a working on?
- [Man] Yeah, it's right there.
- Well then what was the point of sending us
this mock-up one?
- [Man] That's a good question.
- We're not allowed to use it?
- [Man] Well, you can't run games.
You can use it.
- We're not allowed to run games.
- [Man] No.
- But we could run games.
- [Man] Yeah, you could.
- But they'll yell at us.
- [Man] Yeah.
And it's not like Asus will yell at us.
Nvidia will yell at us, and that's not a good time.
- There are two different options for the touch screen.
Although if you get a 4K panel on a 13-inch device,
you're well, that's not a very nice thing to write.
Alex says you are all bone from the jaw up.
I am not going to take a stance on that either way.
But I will agree with him that the 1080p 120 hertz panel
will be more than enough resolution
while offering a much better gaming experience.
And with 100% coverage of sRGB and 500 nit brightness,
it shouldn't look too shabby either.
For IO, it's got Thunderbolt 4 with DP 1.4
running off the iGPU, and support for power delivery.
It's got an eGPU port with support
for up to an RTX 3080 mobile.
That's right, just like the Flow X13.
It's got a type A USB 2.0, which is weird, micro SD.
HDMI 2.0, man, this thing is absolutely loaded
for bear with IO.
And it finishes things off with a 56 watt hour battery.
No idea how long that'll last,
given how powerful this thing is,
but it's pretty impressive given the size.
My question while looking at the Flow Z13, though,
is who would buy it over the Flow X13,
which is basically the clamshell version
that has a much more usable keyboard
and a better sort of weight balance.
And the answer is, according to Asus,
people who don't type very much.
The Z13 is lighter and easier to cart around.
So if you primarily just plan on
gaming and consuming content,
it could actually make a lot of sense.
No word on pricing, but I'm confident that it will have
a high dollar to gram ratio
and arrive sometime in late Q1 or Q2 2022.
As an aside, can I just say that I fully support
a return to transparent and translucent electronics?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- This is so cool.
I love it.
Cut the window into the back.
- [Man] What even is it chilling?
- Nothing particularly important as far as I can tell.
We'd have to open it up to find out for sure.
Moving on, let's circle back to the Zephyrus G14 here
and talk about why I think this is going to be
the gaming laptop of the year.
The specs are freaking exceptional.
This is an AMD Ryzen 6800HS.
So that is eight core, 16 threads, up to five gigahertz.
It's a six nanometers CPU.
- [Man] Uh, it stopped working.
- It's got an AMD Radeon RX 6800S.
That has 105 watt thermal envelope,
which means that in spite of the thinness of this thing,
it should be pretty darn impressive in terms of performance
and maybe even more efficient than an Intel Nvidia combo,
thanks to AMD's control over the entire platform here.
Though we'd have to test it to be sure,
because the only other thing I'm sure of
is that you should shop at lttstore.com
for your water bottle, your indoor hoodie,
all that good stuff.
Actually, one other thing we know for sure
is that for the size of the laptop,
these components will be well cooled.
48% of the motherboard is now covered by a vapor chamber,
and it's got liquid metal on both the CPU and GPU.
Up to 32 gigs of 4,800 mega transfer per second DDR5,
one DIM that's swappable,
and support for up to a one terabyte M.2 SSD,
and it's an 80 millimeter one,
which means you could basically put in whenever you want.
We're not clamoring over this laptop
because of its power, though.
I'm excited by the G14
because of its incredible versatility.
The screen is now 16 by 10,
making it much better for productivity.
And there's a new QHD Plus 120 Hertz panel
that sounds exceptional,
but 100% coverage of the DCP3 colorspace
and 500 nit peak brightness.
Although to be clear, I don't think you'll be disappointed
if you go for the full HD panel that we've got right here.
At 13 and 14 inches, 1080p is pretty good.
The track pad is also 50% larger
and the magnesium chassis has been massaged
to give it more of a premium appearance
rather than a gamer one.
Rounding out the practicality, they gave it a webcam.
Hey, and not only that, but it has
Windows Hello facial recognition and a 76 watt hour battery.
That might be enough to pry Alex's Dell XPS from his hands
or dare I say my framework,
even though I'm invested in the company.
That's my disclosure right there.
No word on pricing, but I hope that isn't too much higher
than the last model, because that one was very compelling.
And we're going to see this in late Q2, 2022.
What is still full on gamer though, is the Strix Scar 15.
This bad boy is now available with up to a
150 watt RTX 3080 Ti.
That's right, Nvidia's new 3080 Ti features 16 gigs
of GDDR6 memory and 7,424 CUDA cores.
That's a 20.8% increase over the standard 3080 Mobile.
That means that Nvidia's claim that it is 20% faster
checks out at first glance,
but you will have to be careful since, of course,
the TDP of a laptop potentially makes
a bigger difference to your performance
than the exact model of the GPU chip inside.
I'm really glad that Asus has published an article
showing the TDP and GPU clocks of their gaming laptops
so I can easily go in and find out that, ah, yes,
this one is not the fastest one.
It is, in fact, this one right here, the Zephyrus Duo 16.
It has an eye watering GPU TDP of 165 watts,
putting it at pretty much the limit of mobile hardware,
with up to an RTX 3080 Ti and an AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX.
This thing, I mean,
it doesn't matter what you try to do on it.
Gaming, content creation, it's an absolute beast.
The upper display is now 16 by 10
with three panel options that all frankly sound amazing.
Though my favorite has gotta be the mini LED option
with 1200 nit peak brightness, 165 hertz refresh rate,
and QHD resolution.
This is one of the few laptop displays
that will give you a proper HDR experience.
Also available is a switching mode display
that can be either 120 hertz 4K or 240 hertz 1080p.
And you can check out our "Short Circuit"
where I look at that display in a little bit more depth.
I mean, it's crazy when the worst panel
available on a laptop is 165 hertz QHD
with 500 nit peak brightness.
Like, dang.
Oh yeah, and that's just one of the screens.
This being a Duo, there's a second one down here
where our video editors really like to put their timeline
while editing on the go.
That is, if we were going to CES 2022,
we might have brought a couple of these.
Finally, we've got a bunch of tough family laptops.
All right, are these the F's?
- [Man] Yeah, those are the F's.
- F15 and F, nope.
What's this?
- [Man] I didn't even look at them
'cause they're budget laptops
and we don't have pricing yet, so.
- Oh, yeah, you can't really say much about a budget laptop
that you don't have a price for.
Well, but at any rate,
they're also introducing the TUF Dash F15 and F17,
which are, at least assuming that, you know,
they are priced like budget gaming laptops,
surprisingly well-built.
They should be available this quarter,
so hopefully we'll be able to properly evaluate them soon
and tell you if they're actually a good deal.
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If you guys enjoyed this video,
you'll probably enjoy the one where we checked out
some of Asus's next gen laptop panels
over on "Short Circuit,"
so I'm going to send you over there.
Wait, I lied, it wasn't on "Short Circuit."
It was on LTT, but you should subscribe
to "Short Circuit" too.