ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) review: gaming lightweight champion

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ASUS has once again released a wonderful, powerful laptop, the ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023), which is formally part of its gaming line. But, in fact, it is universal and suitable not only for entertainment. Packed with top-of-the-line components, this is one of the most powerful 14-inch laptops available. At the same time, it is quite compact, lightweight, and will not be a burden for daily transportation. And it has a stylish, calm design with a metal body, so it can be used in the office without any problems. ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) is equipped with a wonderful 14-inch Mini LED screen with a refresh rate of 165 Hz, a comfortable keyboard and touchpad, and a fairly powerful audio system. Of course, there are some compromises and you shouldn't expect a full workday without recharging, but this is forgivable given the performance. The laptop in the configuration that was reviewed costs 147,000 UAH.

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023)

Top 14-inch gaming laptop with GeForce RTX 4090

Flagship 14-inch gaming laptop with a bright 165 Hz Mini LED display, top-end AMD Ryzen processor, 32 GB of RAM, fast 1 TB SSD, discrete graphics card GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop. It has a compact and lightweight metal body, as well as a very comfortable keyboard and touchpad

Compact body

6 reasons to buy ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023):

• extreme performance;
• excellent 14-inch Mini LED screen with 165 Hz refresh rate;
• stylish metal body, small size and weight;
• efficient cooling system;
• comfortable keyboard and touchpad;
• high-quality audio system.

2 reasons not to buy ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023):

• you need a laptop with more battery life;
• you are not ready to spend that amount on a laptop.

Quick transition:

1. What's in the box?
2. What about the appearance and design of ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023)?
3. How convenient is it to use ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023)?
4. How good is the screen?
5. What about performance and autonomy?
6. Dry residue

What's included?

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) is one of the top ASUS gaming laptops, so the company decided to include everything that a future owner might need. In addition to the laptop, the large black box contains an ASUS ROG Impact gaming mouse, a 240 W power supply for using the laptop at maximum performance, a 100 W power supply with Type-C for the office, a ROG Zephyrus G14 Sleeve (2022) case and documentation.

What about the appearance and design of ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023)?

Gaming laptops of the ASUS ROG Strix and Scar series have a rather bright and aggressive design with a lot of RGB backlighting. The Zephyrus series features a more relaxed and stylish design, despite the extremely powerful components inside. ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) is no exception. The cover is made of aluminum and the body is made of magnesium alloy. Despite the rather compact body, ASUS has installed four speakers in the laptop, two of which are located in the upper corners of the working surface, above the keyboard. The entire working surface has a pleasant matte finish. At the same time, it hardly collects fingerprints, unlike Soft-Touch. The keyboard has black keys and RGB backlighting. There are three LED status indicators at the top of the topcase.

The lid is conventionally divided into two parts diagonally. At the top there are 14,969 CNC machined holes, underneath which are the AniMe Matrix LEDs. Due to size restrictions, there can be either an IPS screen and AniMe Matrix, or Mini LED, but without AniMe Matrix. We received a model with Mini LED and in the holes there are simply glossy inserts that glare a little in different colors at angles of light. In the lower left corner there is a small plate with the ROG logo.

All connectors are located on the sides of the laptop. On the left there are holes for the cooling system, a connector for the power supply, USB Type-C 4.0 (40 Gbps) with support for Display Port 1.4 and Power Delivery at 100 W, HDMI 2.1, as well as a combined audio jack.

Right – USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C with Display Port 1.4 G-Sync, 2xUSB3.2 Gen2 Type-A, microSD card reader (UHS-II) and another area of ​​ventilation holes.

Almost the entire width at the rear is occupied by ventilation holes, behind which there is a cooling radiator. In the middle there is a decorative inscription Zephyrus.

The laptop does not have a cutout for raising the top cover, which is typical for many modern models. But the wedge-shaped lid is quite suitable for this task.

The frame around the screen is thin and made of matte black plastic. Above the screen is a webcam with FullHD resolution, an LED indicator, two microphones and an infrared camera to identify the owner.

There are a lot of ventilation holes on the bottom, wide rubber bands for good fixation on the table and two more speakers. The bottom cover is secured with 11 screws, three of which are located under rubber plugs. Under the cover there is access to replace the SSD drive and one SO-DIMM slot for increasing the amount of RAM.

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) can hardly be called an ultrabook, given the thickness of 20.5 mm. But it is really compact when compared to gaming models. Especially with such powerful components. Its dimensions are 312x227x20.5 mm and its weight is 1.72 kg, so you can easily carry it with you to the office every day. The laptop is assembled with high quality, the panels almost do not bend.

How convenient is it to use ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023)?

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) hinges have a design that slightly raises the working surface area near the display above the table. This allows you to position the keyboard slightly at an angle, and also creates space under the laptop for better air intake by the cooling system. The laptop can be opened 180°, the display unit is well fixed.

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) has an almost standard keyboard layout. It does not have an additional number pad, but it does have four additional buttons just above. By default, they are responsible for adjusting the volume, muting the microphone and launching proprietary Armory Crate software, in which you can configure macros for these buttons. The power button is quite large and also separated from the main unit. Everything else is quite familiar: long Shift and Enter, smaller buttons for the function row and arrow block. So it will be quite convenient for regular laptop users.

The keyboard has single-zone RGB backlighting (without separate settings for each button) with support for AURA Sync. All symbols are evenly illuminated. Full key travel 1.7 mm. The keyboard is comfortable, the buttons have a moderately soft informative action, it is convenient to use.

The touchpad has a nice glass coating and large dimensions of 128×76 mm. It is quite enough for work; the need to connect a mouse arises only during games.

How good is the screen?

ASUS actively uses Mini LED displays in its gaming laptop models. ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) has both IPS and Mini LED ROG Nebula HDR Display configurations. It was the last option that came to our editorial office. The screen has an aspect ratio of 16:10 and a resolution of WQXGA (2560×1600). The refresh rate is 165Hz and the pixel response time is 3ms. According to ASUS, the display color coverage is 100% DCI-P3, the display is Pantone certified, there is support for Dolby Vision and VESA Display HDR 600 certification. They promise a maximum brightness of 500 cd/m² and a peak brightness of 600 cd/m². There is support for G-Sync frame rate synchronization. The ROG Armory Crate app has useful display settings: matrix overdrive (overdrive), power saving (reduced refresh rate) and multi-zone backlight, which is forced on in HDR mode. When you turn off the multi-zone backlight, the screen looks like a regular IPS. The Game Visual section has several picture modes. It is also possible to calibrate the screen using the X-Rite i1 Display Pro calibrator.

A feature of Mini LED screens is that the matrix backlight is represented by a whole grid of miniature diodes less than 0.2 mm in size. In the case of ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023), there are 504 of them. This provides several advantages over IPS: uniform and zonal backlighting, a significantly higher contrast ratio, deeper black color. The screen is really very high quality. Very rich colors, maximum viewing angles, high brightness and very deep blacks. At first glance, the screen can be confused with OLED. Measurements showed that the maximum brightness is 486.828 cd/m2. The color gamut is significantly wider than standard sRGB, and color reproduction is quite close to the reference values.

What about performance and autonomy?

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) is equipped with new powerful AMD Phoenix generation processors and discrete NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4000 series graphics cards. Our configuration has an eight-core AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS. It is built on Zen 4 architecture and is manufactured using TSMC's 4nm FinFET process technology. Up to 16 threads (SMT) are supported, and the L3 cache capacity is 16 MB. The base frequency is 4.0 GHz, the maximum is 5.2 GHz. In the standard version, the TDP is 35-54 W, but for the ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) the figure can rise to 80 W. There is a built-in AMD Radeon 780M graphics accelerator with 12 Compute Units on the 3rd generation RDNA architecture, frequency – 2800 MHz. The top-end NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop with TGP 100 W plus ROG Boost 15 W in turbo mode is used as a discrete video card. The standard frequency is 1455 MHz + 50 MHz Boost. Video memory capacity 16 GB GDDR6. There is a MUX Switch multiplexer that allows you to switch a discrete video adapter directly to the display, rather than through an integrated card. NVIDIA Advanced Optimus technology is also supported, thanks to which there is no need to restart the laptop when switching graphics mode. The amount of RAM is 32 GB DDR5-4800 MHz, there is a slot for an additional RAM module up to 16 GB. Wireless interfaces: Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 6E(802.11ax) (Dual band) 2х2.

Considering the specs, it was quite obvious that the laptop was extremely powerful. This is confirmed by performance tests, in which the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) demonstrates very high results. Both in graphics and processor tests. There is enough power for all modern games, and for working with video or 3D graphics.

The cooling system includes two Arc Flow cooling fans with 84 blades each, a vapor chamber covering 48.2% of the motherboard and four large heatsinks consisting of copper fins only 0.1 mm thick. Liquid metal produced by Thermal Grizzly is used as a thermal interface. There is also a dust protection system.

During the stress test in AIDA64, the components initially heat up to approximately 95°. After adapting the cooling system, the temperature remains at approximately 85°. There is no throttling observed, the system works stably. At maximum speed, the cooling system is quite loud, although the noise level is lower than in larger gaming models. The case heats up mainly above the keyboard, which does not cause discomfort during use.

The drive used is Samsung PM9A1 M.2 NVMe PCIe Gen4 x4 with a capacity of 1 TB.

The maximum reading speed was about 6700 MB/s, writing – about 4950 MB/s.

All modern games work great at maximum graphics settings. In the vast majority of cases, you can expect at least 60 FPS. Cyberpunk 2077 with the latest patch, all possible ray tracing settings, balanced DLSS runs at a frame rate of 60-70 FPS.

Callisto Protocol. Maximum settings with ray tracing: 60-85 FPS

The Ascent. Maximum settings, DLSS in quality mode. 70-90 FPS.

Baldur's Gate 3. Ultra settings, DLSS and FSR disabled. 90-120 FPS:

Starfield. High/Ultra, FSR2 scaling. 60-90 FPS, sometimes with drops up to 55:

The laptop's audio system consists of 4 speakers. 2 tweeters on the working surface and 2 low-frequency tweeters (conditionally) on the bottom of the case. The laptop sounds loud and quite high quality. Low frequencies are present, albeit in small quantities. The audio system is enough to comfortably play games without headphones, the cooling system does not overpower the sound.

The laptop has a 76 Wh battery. In office mode (Wi-Fi, browser, documents, low brightness and minimal performance) it works for about 6 hours. The battery life was not record-breaking, which is quite normal for a gaming model. We recently reviewed the ASUS ROG Flow X13 2023, which runs significantly longer on battery power. But it's important to understand that it has lower performance, a smaller display, and a larger battery. So the difference is quite logical. From the supplied 240 W power supply, the laptop charges in about 2 hours. And when working in the office, you can use an additional included 100 W Power Delivery power supply with a Type-C connector.

Almost all laptop settings, including performance level, macro settings, backlight, MUX Switch, display are done in the Armory Crate application.

There is also a MyASUS application common to all laptops of the company with basic settings:

Dry residue. Four things you need to know about ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023).

• ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023) is one of the most powerful 14-inch laptops in existence, has an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS and a GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop

inside

• It features a stunning 14-inch Mini LED screen with 2560×1600 resolution, 165Hz refresh rate and 3ms pixel response time.
• It has quite compact dimensions, light weight and a stylish, discreet design.
• Don't expect a full working day without recharging.

Specifications ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2023)
Display	14 inches, 2560×1600 16:10, Mini LED, 165 Hz, 3 ms
Sizes	31.2x227x20.5 mm
Weight	1.72 kg
Operating system	Windows 11 Home 64bit
Processor	AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS (4.0-5.2 GHz), 8 cores, 16 threads, (Zen 4, 4 nm)
RAM	32 GB DDR5-4800 MHz
Graphics	nVidia GeForce RTX 4090 Mobile, 16 GB GDDR6, integrated AMD Radeon 780M
Accumulator	1 TB SSD M.2 NVMe PCIe Gen4 x4
Communications	Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax, Bluetooth 5.3
Connectors	HDMI 2.1, 2xUSB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C (DisplayPort), USB 4.0 Type-C (DisplayPort, Power Delivery), MicroSD card reader, 3.5 mm audio jack
optical drive	No
Battery	76 Wh

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