Note: This article was first published on 13th April 2020.
The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 gaming notebook - bringing a new dawn to PC mobile gaming.
AMD's secret weapon to trump Intel?
It is no secret that Intel processors have dominated the gaming notebook segment for the past decade, and the main argument in favour for an AMD Ryzen chip over an Intel chip centred on price rather than performance. Over the past few weeks however, I’ve spent time with a pre-production unit of ASUS ROG’s newest 14-inch Zephyrus G14 gaming notebook and came away with the impression that AMD has released a CPU, the new Ryzen 9 4900HS, that could finally compete with Intel’s mobile solutions.
The first and only notebook powered by the Ryzen 9 4900HS processor
But first, a quick backgrounder about the new AMD Ryzen 4000 mobile processors that’s powering the Zephyrus G14.
Officially announced last month, these processors use the latest Zen 2 architecture and 7nm manufacturing to accommodate up to eight CPU cores and 16 threads for muscular performance. Tacked on to each processor is also a Radeon Vega graphics pulled from the last generation.
With the Ryzen 4000 series, AMD is catering for a diverse notebook market share with the release of five low powered 15W U-series chips alongside six 45W H-series for high-performance laptops, that also tout dedicated GPUs. This is a big game changer for AMD in the mobile space, as such a range strikes at the heart of rival Intel's offerings that populate the same form factors and power requirements. (Even the series naming sounds similar, don't you think?)
And it's the HS-series that are interesting for mobile gamers, as there are three of these processor models (4600HS, 4800HS and 4900HS) that run with a lower 35W TDP, and are installed in select notebooks that adhere to a stricter design standard mandated by AMD and collaboratively worked on by the manufacturer – like ASUS, in the case of the ROG Zephyrus G14 here. AMD claims these notebooks will offer the best balance between performance, battery life and form factor.
Incredibly, ASUS also revealed to us that it secured exclusive use of the 35W Ryzen 9 part for six months. They are literally throwing its entire lot behind AMD here, and if you are hoping for an Intel version of the Zephyrus G14, well tough luck as there are no plans now to offer one.
Haven’t we seen this Zephyrus G14 before?
Perhaps you’ve already read Wanzi’s first impression of it earlier this year, which also details the notebook’s specifications (if you haven’t, then I recommend you do) but let me give you the key highlights of the Zephyrus G14 anyway.
The Zephyrus G14 is the first ROG notebook to debut a new look, and as far as I can recall, to deviate from the usual “Mayan” pattern design seen in existing line of ROG notebooks. For starters, it is a pretty sleek and angular notebook, more closely resembling the minimalist design of Razer's Blade Stealth 13 than any of ASUS' recent ROG models. It is also available in two finishes – a dusky Space Gray colour and the starker Mirage White.
The test unit that ROG sent over is the Mirage White model. Now I do like the aesthetics a lot, but like Wanzi, I also found the silvery finish on its palm rests and keyboard a tad cheap-looking and boring. An all-white design or even a darker contrasting colour (black, perhaps?) for the palm rest and keyboard would have been my personal preference. That aside, the design can hardly be called plain.
The most distinctive feature of the Zephyrus G14, however, is the perforations on the lid. There is a total of 6,536 CNC-machined holes on the surface, and they come together to create a matrix LED panel that can be customised with animations or your own custom text – for example, information such as the battery status and weather. It might come across as gimmicky for some, but at the same time I am also aware there are a lot of users who like to customize the looks of their notebook to no end. So instead of pasting a permanent sticker on the lid of a notebook, you can regularly update the panel to show something different each time.
Unfortunately, I was not able to test this part of the notebook to give my own assessment of it. The unit I had came with a few kinks (this, and even the Wi-Fi refused to work at first) out of the factory. Even though there is nothing else that prevented us from doing our regular benchmarks on it, I will save our final review and score once we receive a fully working review set in our hands.
Here's an overview of its specifications:
- 14-inch 1,920 x 1,080-pixel 120Hz IPS panel
- AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS processor
- 16GB single-channel DDR4 RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060
- 1TB M.2 PCIe SSD
- 76Wh battery
- 324 x 222 x 19.9mm
- 1.7kg
So how did the ROG Zephyrus G14 performed? Let us find out over the next few pages.
Test Setup and Performance
For my comparisons, I have opted to refer to past notebooks that we had reviewed before. These are:
- Aftershock Forge 15 Pro
- Gigabyte Aero 15 OLED XA
- Acer Predator Triton 500
- ASUS ROG Strix Scar III GL531GW
Admittedly, choosing the notebooks to stack up against the ROG Zephyrus G14 was challenging not least because we do not have any recent AMD-powered notebooks that we can use as a baseline to compare it with. So, I have picked these four gaming notebooks to not only check how the GeForce RTX 2060 in the Zephyrus G14 stacks up against its 2070 Max-Q variant brethren, but to also provide an indicator of how the AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS, with a base clock of 3.0GHz (max boost clock up to 4.3GHz) match up to Intel-based gaming notebooks using H-series performance processors.
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These are the games and benchmarks that I ran on the Zephyrus G14:
- PCMark 10
- 3DMark
- Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
- Metro Exodus
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Tom Clancy's The Division 2
For daily work productivities
PCMark 10 is a synthetic benchmark that evaluates systems based on workloads that can be categorized into four distinct groups, comprising Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation, and Gaming. This includes tests such as app start-up times, web browsing, word processing and spreadsheets, photo and video editing, and rendering and visualization tasks. Finally, gaming performance is evaluated using the Fire Strike benchmark.
ASUS has been known to produce top notch gaming products, but their continued insistence in using single-channel memory as opposed to dual-channel (as with almost all of their competitors) for their notebooks is a handicap to performance – as seen in the results below where we had previously compared how the ROG Strix Scar III GL531GW would have performed if it was running on dual-channel memory (2x8GB). The results above are quite clear for both productivity or gaming - dual-channel memory does have a positive impact on performance. ASUS’ reason for this, was to give consumers a spare DIMM slot for when they wish to upgrade their ROG notebooks’ memory count to 32GB (2x16GB), but the downside here also meant that their notebooks do not perform to its full potential out of the box.
What about games performance?
That the Zephyrus G14 lags behind the rest of the notebooks here is not unexpected, as its RTX 2060 is slower than the superior RTX 2070s but not that far off from the Aftershock Forge 15 Pro, which also uses the same RTX 2060 chip. But the interesting observation here is how, if a CPU bound game like Shadow of the Tomb Raider is optimised for Ryzen processors, that the Zephyrus G14 can come close to – if not outperform – the Intel notebooks.
So, the question is this. Will the ROG Zephyrus G14 perform even better if it had been crammed with two 8GB of memory instead of one 16GB? Very much so, especially in games that are CPU bound – like Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. These are really impressive results.
What a battery life!
For battery life tests, I settled on PCMark 10's new Modern Office and Gaming battery life benchmarks and the results were quite eye-popping. The Zephyrus G14 outlasted the rest of the other notebooks and then some. To find out more about how this benchmark works and why we are using it, here's our investigative piece.
It’s also quite impressive that ASUS has managed to cram in a large 76Wh battery inside a 14-inch chasis, and combined with NVIDIA and AMD’s newest Ryzen 4900HS optimisations for battery, power efficiency and design, it gives the ROG Zephyrus G14 an excellent balance of performance and battery life of any gaming notebook for the moment. We've literally never seen such high battery life uptime on any decent gaming notebook... ever.
Second Impressions
I really like the ROG Zephyrus G14. I really do. It can charge via USB-C, albeit slower, if you do not wish to use the chunky 180W standalone adaptor. Thunderbolt 3 is non-existent though, unsurprisingly, since that’s Intel’s proprietary standard. It’s the downside of using an AMD system but the Zephyrus G14 also comes with HDMI and DisplayPort, so I don’t feel that many (especially gamers) will miss out. The notebook has a Full HD resolution screen with a 16:9 aspect ratio that runs at 120Hz, which is the norm for the better specced smaller gaming notebooks these days. There is no 4K panel option, which would be a big ask of the GeForce 2060 Max-Q anyway (not to mention a hike in price and a hit in battery life, plus not being able to appreciate 4K resolution on such a small screen).
The ROG Zephyrus G14 is a triumph for both ASUS and AMD, having successfully worked together to put out a gaming notebook that can finally put Intel on notice. As it is, the notebook has plenty to offer, but I will still have to take a retail unit (once I get my hands on it) for a spin before I can draw conclusions on its overall worth. While ASUS has let on that the Zephyrus G14 will be available in Singapore sometime in May, they have yet to talk about the elephant in the room – pricing. AMD has traditionally targeted at price-conscious consumers and I will be surprised if ASUS steers the Zephyrus G14 towards the same price direction as their Intel-based products.
Regardless, one thing is clear. AMD has finally thrown down the gauntlet on what a gaming notebook can be.
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