**Go to the end of this review to read about the QC issues and also why I gave this laptop 3 stars**
The Asus Zephyrus G14 is an amazingly designed laptop, hitting a great balance between portability and performance, thanks to a lot of right choices made by the Asus engineers. However, it is all rendered useless with the terrible QC check issues Asus has been facing for a while.
Pros:
-Stunning 16:10 QHD display!
-Very powerful for its size
-Decent battery life (amazing for a gaming laptop)
-Small size and weight
-Pretty good speakers with better bass than most windows laptops
Cons:
-Terrible QC
-mediocre webcam
-No Fn lock (really Asus??)
-overheats
-heavy and power consuming proprietary software
I mean it when I say those engineers really made some right choices when making this laptop. They chose to go with an AMD processor, which especially with the 6000 series is a lot more power efficient compared to Intel. The 1440p display is a great middle ground between sharpness and power consumption for a 14” laptop.
Build quality:
The build quality is decent, although not very flamboyant and premium feeling like many other laptops. The laptop has a magnesium alloy chassis where the palm rests, however the underside is plastic and the screen flexes more than laptops with aluminium frame. Overall though, it’s not a cheaply made laptop and durability is up there with laptops from the premium category.
Display:
The screen is one of the strongest features of the product featuring a 1440p display with a brightness of 500nits and support for Dolby Vision. It is really beautiful to look at and bright enough for most scenarios, however that Dolby Vision sticker means less in a windows laptop than you might think. It doesn’t support traditional HDR in windows meaning you can’t watch YouTube or play games in HDR. The only time you can use HDR is if you playback Dolby Vision content locally on the machine using windows media player or on Netflix Premium using Edge browser. In the end though, it is still way better than the standard we’re used to seeing for gaming laptops.
However, you can have issues like screen bleeding due to ASUS’s terrible QC which I’m gonna mention down below.
Performance:
The performance is plenty, the 6900HS is powerful enough for most tasks and games. For reference, it is slightly behind Intel’s 12700H processor but it only really matters if you wanna save some time in video renders. The main benefit of the processor is the power efficiency, which enables this laptop to have impressive battery life, more on that later.
The 6700s GPU is decently powerful doing as good or better than the RTX 3060. I am able to get 100fps in Forza Horizon 5 at 1600p Ultra settings. Far Cry 6 ran well above 60fps at 1200p Ultra. The only caveat is Ray Tracing and DLSS. This laptop absolutely struggles when RT is turned on. Also Fidelity FX, the AMD alternative for DLSS is not as good as Nvidia’s offerings. But at the end the only game where RT actually has significant improvement in visual quality is Minecraft. So unless you’re playing that game, you’ll be just fine and happy with this laptop.
Speakers:
The laptop is really good at spatial surround with its speakers which helps with movies and sports like Formula 1. The bass, although nowhere near MacBook level is much better than most 14” windows laptops, and the highs and mids are sparkly and decent. Just a note, do not use the “Music” sound profile that it comes with by default in Dolby Access app, it significantly lowers the volume and does not actually help with music. Surprisingly, I found Gaming to be the best sound profile for all types of content including videos and music. Another alternative is custom profile with a V-shaped EQ. With that mode, while you it sounds great, there can be a lot of distortion at high volume.
Software:
By default, the G14 comes with MyAsus and Armoury Crate, both of which are pretty much useless except for driver updates. Why you might ask? Because there exists a software called G-helper, made by the community. Armoury Crate and MyAsus are really good for selecting performance profiles and battery limit. But unfortunately, is it really bloated and consumes battery. Not only that, the D-gpu randomly turns shortening the battery life to 2-3hrs. Ghelper on the other hand has all the same functions as those two softwares but is much lighter and more optimised, leading to lower idle temps and better battery life. It even adds a Fn lock functionality which for some reason Asus doesn’t provide on their own. This means you have to hold the Fn key while doing simple stuff like changing brightness or taking a screenshot.
Battery Life:
The 2022 model of Asus G14 sets a benchmark for battery life when it comes to gaming laptop. I am able to get 8-10hrs of browsing on chrome and 7hrs of YouTube playback. Not only is it quite good for windows laptop, it is fantastic for a windows gaming laptop. It also supports type c charging which is really nice, though for some reason only the left c port. Honestly, I was a little bummed out by the video playback performance since many reviewers got 10+ hrs of YouTube playback. But I guess Asus might have done some optimisation for them which they might not have for consumers.
Ports or I/O:
The left side has HDMI2.0b, AC barrel jack, USB 4 type C (40gbps), headphone jack. The right side has two 10gbps USB-A, one 10gbps type C and a micro SD slot.
Sadly the HDMI isn’t 2.1 so no 8K or 4K 120hz. The HDMI and the right type C port are connected directly to the GPU, which while it helps with more FPS in gaming, drastically reduces the battery life when doing simple stuff like presentation. So if you’re one of those people who use project a lot, get a type c to HDMI converter and use the left type c port which is connected to the iGPU.
The left type c supports 40gbps USB 4, meaning you can connect an external GPU enclosure if you want.
The elephant in the room:
The terrible Asus QC. Many people in the best buy review and Reddit have been complaining about the terrible QC of G14, and they’re right. I first bought the open box version of this, and it had a flimsy trackpad, wobbly F key and battery of much lower capacity. Obviously with open box, it’s expected, so I replaced it with a new sealed one, and that had issues too. The trackpad was still a little flimsy, the F key was still wonky, and while the battery health was good, this time I got horrible backlight bleeding on the screen and super uneven backlighting on the keyboard. With LCDs, you should ideally expect a dark bluish tone when on a black screen. But sometimes, you might get slight blotches of green in the corners, that’s called backlight bleeding and is normal with LCDs. However, the unit I received had absolutely terrible bleed, beyond normal (view image). Not just me, many people on Reddit and Best Buy also have the same issue.
The more I dug into this issue, I found out that people have been having other issues as well like cracked chassis, loud coil whine, fan rubbing against something and abnormal battery life. There are reports of people exchanging their laptop more than 3 times until they got a unit without any defects. Issues like these happen to be common with many other Asus ROG products, which leads me to the conclusion that Asus has a huge manufacturing defect problem that they can’t fix or that they don’t care about.
Conclusion:
The concept of the laptop is so balanced and so perfect that it was finally a dream choice for gamers who also like a portability for college or work. But with the ongoing manufacturing defects from Asus and simple blunders like no Fn lock force me to give it only 3 stars. What good is a great idea if the end result is poor.
5/5 for concept/design
2/5 for execution
If you don’t mind replacing it multiple times, it’s a great laptop.