ASUS Zephyrus G16: The Thinnest and Lightest 16-Inch Gaming Laptop

This is the thinnest and lightest 16-inch gaming laptop I’ve ever tested. It’s ASUS’s new Zephyrus G16, but what sort of compromises have been made to get it this portable? There’s one major issue that you need to know about!

Design and Build Quality

The G16 is available in platinum white or eclipse grey, which is what I’ve got here. It uses a CNC aluminum chassis, which feels more solid compared to previous generations. Overall build quality feels great with only minor flex to the keyboard and lid. Screen wobble is very minor when typing hard; the hinges feel nice and sturdy even when ripping the lid open fast. Most laptops only have hinges near the outer corners, but the G16’s lid gets some support in the middle too.

The lid sticks out slightly, making it easy to open, and the screen goes back about 130 degrees, which I found to be enough for regular viewing. The lid features ASUS’s new slash lighting. Basically, there’s a line with some white lighting, and you can customize it between a few different effects through the included Armory Crate software. Fingerprints don’t really show up on the lid or interior, but are easy enough to clean with a microfiber cloth when they do.

Portability and Weight

This year’s G16 is smaller in all dimensions, and it’s incredibly thin compared to all other 16-inch gaming laptops we’ve tested. It’s very portable, only weighing in at 4lb or 1.8kg, increasing to 5.3lb or 2.4kg with the 200 watt charger included. This makes it the lightest 16-inch gaming laptop we’ve ever had, and more in-line with the smaller 14-inch models that we’ve tested. That’s the case with the charger included too; I was surprised to find out that Razer’s Blade 14 actually weighs more.

Specifications and Configuration

My configuration has Intel’s Core Ultra 9 185H processor, Nvidia’s RTX 4070 graphics, and a 16-inch 240Hz OLED screen. But it’s available with an AMD CPU, or 4050, 4060, 4080, or even 4090 graphics for more or less money.

Keyboard and Touchpad

My chiclet keyboard has 1 zone of white backlighting, but there’s an RGB option too, and all keys and secondary functions get lit up. Key brightness can be adjusted between 3 levels or turned off by holding function and pressing the F2 or F3 keys. You can use the F4 Aura key to cycle between 3 different effects: static, breathing, or strobing. The keyboard has 1.7mm of key travel, and typing feels nice with a subtle clicky feel.

The touchpad is huge, smooth, and works well. It never felt like it was in the way while typing because it’s in the middle, and that’s possible due to there being no numpad to shift the keyboard over.

Audio and Speakers

There are front-facing speakers on either side of the keyboard as well as subwoofers underneath on the left and right sides towards the front. They sound amazing. Easily the best gaming laptop speakers I’ve ever listened to. There’s plenty of bass and they’re still clear at higher volume. The latencymon results weren’t the best, but not as bad as we’ve seen from others.

Ports and Connectivity

As for ports, the left side has the power input at the back, an HDMI 2.1 output, a Thunderbolt 4 Type-C port, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, and a 3.5mm audio combo jack. The right side has a full-sized UHS-II SD card slot, and USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A and Type-C ports. There aren’t any ports on the back, and the power input uses a proprietary rectangle connector rather than a standard barrel plug.

Unfortunately, there’s no ethernet port like last year’s 2023 version because they made it thinner this year. But at least we’re getting a full-sized SD card slot this year, because last year’s version had a MicroSD card slot despite having more space.

Both Type-C ports can be used to charge the laptop with up to 100 watts, and it’s nice that you’ve got the option of choosing which side you want to charge from. They both have DisplayPort support for connecting monitors, but the one on the left has the newer DisplayPort 2.1, which I think is the first time I’ve ever seen that in a gaming laptop. The one on the right is the standard 1.4.

Internals and Upgradability

Getting inside requires taking out 11 TR6 screws of 3 different sizes, so keep track of them. For some reason the two towards the middle at the back are covered by these rubber covers, but thankfully they’re at least easy to remove. Getting inside was fairly easy with pry tools.

Inside we’ve got the battery down the front, installed M.2 SSD on the right, a spare secondary M.2 storage slot on the left, and the Wi-Fi 6E card next to that. Wi-Fi speed was on the slower side compared to other laptops tested with the same Wi-Fi card, but at the end of the day this is still faster than gigabit speeds and is plenty for most people.

The speeds from the installed 2TB PCIe Gen 4 M.2 drive are decent, but not at the higher end of what’s available like some other laptops. Both M.2 slots can fit doubled sided SSDs no problem. The SD card speeds were good, basically maxing out my V90 card on the reads. The card does not click in and sticks out a little, so be careful not to bump it.

Unfortunately, memory is soldered to the motherboard this year and cannot be upgraded. Last year’s model had one removable memory slot, but that’s gone now in favor of the thinner design. It’s available with 16 and 32 gig options, and although 16 gigs is still okay for most games, it’s difficult to justify in expensive laptops that you’ll want to use for years, so consider spending more for 32 gigs. On the plus side, soldered memory means faster LPDDR5X-7467.

The upgradeability score is on the lower side, mostly due to the soldered memory. I also took off half a point for the uncommon TR6 screw type, which just makes it unnecessarily harder for people with common tools to access. It’s only a point higher than their smaller G14 because the G16 has a second M.2 storage slot.

Battery Life

The G16 is powered by a 4-Cell 90Wh battery. Panel power saver is enabled by default, which automatically lowers the screen’s refresh rate to 60Hz when you unplug the charger to save power. This is why the screen flashes black, and it goes back to 240Hz when you plug back in.

You can enable battery care mode through the MyASUS software to limit the maximum charge level to 80%, which helps improve the longevity of the battery. Or you could also enable Eco mode through Armory Crate, which disables the Nvidia graphics and may help improve battery life if you don’t need the power-hungry Nvidia GPU.

Battery life was excellent for an Intel-based laptop, lasting for 8 hours and 48 minutes in our YouTube video playback test. This is 82% longer compared to Alienware’s m16 R2, which has the same CPU, GPU, and battery capacity. It’s only really beaten by AMD or Apple laptops—a great result.

Thermals and Performance

The G16 with RTX 4050, 4060, or 4070 has 3 fans inside now, up from last year’s 2, but one of those fans is where the single memory slot used to be. There are heat pipes shared between the CPU and GPU with thermal grizzly liquid metal on the CPU and paste on the GPU. The higher tier RTX 4080 or 4090 versions only have 2 fans but use a vapor chamber cooler instead.

There are holes directly above the air intake fans, and air comes in through the keyboard too. Air only gets exhausted out of the back, and you can’t even see the vents because they’re actually on the bottom with the rear rubber foot blocking hot air from coming straight back in. This new design means hot air doesn’t blast the screen like before, and with no side exhausts this year, it also means no hot air blowing on your mouse hand.

ASUS’s Armoury Crate software allows us to change between different performance modes, which from lowest to highest are silent, performance, turbo, and manual. Both turbo and manual modes apply this overclock to the GPU, but only manual mode lets you customize it. Manual mode also lets you customize CPU and GPU power limits, temperature limits, and gives you some control over the fan curves for all three fans. Whenever we’ve tested manual mode, all power and temp sliders were maxed out with fans on 100% speed for best results.

The internal temperatures were fine at idle. The rest of the results are from combined CPU and GPU stress tests, which aim to represent a worst-case full load scenario. Closing the lid was a couple of degrees warmer as air goes through the keyboard, and the cooling pad I test with was able to lower temperatures significantly—9 degrees lower on the CPU and 7 degrees cooler on the GPU. You can get a similar temperature reduction by setting the fans to max speed instead, but as you’ll hear soon, that’s also louder.

CPU clock speeds were exactly the same in performance, turbo, and manual modes.

The lower temperatures in manual mode with max fans allowed the GPU clock speeds to run higher compared to turbo mode, though. In a GPU-only stress test, the 4070 would sit around the 100-watt power limit of this laptop, but games were typically running lower at around 85 to 90 watts. The 4070 would run cooler than the CPU in combined stress tests.

The control panel allows you to toggle a feature that disables the integrated graphics, otherwise known as advanced Optimus, which offers a speed boost in games at the expense of lower battery life. This feature was disabled for the best performance possible, and the 240Hz OLED screen only works when the Nvidia graphics are being used. There’s no mux switch in Armory Crate, so you’ve got to toggle this option through Nvidia’s control panel, but we found a helpful tip to force this toggle to appear on our Discord server.

The 16-inch model from MSI was around 3 FPS behind the G16 in this test, and although the Blade 14 was 2 FPS ahead of the G16, both are within margin of error range, so essentially these three are performing the same with the same specs. The G16 was right on the average of all RTX 4070 laptops I’ve tested with this game so far. Some of the thinner 14-inch models were performing worse, but the G16 was performing better compared to Alienware’s M16 R2, which was struggling as the same CPU and GPU combination.

Display

The 16-inch screen has a 16:10 aspect ratio, which gives us more vertical space compared to a more traditional 16:9 panel. The 240Hz OLED screen looks amazing with an extremely low average gray-to-gray response time of 1.9ms, and the 60Hz option was no different. Although OLED screens don’t get as bright as mini-LED, my panel still gets quite bright for OLED and is fine for indoor use. OLED screens are also able to get true blacks, so you won’t see any backlight bleed here. This panel also has better color gamut compared to mini-LED alternatives.

OLED does have some downsides though, like burn-in. My panel has a pixel refresh mode that appears when you turn off the laptop to help combat this, but it only runs when the laptop is powered off, so it’s up to you to actually turn it off every now and then instead of letting it sleep. I also noticed OLED flicker at lower brightness levels with the screen displaying white, which would be a problem in dark environments. The screen also uses PWM, or pulse-width modulation, to control brightness.

When the screen is set to maximum brightness, the brightness level can change at certain low percentages, like when most of the screen is dark, but a small part of it is bright. It’s not ideal if you’re trying to get an exact brightness level for color-critical work, but if that’s you, you should probably consider using an external monitor anyway. These limitations aren’t specific to ASUS though, so they’re still worth knowing. There’s also no HDR with the OLED screen either. It would have been nice if we could pick a mini-LED option for those that prefer HDR content. Overall, I’m still happy with the quality of this OLED screen. It’s hard to beat when it comes to color vibrancy and response time.

Camera and Microphone

The camera is above the screen in the middle and has a privacy shutter that’s easy to move. The 1080p camera looks alright and is better than the 720p option in previous years, but the camera does still struggle when dealing with bright and dark spots. This is what the camera and microphones sound like. It’s sounding pretty clear. This is what it sounds like while typing on the keyboard. I didn’t find the noise-canceling features super obvious, so I don’t think they’re that effective, but they’re there.

Summary

This year’s G16 is a nice improvement compared to last year’s model, especially in terms of portability. But like all things, there are compromises. There’s no ethernet port, soldered memory means you’re stuck with what you buy, the camera is basic, and some might not like the OLED screen despite its awesome response time. The G16 still performs well in games and doesn’t run too hot. As long as you’re aware of the limitations, the new G16 is still a solid option for those after a more portable gaming laptop.