At CES this year, ASUS ROG (Republic of Gamers) have unveiled their new line-up of gaming systems, with the new Zephyrus G16 a highlight thanks to the new CNC machined body and the latest Intel and NVIDIA hardware.

Priced from $3,499, the ROG Zephyrus G16 has a new design with an all aluminium, CNC-machined chassis and is the first to feature an ROG Nebula OLED Display.

The ROG Zephyrus G16 is on-sale from today through the ASUS E-SHOP, as well as channel partners. ASUS kindly sent the device over for a first look and I had the chance to use it for a while ahead of a full review coming in the next couple of weeks. So, here are my first thoughts. 

Design

To start with, the new 2024 ROG Zephyrus G16 design is gorgeous. 

It’s got a super slim profile and footprint which belies the large, bright 16” OLED display you find inside. The unit itself is lightweight, weighing in at just 1.49kg and even with the 16” display it’s just 1.49cm thin and slips easily into my backpack.

The aluminium lid includes a slash on the lid of the laptop, which contains an animated light bar, replacing the AniMe Matrix display we saw on the lid of last years G14, which can be programmed with up to 15 animations you can play around with. It’s kinda fun to have it light up with various notifications.

Opening the laptop you’ll find a clean looking setup. The hinges are smooth and easy to manipulate, letting you open the lid to any angle and it stops without issue. 

Inside you’ll find the large, spacious backlit keyboard with RGB effects and a touchpad which can only be described as massive. 

While the keyboard on the previous gen Zephyrus G16 was spacious, the new, lighter chassis allowed ASUS ROG to expand the keyboard with larger keycaps making it even more comfortable for your fingers when resting or typing. The keyboard is super nice to type on with 1.7mm travel distance on the keys giving a nice response as you press each key. 

The clean design includes shortcut keys for audio, as well as an Armoury Crate shortcut key above the keyboard allowing you fast access to settings on the fly.

The spacious touchpad extends from the bottom of the keyboard all the way to the edge of the lower deck, offering a large and responsive workspace. 

There are speaker grilles on either end of the keyboard with dual woofers mounted underneath, alongside the various vents for cooling.

There’s full I/O ports, with full-sized HDMI (2.1!) port as well as USB Type-A and Type-C ports and an SD card reader as well allowing for easy access to files from digital cameras. 

Hardware

The Zephyrus G16 (and its smaller sibling, the G14), are the first ROG gaming machines to receive an OLED panel, and they look amazing. 

The ASUS ROG Nebula Display in the Zephyrus G16 is a stunning 2.5K resolution panel with 240Hz refresh rate and 0.2ms response time, with G-Sync support. 

The display is bright and easy to see in both inside and outdoor lighting, though the gloss finish on the panel does show reflections – and would show fingerprints, but it’s not a touch display so that’s not a problem. It’s a great display to work on, watch movies on, or play games with a HDR600 rating as well as Dolby Vision support, so blacks look really black and the colours are vibrant.

For a laptop, the Zephyrus G16 has impressive audio, thanks to the new design allowing for a six speaker setup including two tweeters and four woofers. The speaker grilles on either side of the keyboard offer clear audio while the dual side woofers give excellent bass.

Under the hood, there’s one of the new Intel Core i7 Ultra processors with an NVIDIA RTX4050 (6GB GDDR6) Laptop GPU and 16GB DDR5 RAM with 512GB M.2 SSD. It’s all powered by a large 90Whr battery promising excellent battery life, with support for fast charging from the 200W charger which will get you from 0-50% in just 30 minutes. 

Summary

This newly designed Zephyrus G16 (and G14) platform with the new ROG Nebula OLED display is really just very pretty to look at, but it also comes with some excellent internal specs.

I’ll be digging deeper into the Zephyrus G16 in a full review in the next few weeks, so stay tuned. If you can’t wait, you can head over to the ASUS E-Shop to check it out right now. 

EFTM’s Coverage of CES 2024 is made possible by the ongoing support of our regular advertisers and supporters such as Arlo, Belkin, Oppo, Motorola, Ecovacs, LG, Netgear, JBL and Trend Micro, and by additional support from Samsung, LG, Hisense, TCL, and ASUS