The new ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 2024 was announced at CES in January, with a brand new, sleeker and lighter design and along with the G14, are the first laptops to feature ROG Nebula Display OLED panel.
The laptop is available to buy in Australia and can be configured with either an Intel Core 7 Ultra for $3,499 or the Intel Core 9 Ultra for $3,699 – with 16GB DDR5 RAM, 1TB M.2 SSD storage and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU.
I had a brief first look at the Zephyrus G16 2024 during CES, but got to spend some more time with the laptop and here’s how it went.
Hardware and Design
The words sleek and minimalist can be used easily when describing the new ROG Zephyrus G16. It’s got a simple design with an all-aluminium CNC-machined chassis, and a distinctive LED powered Slash Lighting bar in the lid to display notifications and more, which replaces the AniMe display from last year’s model.
Opening the laptop you see a sparse, simple design with a spacious keyboard centred between two speakers, with a simply gigantic glass trackpad beneath it.
The keyboard is full-sized and feels good to type on with the keys slightly cupped to make resting your fingertips on them quite comfortable. As you’d expect from an ROG gaming laptops, the keyboard is backlit with RGB lighting, with a number of effects you can configure in the Armoury Crate app
The trackpad feels amazing with the glass letting your fingers glide across it with just the right amount of resistance so you’re not slipping off – and it supports multi-gestures for switching apps and more.
There is of course the large 16” ROG Nebula OLED display front and centre when you open it up. There’s slim bezels either side with a slightly thicker one up top housing a 1080P FHD IR Camera with support for Windows Hello login.
There’s plenty of connectivity options, both wired and wireless with Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 6E support. The Zephyrus G16 includes a new rectangular power supply connector on the left alongside a USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 port, USB Type-A port and HDMI 2.1 FRL (Fixed Rate Link for supporting higher video output at 4K60) port, while on the right you get another USB Type-C and USB Type A port and full sized SD card reader.
There’s a couple of raised feet on the base, with vents underneath for getting rid of hot air with a slew of features inside to help dissipate heat including Liquid Metal for improved heat transfer from the CPU & GPU, and 2nd Gen Arc Flow Fans to move the air.
Performance
The review unit supplied by ASUS includes an Intel Ultra 7 processor with 16GB DDR5 RAM and 1TB M.2 Gen 4 SSD, with an NVIDIA RTX 4060 GPU (8GB DDR6).
Performance wise, the Zephyrus G16 offers good performance when it comes to running applications. Load times for apps including Adobe Premiere and Photoshop were fast, though notoriously memory hungry Chrome tended to have a few skips as it devoured as much of the 16GB of RAM on-board as possible when web surfing.
I’d love to get an update to 32GB RAM to see if this improved matters, but for the most part it’s not generally noticeable and doesn’t appear to affec the gaming performance.
Playing games on the Zephyrus G16 while powered using the RTX 4060 GPU I was able to easily get around 50-60fps in games like Sons of the Forest and Cyberpunk 2077, and using the Xbox app, I was able to play the new Palworld game with around 45fps on average.
Switching to battery can give a performance hit, with the games dropping by around 20fps to accommodate the lower power input.
The laptop has impressive cooling, though using the Ultimate option for GPU gave the cooling system after playing games for a while. The fan noise can be a little loud during performance modes, though it cools down easily once you’re through.
If you’re not doing particularly intense work, the fans don’t tend to ramp up too much under the Eco, Standard or Optimised modes. If I was mainly surfing the web I left the profile on Standard for the most part, but you can easily switch in Armoury Crate when you need it.
Of course we ran the laptop through the 3DMark benchmarks and here’s how it went.
Display and Audio
The 16-inch 2.5K (2560×1600, WQXGA) resolution ROG Nebula OLED display sits in 16:10 aspect ratio and has up to 240Hz refresh rate with 3ms response. On the audio side, the laptop comes with six speaker units, including four woofers, and two tweeters.
Like their consumer Zenbook and Vivobook range, the ROG Nebula OLED display is excellent. The panel supports up to 240Hz refresh rate with 3ms response making it excellent for gaming.
The colour reproduction is excellent, with support for 100% DCI-P3 and there’s options in the Armoury Crate software to choose between the native vivid colour scheme, or switch through other modes including sRGB.
The screen is bright enough to work on, in most lighting conditions, though has a glossy finish so can show reflections – and fingerprints, though it’s not touch enabled.
The Zephryus G16 comes with Dolby ATMOS and VISION support, so watching your favourite shows and movies look and sound great.
The audio is perhaps one of the best systems I’ve heard with a full, rich sound thanks to the improved chambers in the CNC machined chassis that allowed for four speaker, ‘dual force woofer’ units to be installed in the base of the laptop, matching the two up facing tweeters located at either end of the keyboard.
There’s a combination headphone jack on the right side of the laptop which is certified for Hi-Res audio, though there’s a 3-mic array in the laptop which can record fairly decently if you don’t want to use an external mic.
Battery and Charging
There’s a 90WHrs, 4S1P, 4-cell Li-ion battery inside the Zephyrus G16, with a big 200W charger included.
The battery life on the ROG Zephyrus G16 is good, with around 6-8 hours of life doing office work.
When it comes to gaming though you’re looking at around an hour and a half with the ‘Ultimate’ GPU setting. You can extend life by using the more optimised options, though the gaming experience starts to suffer with lower frame-rates.
The charging with the 200W charger is excellent, though you do have the proprietary connector to contend with, meaning you’ll have to carry the charger with you if you travel to get the full speed charging.
From a full flat battery, the charger takes around an hour and three quarters to fully charge, though you get to 50% charge in 30 minutes and 90% charge in an hour.
If you want to travel a little lighter, you can use a standard USB-C charger. I used a 100W PD USB-C charger which had similar charging speeds, though took slightly longer to charge to full.
Software
Powered by Windows 11 Home, the Zephyrus G16 includes a few pre-installed apps and utilities.
There’s the usual smattering of Microsoft trials on offer, including for Office 365, and you can nab a 3-month Xbox GamePass ultimate subscription when you open that app for the first time. There’s also the myASUS app which includes support including options to run diagnostics and more, aswell as some offers for Dropbox and Adobe. There’s also the Armoury Crate app for controlling the hardware experience.
The Armoury Crate app let’s you control the RGB lighting and the Slash Lighting on the top deck of the laptop, as well as the, colour profiles of the OLED display, the performance profiles and more. The Zephyrus G16 handles well under the Standard, balanced option for performance when you’re just working on the laptop – but if you need the performance boost, you can switch it to Ultimate when you want to do more intensive tasks like video rendering, or more importantly, Gaming!
The Armoury Crate software is easy to launch and change all these settings, with a dedicated shortcut key above the Function key row, alongside the volume controls and mute button.
There are other ASUS apps included including the MyASUS app for getting support, Aura Creator for RGB sync and changing profiles, and GlideX software for screen sharing.
The utilities consist of the usual smattering including NVIDIA, Dolby and Realtek apps, as well as the usual McAfee LiveSafe app which gets progressively more annoying in pop-ups as you approach the end of your included 30-day trial.
Should you buy it?
The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 blurs the lines between the usual ‘gamer’ look laptops that are usually required to play high-end games. The new CNC machined Aluminium body does away with that vibe, with a discrete looking, super slim and lightweight unit that packs a nicely high-end gaming system under the hood.
The new Intel Core Ultra 7 CPU, paired with the NVIDIA RTX 4060 Laptop GPU offers excellent performance, though an upgrade to 32GB RAM wouldn’t go astray. The ROG Nebula OLED panel is gorgeous and bright, and the audio can only be described as excellent.
There can be some noise when the fans kick in during times you’re pushing the performance but for the most part it’s a well performing and quiet laptop.
The OLED panel and new speaker setup make it a real joy to watch movies on, especially those with ATMOS spatial audio and Dolby Vision support.
Overall, the ROG Zephyrus G16 is a great gaming laptop with the looks of a sleek, svelte business laptop.
If you want to check it out, you can head over to the ASUS eShop to check it out.
