ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) Laptop Review

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) is available in a Platinum White or Eclipse Gray color. See the bottom of the laptop here.

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024)'s build quality is outstanding. Its aluminum chassis feels very sturdy, exhibiting little to no flex on the lid or keyboard deck. The display doesn't twist when manipulating it. The finish is fairly scratch-resistant and doesn't pick up too many fingerprints or smudges. There are no complaints about the feet; they feel solid and stick firmly to the bottom.

The hinge is outstanding. It feels smooth when opening and closing the lid, and while it has a fair amount of resistance, you can still lift the lid with one hand. There's very little screen wobble when moving the laptop or typing heavily.

Accessing the internals is relatively straightforward; you need to remove quite a few screws—11 total—and two of them are beneath the feet, so you have to remove the feet, too. Thankfully, you can easily remove the feet and put them back on because they aren't glued on. Once you remove the screws, the bottom panel pops off easily without the need for a prying tool. The SSD slot supports M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs.

Get the service and maintenance guide here.

• 180W power adapter and cord
• Documentation

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024)'s OLED display looks very sharp, with a pixel density exceeding that of the Apple MacBook Air 13 (2024)'s Retina display. Its 16:10 aspect ratio is quickly becoming the norm, even for gaming laptops. This format is great for productivity, as it gives you slightly more vertical space than a standard 16:9 screen, allowing you to see more information at once when reading a document or website. OLED panels are susceptible to permanent burn-in, especially with static elements like Windows' taskbar; however, it's unlikely to be an issue for those viewing varied content. Check out the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 (2024) GU605 if you want a laptop with a bigger screen for a more immersive gaming experience.

The display has a good response time, resulting in only a small amount of ghosting behind fast-moving objects. As for its refresh rate, although 120Hz feels reasonably responsive (certainly better than 60Hz), it's a slight downgrade from the 2023 ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (GA402), which has a 165Hz (Mini LED) display.

The display's contrast ratio is effectively infinite since OLEDs can turn off individual pixels to produce perfect blacks.

The display gets bright enough for use in most indoor settings but not outdoors in broad daylight. It's very dim at the lowest brightness setting, which is great for dark room viewing because it causes less eye strain.

The display's glossy finish handles reflections remarkably well. Reflections are only problematic when viewing dark-color content. Bright reflections, like a lamp, are visible when viewing light-color content with the screen at max brightness, but they aren't distracting.

The display's horizontal viewing angle is decent. Like most OLED panels, colors shift fairly quickly as you move to the side.

The display's vertical viewing angle is passable. Again, color shift is the main issue when viewing from above or below. It isn't too bad if you're only viewing documents, but you'll have to look at the screen more or less straight on if you need perfect accuracy for color-critical work.

The display's accuracy is good out of the box. The white balance inaccuracies are minor and hard to spot; however, many colors are visibly off due to oversaturation. Some people may like this punchy, oversaturated look; just know it isn't accurate. The gamma follows the curve relatively well, except in dark scenes where it's too high, resulting in crushed blacks.

The display's color gamut is superb. It has full coverage of the sRGB and DCI P3 color spaces and near-full coverage of the Adobe RGB color space, making it suitable for a wide range of uses, including media consumption, professional photo editing, and HDR video production.

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) has an excellent keyboard. Its layout feels spacious and is easy to get used to. The keys have a good amount of travel, require little force to actuate, and provide clear tactile feedback. They aren't the most stable keys, as they wobble a bit, but it isn't bad enough to be of concern. This keyboard has RGB backlighting, but there's only one lighting zone.

The touchpad is excellent. It's quite large, and its surface feels very smooth, allowing fingers to slide easily across it. Tracking is excellent, except around the edges, where it feels a tad less responsive. Palm rejection works as intended, and there are no issues performing gestures like dragging and dropping. You can only click in the bottom half of the touchpad; the buttons feel satisfyingly tactile.

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024)'s speakers get pretty loud with minimal compression artifacts at high volume levels. They sound clear and full, with a good amount of bass.

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) has a good webcam. The image looks detailed but slightly overexposed. As for the microphone, although voices come across clearly, there's a noticeable background hiss.

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) has a good port selection. Both USB-As support USB 3.2 Gen 2 data transfer speed of up to 10Gbps. The USB-Cs have different specifications; the one on the left supports USB4 (up to 40Gbps data transfer speed), while the right one supports USB 3.2 Gen 2. Although both USB-Cs support DisplayPort, only the left one supports charging, and only up to 100W, so the battery will discharge if you use the laptop for intensive tasks while charging.

The wireless adapter is a MediaTek Wi-Fi 6E MT7922 (RZ616). Wi-Fi 6E gives you access to the 6GHz band, providing faster speeds, lower latency, and less signal interference than previous wireless standards; however, you need a router that supports Wi-Fi 6E to benefit from these features.

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) is available with the following CPUs:

• AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS (8 cores/16 threads, up to 5.1GHz, 24MB cache)
• AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS (8 cores/16 threads, up to 5.2GHz, 24MB cache)

Both are 35W high-performance processors typically found in compact gaming and workstation laptops. They're essentially a refresh of the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS and Ryzen 9 7940HS from the previous generation but with better NPU (Neural Processing Unit) performance to speed up A.I.-based tasks, like image generation in photo editing apps and background blurring during video calls. They can handle general productivity tasks as well as more demanding workloads like gaming, programming, and content creation. Core count and composition are the same for both CPUs; the only difference is that the Ryzen 9 8945HS has slightly faster lock speeds, typically resulting in only a small performance increase.

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) is available with the following discrete GPUs:

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU 6GB GDDR6 (90W TGP /w Dynamic Boost)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU 8GB GDDR6 (90W TGP /w Dynamic Boost)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU 8GB GDDR6 (90W TGP /w Dynamic Boost)

The available GPUs range from entry-level (RTX 4050) to the mid-range RTX 4070. They all support the same features, like DLSS, ray tracing, Frame Generation, and NVIDIA Reflex, so you aren't losing out on features if you go with the lower-end configurations. All three run at a TGP (Total Graphics Power) of 90W, which is somewhere in the middle of the recommended 35-115W power spectrum, so they aren't the weakest variants of these GPUs, but there's room for improvement.

If you want to play all of your games at the display's native 2.8k resolution, it's best to get a model with an RTX 4070. The RTX 4060 can handle games at that resolution; however, you'll have to play with most of the settings at or near minimum and rely on DLSS and Frame Generation to get playable frame rates. You'll have to lower the settings on models with an RTX 4070, too, just not as much. As for the RTX 4050, it's mainly for 1080p gaming. Again, you might be able to play at the 2.8k resolution in lighter games, like 2D platformers and older or highly optimized titles, but only with some tweaks in the graphical settings.

You can configure this laptop with 16GB or 32GB of RAM, though the 32GB option is only available on models with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 GPU. The memory isn't user-replaceable.

You can configure this laptop with 512GB or 1TB of storage. The SSD is user-replaceable; the slot supports M.2 2280 PCIe Geb 4 NVMe SSDs.

The AUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024)’s overall score in Geekbench 5 is outstanding. Its AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS CPU performs well in various workloads, beating the HP OMEN Transcend 14 (2024)'s Intel Core Ultra 9 185 CPU in single-thread performance (by roughly 13%) but losing in multi-thread (18% slower). The posted results are averages taken in the default Performance mode. Switching to the Manual mode with all settings maxed out doesn't impact the performance. The Ryzen 7 8845HS is only slightly slower, less than 5% difference in most workloads.

As for GPU computing tasks, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU is very fast and can easily handle intensive workloads. The RTX 4050 and 4060 are suitable for heavy computing tasks, too; they're just slower, so you might experience more stutters in highly complex workloads and will have to wait longer for tasks to complete.

The AUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024)'s overall score in Cinebench R23 is outstanding. Its AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS CPU can easily handle intensive, multi-threaded workloads and general heavy multitasking. That said, there are significantly faster CPUs on the market, like the Dell Alienware m18 R2 (2024)'s Intel Core i9-14900HX and Apple's M3 Max SoC. Switching to the Manual performance mode with all settings maxed out only increases the performance by roughly 2%, boosting the multi-thread score to 15,895.

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) is outstanding for Blender work. All three NVIDIA discrete GPU options can quickly render complex 3D images, so choosing between them depends on the complexity of your work and how fast you expect to complete tasks.

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024)'s RTX 4070 scores well in the Basemark GPU benchmark. As mentioned in the GPU section, the RTX 4060 and 4070 can handle demanding games at the QHD+ resolution; you just have to tweak the settings slightly more on the 4060 to get playable frame rates. The RTX 4050 is mainly for 1080p gaming, and even then, you might have to turn down some settings because it only has 6GB of VRAM.

Borderlands 3 runs relatively well at 1080p on the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU. The average frame rate is high; however, there are noticeable stutters due to frame drops. At the display's native 2.8k resolution, the average frame rate drops to 50 fps with high settings and 106 fps with low settings. The RTX 4050 GPU can likely push close to 60 fps at the 2.8k resolution, but only with the lowest graphical settings.

Every configuration can run Civilization VI and other similar games smoothly at 1080p or the display's native 2.8k resolution.

Every configuration of the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) can deliver smooth gameplay in Counter-Strike 2 and other similarly demanding games, even at the laptop display's 2.8k native resolution.

Every configuration of the ASUS Zephyrus G14 (2024) can run Shadow of the Tomb Raider smoothly at 1080p or the display's native 2.8k resolution. However, you'll have to lower the settings a bit and rely on DLSS to get high frame rates (at 2.8k resolution) on models with an RTX 4050 GPU.

The keyboard deck gets toasty under load, but the hot spot is at the top of the deck, so it's unlikely to be an issue in typical uses. Unfortunately, the bottom gets uncomfortably hotter, reaching a max temperature of 57.1 °C (134.78 °F).

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) has a few pre-installed applications, including:

• ASUS Armory Crate: Lets you monitor the system status, change performance settings, create macros/hotkeys, customize the lighting (lid and keyboard), as well as access gaming news and the ASUS online shop.
• GlideX: Lets you mirror your screen's content to a smartphone, tablet, or computer.
• McAfee: Antivirus software. Requires subscription.
• MyASUS: Lets you connect your smartphone for file transfers, customer support, and power settings.
• Solitaire & Casual Games: Solitaire, FreeCell, Spider, Mahjong, Sudoku, and other casual games.

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024) has a Windows Hello facial recognition camera. You can use it to log into Windows, authorize purchases on the Windows Store, or auto-fill saved passwords on supported websites.