So the day that we've all been waiting for is finally here and I don't mean by what's going on right now. I really hope that you guys are staying home and safe but it's more along the lines of technology and and notebooks so what I have in front of me is the Asus Zephyrus rog g14 and it features AMD's Ryzen 4000 series Zen 2 CPU that's right Zen 2 has finally made its way into the notebook space now we're already aware of its outstanding performance on the desktop platform but how does that translate into notebooks most importantly how does it tackle important factors like battery life well the G14 is something a bit different for a me.
Notebooks since it's being put out there as a premium slim yet super powerful laptop that's supposed to represent the best Ryzen has to offer right now now asus is targeting the g14 towards the premium gaming market and that's actually pretty big deal because in the past any notebooks were relatively affordable and while they offered acceptable performance they didn't sacrifice on some key areas like the overall build quality and things just didn't feel that right but the G14 is taking a complete no compromise approach and that's amazing because in the past at least fora really long time Intel used to be dominating the high-end notebook space so after all the hype does the Ryzen 4000 series have what it takes to compete with in the mobile market let's find out right after this the razor Huntsman tournament edition has arrived it's linear optical switchers are rated with a hundred million keystrokes and actuate at just one millimetre that gives it alightning-quick feel with no risk of the bounce delay let your fingertips appreciate the double shot to be cheeky caps with their extra texture and enhanced durability so you can always dominate your game the Razer Huntsman keyboard this is gaming at a speed of light learn more the links below ok so let's quickly talk about how AMD was able to translate that rise in 4000 into the notebook space so I covered a lot of the details back at CES in fact if you're interested in learning a little bit more about them you can checkout that video right over here I'm gonna be focusing on the 8 Series since that's what's being used on the G14 now but those of you wondering the eight series processors is really the higher performance parts from AMD that's really targeted towards gamers and creators whereas the u series is really more towards the thin and light devices that are later coming on to the market.
So right now AMD will be launching eight and six core variants and all of them have SMT enabled creating 16 and 12 thread CPUs they've been a lot of questions and confusion about the differences between H and HS names so let's put that to the rest so HS is design specification used by AMD to create notebooks with a thickness of 20 millimetres or less on more than 10 hours of battery life and a discrete graphics card to achieve that CPUs like the Ryzen 9 4900 HS in the Zephyrus g14 are simply lower TDP versions of standard processors but unlike the other HS series the 4900 HS also makes do with lower boost and base clocks another thing I want to mention is that AMD made some pretty odd positions on the connectivity front so with the desktop CPUs were aware that Zen 2 does feature support for PCI Gen 4 both on the graphics and the storage side of things but these notebooks don't support that in fact they're back to Gen 3 with these new notebook processors and that's kind of unfortunate because you're only getting or Indies only allocated 8 graphics lanes for the discreet graphics card which shouldn't really cause any bottle necks but it would have been cool to at least see support for Gen 4 and drives at least on these new notebooks but that's not the case supposedly And did this to boost overall efficiency which I guess is good news.
If you really want longer battery life okay so you might remember the g14 back from CES as the notebook with the fancy LED matrix display on the lid unfortunately the model that I have over here doesn't feature that since issues will be planning to launch that matrix model a little bit later in the year in fact it's a specs packed inside that got me really excited so it's got the new Ryzen 9 4900 HS 8 core CPU with 16 threads 16 gigabytes of RAM running in a dual channel mode at 3200 megahertz a one terabyte nvme SSD and a 14 inch 1080p 120 Hertz display and an rtX 2060 max-q GPU all for less than $1500 say that's right at least that's where things stand right now but that could change given the current situation that's going around these days in fact the G14 starts at about $1,000 for the GTX 1650 with a Ryzen 7 4800 HS model that I have over here but it adds that matrix LED display with a qHD panel and 60 Hertz so with all the specs out of the way let's get into the exterior impressions and I really like what Asus has done here guys you can pick up this notebook with either a dark grey or white top cover and it's refreshing to see something different from ROG instead of the traditional red and black theme that they're known for build quality is really good the entire chassis is constructed out of magnesium alloy topped off with a coating that resists fingerprints and it sure does a trick love this feature and it's very thoughtful of Asus I also like the fact that you can open the notebook with just one hand plus the keyboard tilts at an angle to optimize typing and it helps with air flow and for those of you wondering about the CNC holes on the lid don't worry about liquids getting in and damaging the components because there's a secondary backer to prevent that from happening I really like this design in fact weirdly enough it does provide abit of a grip when you're holding this notebook so it's really nice I should mention that the color scheme isn't consistent throughout the notebook the lid screams pure white whereas the keyboard and the track pad is a silver finish it no world looks like a razor blade mercury white finish just without the white keyboard but putting the g14 next to a previous generation rise in notebook like these Zephyrus GA 502 d you I still remember that off the top of my head you can see that Asus kept the overall design look but they've modernized it a lot and that's something that I love about the J 14 I'm really impressed with the size of this laptop it's smaller than my razor blade 15 so it can easily throw this into a smaller backpack and not worry about the weight because it only weightless than 4 pounds and the included power adapter is also fairly light weight too so nothing to worry there in fact this notebook it's only about seventeen point nine millimetre stick which definitely fits the HS specification and like I said I'm really still shocked at how much asus named you were able to cram inside such as small chassis it is really really impressive moving on to the keyboard and track pad you still get the same layout just like any other Zephyrs notebook with the RG fonts on the key caps dedicated volume adjust keys along with quick access to rog armory which is a software that lets you switch between three different performance modes I really wished if ere was an additional mute key since that would have been more consistent instead of relying on function for just that command I like the separation with he arrow keys it makes it easier to navigate through spreadsheets the power button also acts as a fingerprint reader appreciate the subtle implementation there the keys themselves are excellent with good tactile feedback and adequate amount of travel distance it reminds me of bees n book 15 that I looked at not too long ago the back lighting on the other hand though is the worst that I've come across on a notebook it's just almost impossible to read the keys at night especially when you have it during daylight you're actually better off disabling it completely because asus seems like they win with micro LEDs instead of the center-mounted system underneath the key caps I guess that didn't really tell her that great now asus did confirm with us that they're gonna address this issue with the mass production units now the track pad on the other hand is phenomenal it features a glass surface feels very similar to my razor blade 15 and it features Windows position drivers now typically with every other notebook I would switch right away into the webcam quality test but there isn't one on the G14 in fact yeah it's just completely it's not there and I guess I can't complain about that but a lot of people seem to not care about having a webcam on their notebooks so I'm just gonna I'm just gonna skip that part the speakers on the g14 are front-facing so you get two tweeters at the top and a couple of wool first at the bottom and this results in one of the best sounding notebooks that I've ever come across I'm serious guys the trebles are well defined in fact the sub underneath really adds a great depth to any genre that you're listening to and this out performance my razor blade 15 by along shot without losing clarity at max volume moving on to the i/o it's really good for a 14 inch notebook I mean on the left-hand side there's power in HDMI 2.0 USB 3.2 gen2 type-c with Display Port 1.4 pass-through and power delivery and just to clarify on that power delivery this notebook can only accept 65 watts over that type C port but also do keep in mind that it does limit the performance of the laptop if you really want to take advantage of the rtx graphics and the Ryzen processors full potential you'll definitely have to use the hundred eighty watt included adapter unfortunately issues does not include the type C power adapter it's just a standard one that you get switching to the right side there's a Kensington lock a couple of USB type eight ports but sadly those are genuine five gigabits per second instead of Gen 2 which is twice the bandwidth it's really weird to see Asus cut corners especially in the spec department because this is AMD's latest offering especially on the notebook front and not getting that up-to-date spec is frustrating because mostly Intel notebooks in the market do feature that now I do have something that I also want to bring up and that is the port location because you might notice or you might wonder that I have amouse sitting right beside me if I plug the same on the side I for one am definitely gonna end up bumping into that cable every once in a while because it's so close and I'm sure it's gonna end up being a problem now I really don't know if I can blame this on the design of this laptop because Asus definitely had to make room for you know ventilation and the heat sink to breathe so it's really just a design limitation but I thought that was something worth bringing up I should mention that there are no Thunderbolt 3 ports on this laptop but that's expected given that Intel still hasn't licensed that to AMD yet now moving up the display it's 14 inches 1080p IPS like not necessarily true IPS however it does come factory calibrated and Pantone certified meaning that they claim to cover up to a hundred percent of the srgb color range from our testing there's number only covers 95% srgb and75% DCI p3 which isn't too far from the blade 15 you can definitely get away with photo and video editing on this notebook the view angles are excellent as well but unfortunately the screen doesn't get that bright so viewing content outdoors is definitely going to be a challenge I didn't notice any backward lead on my sample overall for the price I really can't complain about this display guys cuz you know it's running a 120 Hertz gaming on it was absolutely amazing getting me a fast fluid response with the discreet graphics card really I mean you can't go wrong with this screen when it comes to upgrade ability there are a couple of things that can be tweaked on the g14 so when you look at the memory you only have access to a single memory slot which is already populated because this laptop comes with 16 gigabytes of Ram eight gigabytes is onboard memory so that means you can only expand this up-to 24 gigabytes and there's a single M dr. salon that's already populated with the Intel 660 PS se that unfortunately doesn't have the greatest read or write performance now the battery life on the G14 surpassed my expectations you see when you take a 76 one hour battery and combine them with AMD's Zen to power fish and processor you really get a laptop that can last you all day as you can see with our light load test refreshing Chrome on a loop our sample lasted for about nine hours and 30 minutes guys that is ultra book level battery life coming from a gaming laptop with an RTX 2060.
It's it really goes to show how well AMD has improved its power state selection with these new processors fascinating stuff now under heavy load it only lasted for about anhour and a half which is right on par with the other gaming laptops that we've tested and now the moment that you've all been waiting for performance in one word it's just fast like really really fast guys in fact these numbers would make Intel cry so if anyone from Intel's watching this video you better have a box of Kleenex handy because it's about to get real so jumping right into our standard synthetic tests starting with sentimentar-15 in our 20 the 8 core 16 thread Ryzen 9 4900HS is a good 50% faster than intel's 6 core 12 thread eye 797 58 and what's even fascinating is how well it outperforms the core I 9 1980 HK 8 core 16 thread processor that's on the arrow 15 OLED model that I tested last year something I should mention is that the arrow 1500 LED was returned to gigabyte so you'll only see it in the synthetic tests single core performance is very impressive as the clock speeds boost up to four point three gigahertz as per spec and it's just as good as Intel's offerings so was you two more real-world tests this blender results says it all folks I mean he took half the time to complete the render comparedto my blade 15 this is desktop 99 hundred K level performance guys those extra cores do come in handy for video trans-coding as well as you can see with our handbrake test the 1400 HS is just way too fast for Intel to keep up with moving on to DaVinci Resolve with exports it's really interesting to see how those four extra threads managed to close the gap between it and my blade 15 featuring an RT X 20 max Q but keep in mind that the g14 features in RTX 2060 max Q and resolved loves GPUs however if you're an adobe premiere user I'd stay away from this laptop because it doesn't feature a quick sync support which is an Intel exclusive feature and Adobe embraces dad for accelerated rendering now about this window our test a lot of this has to dowith the SSD speed along with the single threaded performance well that Y740 from lenovo has one of the fastest SSDs we've seen on a notebook and it also has really high clock speeds so it literally kills everything else here alright so switching to gaming as you can see with these 3d mark benchmarks the g14 does pretty well for having an RTX 2060 max Q but it is a different matter when you're actually playing some titles so first of all there's a known issue with tomb raider and NVIDIA and Asus are both working on it and we did get confirmation with that but in other games it's pretty evident that Asus is limiting clock speeds to remain within their thermal specs it's important to remember that this is a slim and light notebook but there's also a way around these limits by using the turbo mode more on that later taking a look at temperatures the CPU did shoot up to 96 degrees Celsius under a full multi-core workload but after a few minutes to clock speeds did throttled down to three point three gigahertz maintaining 71 degrees Celsius the Arctic's 2016 ran pretty cool too I think the max peak Tim that I saw was around 70 C which ispretty respectable for a 14-inch gaming laptop even with the relatively low component temperatures these surface temperatures were pretty high especially at the center of the keyboard and directly on your lap now for those of you wondering issues has implemented three performance modes on this notebook so you have silent performance and turbo I ran all of my tests in the performance setting because to me it looked like the optimal setting now when you take a look at the performance difference between all three modes silent really limits the CV performance and the benefit of it is that you get a relatively quiet system but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for gaming as it applies a significant power limit on that RTX 2060 max Q but there's a catch there's always a catch when you see these numbers that are just so great so the g14 unfortunately is not a silent or a quiet gaming laptop because the fans ramped up significantly when you put it through a gaming load or anything that has to do with rendering or any sort of multi-core workload so I guess this brings us to the conclusion and guys I am still shocked at the performance of this g14 monster I mean the fact that it completely destroyed my razor blade 15 in all the tests I mean blender Cine bench even resolve in some cases when you set it to turbo it just outperforms that laptop with an RTX 2080 max Q that's just crazy most importantly this is a gaming laptop with a battery life of a thin and light like how amazing is that AMD has certainly caught up with the best that intel has to offer and this is huge news and of course at a competition is great now are you making any compromise with his notebook definitely I mean yes the lack of a webcam can be considered as one the back-lighting isn't necessarily the greatest and I'm not really a fan of the aisle placement I really wished if there was a type a USB port on the side because having just two type of ports on this is definitely abit frustrating but for the price it really is amazing you see right now we're seeing a slim view of what these new Ryzen processor scan offer and I hope to see a lot of other rise in laptops perform to the level just like the g14 I should also mention that this is the HS series processor and not the fully spect at H processor so it's a lower power state so just imagine what that fully Specht out eight series processor can perform and what it's going to be compared to Intel's upcoming tension series it's gonna be an interesting one to definitely witness and that's it that's all I have to say about the g14 I hope I was able to cover everything that you needed to know about AMD's new horizon CPU's on notebooks in fact are you looking if you're looking for a fairly small compact gaming laptop would this be on the top of your list I would certainly consider this because of the performance but I want any other thoughts about the g14 in the comments.
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