Most Overhyped Laptop I've ever used: ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 Review
Yesterday I received the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 which came with a AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS, 16GB's of DDR4-3200MHZ Ram, 1TB SATA M.2 SSD and a RTX 2060 Max-Q Design. By looking at the specs you would think this would be a killer laptop, and that's exactly what I had thought.
Straight out of the box, the laptop looked extremely premium and promising. The laptop weighs about 4lbs and has good I/O for the average gamer or student, with 2 USB 3.0 Ports, 2 USB-C Ports, One HDMI Port, One Headphone Jack and the Power port. The Laptop is equipped with some pretty powerful front-facing speakers which I thought were great. The display is very nice at 14" with 1080p 120Hz, great colors and Freesync enabled.
Now onto the real-world use.
On paper, this laptop seems like the best laptop money could buy at $1400, however that began to change real quick as I started to use it. I began to set up the laptop, during the process the laptop would become quite hot with the fans running very loud. I suspected this to be due to the Windows setup and should all be fine when I get to the desktop. When the laptop had finished the initial setup, the laptop was still running very hot and the fans were incredibly loud. I loaded up HWInfo64, and temps were reporting over 70c on the CPU and 75c on the GPU, keep in mind this is with absolutely no load and idling. By now I knew something was up. I then consulted the ZephyrusG14 subreddit, which proved to be quite helpful. Many guides showed how to achieve little to no fan speeds while maintaining cool CPU and GPU temps. On top of that, many had provided guides on how to achieve 10+ hours on battery with this laptop. After spending an hour or two following guides, my laptop would be idling at 39c on desktop with no fan movement whatsoever. I was finally starting to like this laptop however, every time I would the laptop into power, the device would go max fan speed with temps reaching over 75c on both the CPU and GPU. This was very surprising as I had nothing running. I realized that every time I would plug in the laptop, Windows would set the power plan to High Performance, meaning that the dGPU and turbo would be activated. I tried for 1-2 hours to disable this profile, but never worked. I also started to believe that ASUS's software, "Armoury Crate", was causing all the commotion, however after uninstalling that, the laptop would continue to hit high temps. Another issue I had encountered as a whole was the overall gaming experience.
Gaming on this thing is nearly impossible if you don't use an external keyboard. This chassis gets hot to the touch while running Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. I had set the graphic settings to all High/Ultra and was able to play at 90fps. But the GPU was hitting 86c, and the chassis + keyboard were untouchable, you would probably burn yourself to be frank. Another thing that sucked with this laptop was that ASUS SOLDERED 8gb's of ram to the motherboard, with only one slot remaining for upgrade. This meant that if you would want to upgrade to, lets say, 32gb's of ram, you would lose the functionality of "Dual-Channel Memory", resulting in loss of performance. This would ultimately hurt Ryzen especially as the entire Ryzen CPU family benefits of Dual Channel Memory. That being said though, the laptop can be upgraded to a max of 40GB's of ram, which is nice to have, but with that performance loss, it really doesn't make any sense. Lastly, the laptop comes with 1 M.2 Slot, meaning that you can only replace the existing drive. After taking a closer look on the internals of the G14, I noticed that few ventilation openings were blocked off. I had consulted the ZephyrusG14 subreddit about this problem, and turns out that ASUS had done this intentionally to their AMD laptops. The G14 and G15 both are effected by this, causing increased temps overall. However, on the M15 (Intel Variant), all vents were open and were able to move freely. I don't know if this is just me or if ASUS is just hurting the AMD reputation... And keep in mind, if you were to remove the flaps blocking ventilation on either the G14 or G15, that would VOID your warranty. Absolutely disgusting by ASUS.
Aside from the entire list of issues with this laptop, it was pretty good. But with so many issues, I really find it difficult to recommend.
Stay tuned for next weeks review on the MSI GS66-005 (i7-10750H, RTX 2070)
Straight out of the box, the laptop looked extremely premium and promising. The laptop weighs about 4lbs and has good I/O for the average gamer or student, with 2 USB 3.0 Ports, 2 USB-C Ports, One HDMI Port, One Headphone Jack and the Power port. The Laptop is equipped with some pretty powerful front-facing speakers which I thought were great. The display is very nice at 14" with 1080p 120Hz, great colors and Freesync enabled.
Now onto the real-world use.
On paper, this laptop seems like the best laptop money could buy at $1400, however that began to change real quick as I started to use it. I began to set up the laptop, during the process the laptop would become quite hot with the fans running very loud. I suspected this to be due to the Windows setup and should all be fine when I get to the desktop. When the laptop had finished the initial setup, the laptop was still running very hot and the fans were incredibly loud. I loaded up HWInfo64, and temps were reporting over 70c on the CPU and 75c on the GPU, keep in mind this is with absolutely no load and idling. By now I knew something was up. I then consulted the ZephyrusG14 subreddit, which proved to be quite helpful. Many guides showed how to achieve little to no fan speeds while maintaining cool CPU and GPU temps. On top of that, many had provided guides on how to achieve 10+ hours on battery with this laptop. After spending an hour or two following guides, my laptop would be idling at 39c on desktop with no fan movement whatsoever. I was finally starting to like this laptop however, every time I would the laptop into power, the device would go max fan speed with temps reaching over 75c on both the CPU and GPU. This was very surprising as I had nothing running. I realized that every time I would plug in the laptop, Windows would set the power plan to High Performance, meaning that the dGPU and turbo would be activated. I tried for 1-2 hours to disable this profile, but never worked. I also started to believe that ASUS's software, "Armoury Crate", was causing all the commotion, however after uninstalling that, the laptop would continue to hit high temps. Another issue I had encountered as a whole was the overall gaming experience.
Gaming on this thing is nearly impossible if you don't use an external keyboard. This chassis gets hot to the touch while running Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. I had set the graphic settings to all High/Ultra and was able to play at 90fps. But the GPU was hitting 86c, and the chassis + keyboard were untouchable, you would probably burn yourself to be frank. Another thing that sucked with this laptop was that ASUS SOLDERED 8gb's of ram to the motherboard, with only one slot remaining for upgrade. This meant that if you would want to upgrade to, lets say, 32gb's of ram, you would lose the functionality of "Dual-Channel Memory", resulting in loss of performance. This would ultimately hurt Ryzen especially as the entire Ryzen CPU family benefits of Dual Channel Memory. That being said though, the laptop can be upgraded to a max of 40GB's of ram, which is nice to have, but with that performance loss, it really doesn't make any sense. Lastly, the laptop comes with 1 M.2 Slot, meaning that you can only replace the existing drive. After taking a closer look on the internals of the G14, I noticed that few ventilation openings were blocked off. I had consulted the ZephyrusG14 subreddit about this problem, and turns out that ASUS had done this intentionally to their AMD laptops. The G14 and G15 both are effected by this, causing increased temps overall. However, on the M15 (Intel Variant), all vents were open and were able to move freely. I don't know if this is just me or if ASUS is just hurting the AMD reputation... And keep in mind, if you were to remove the flaps blocking ventilation on either the G14 or G15, that would VOID your warranty. Absolutely disgusting by ASUS.
Aside from the entire list of issues with this laptop, it was pretty good. But with so many issues, I really find it difficult to recommend.
Stay tuned for next weeks review on the MSI GS66-005 (i7-10750H, RTX 2070)
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