ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022) review: Still the productivity/gaming champion

This is the third iteration of the very famous ROG Zephyrus G14 gaming laptop by ASUS, now, powered by both AMD CPUs and GPUs, giving an edge over last year in terms of performance & efficiency. Being an AMD Advantage laptop, get guaranteed benefits of AMD tech like SmartShift, long battery life, good display and a lot more.

Now, with a dedicated webcam and a few minor tweaks, the new ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022) retains its originality while being much more functional this time. Now with an upgraded 16:10 aspect ratio display which is brighter and colorful than ever, this new gaming laptop can also be used for productivity.

Now with Radeon RX 6000S GPUs that draw up to 105W TDP thanks to SmartShift you get the best performance from the combo. With new PCIe Gen 4 SSD and DDR5 RAM, the price increase of these next-gen all-AMD laptops is quite justifiable. However, is it viable enough to spend that extra money on this 14-inch gaming laptop in 2022? Let’s find out in our detailed review:

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Specifications of new ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022)

In the Box

‎Laptop, Adaptor, ROG Zephyrus G14 Sleeve (2022), User Manual

Design & Build Quality

One of the key aspects of the ROG Zephyrus G14 is that it still retains the 14-inch form factor that helps you to carry it anywhere and do work or play in any place. Now, with more robust cooling and a slight improvement in build quality along with design improvements by adding additional prismatic details around its magnesium alloy chassis and keyboard.

You still have two color options: Eclipse Gray and Moonlight White, also you have the iconic & emblematic AniMe Matrix on the rear end which makes this ROG Zephyrus G14 stand out from the rest of the competition. ASUS has also improved the AniMe Matrix, which has now been upgraded to produce brighter and smoother-looking animations.

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In terms of build quality, the laptop remains solid enough and doesn’t much flex or creak as such while you can still open the gaming laptop with one hand. Thanks to 4.7mm side bezels and the new ErgoLift design, this ROG Zephyrus G14 can now be rotated up to 180 degrees, unlike the last gen that could only be stretched up to 110 degrees.

The bottom of the laptop now features a perforated metal design, which provides additional room for airflow. The AniMe Matrix has a lot of functions this time namely normal Animation Mode that lets you project whatever you want on the larger perforated display along with Audio Mode and System Mode.

The new interesting addition this time around has to be the new Omni (Virtual Pet) that acts as an interactive digital assistant with whom users can interact. Clicking on OMNI will display numerous functions ranging from checking system status to the newly added mini-game mode. Additionally, OMNI will automatically react to preconfigured system scenarios.

It’s nice to see that the most loved all-AMD ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022) take good things from its predecessors and has kept its unique identity & rigidity with some feature upgrade.

Display

ASUS says the display of this new ROG Zephyrus G14 has been upgraded, though ships with the same 14-inch display but this time it’s a 16:10 aspect ratio which means you have thinner bezels. Now, you have a 91% screen-to-body ratio for a truly immersive gaming and visual experience.

The Taiwan giant has now given a webcam finally, the top bezel comes equipped with an IR camera that supports Windows Hello for added user convenience. ASUS calls this display the ROG Nebula Display, which according to them is a standard that the company is maintaining for high-end gaming laptops. This provides users with the reassurance of receiving panels with high resolution, high refresh rates and extensive coverage of the color gamut.

Here, you have a QHD (2560×1600) 120Hz panel which is enough for even the most demanding games and gives you crisp details along with a good amount of brightness. Yes, ASUS has upgraded the peak brightness up to 500nits along with super low response times of just 3ms.

If you love doing productivity work, you will definitely love this display as it covers 100% DCI-P3 color gamut and comes with Pantone validation. As the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14’s display also supports AMD FreeSync Premium technology, an added bonus of AMD Advantage, this reduces screen tearing while playing games.

Also, if you are an ardent Netflix lover or love watching movies, YouTube or web series you will definitely like that the display supports Dolby vision that helps look at the media on the screen much better. It helps to dynamically adjust the brightness, color and sharpness of each video frame to match the display color volume, ultimately allowing users to enjoy the content that looks richer, brighter and livelier.

To test the accuracy and other features claimed by ASUS on this new ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022), we ran tests on our Datacolor SyperX Pro and here are the results:

As you see in the display tests, the 14-inch display of this ROG Zephyrus G14 lives up to the expectation of what ASUS has claimed, providing excellent color accuracy, contrast and peak brightness. Overall, not only from our tests but also in real life as well, the display gives you both good gaming performance and is ideal for high-end productivity work as well.

Performance

The biggest boost this new ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022) has got is in terms of performance as gone are those days of RTX 3060 capped up to 85W because now moving to an all-AMD platform gives an edge over the rest. Now sporting up to an 8-core AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS processor based on 6nm & Zen 3+ architecture provides incredible efficiency and performance even drawing low TDP.

With a max boost clock speed of 4.9 GHz, this Ryzen 9 processor bursts through all your gaming and productivity tasks easily. Also, the CPU is very efficient and if you need long battery life, you should definitely look upon this one, now paired with AMD Radeon RX 6000S Series mobile graphics based on RDNA2 architecture.

This helps deliver high framerate gaming to laptop users and a solid selection of advanced content creation features. Thanks to exclusive AMD features like AMD SmartShift Max technology, AMD Smart Access Memory technology and AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution (FSR), enjoy gaming and content creativity up to its true potential easily.

In my usage, I did notice a huge bump in performance, compared to last year all thanks to the beastly AMD combo along with up to 105W TDP GPU which excels in all kinds of workloads. Also, if you don’t need the discrete GPU so that you can save battery life, use the dedicated MUX switch present on all ROG gaming laptops these days, a handy feature to have.

Here are the benchmarks we took of this new ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022) and how it stands against the other gaming laptops in the segment:

As you see in the synthetic benchmarks, the Ryzen 9 6900HS does put up some good numbers against the latest 12th Gen Core processors, obviously not the most powerful but yes it’s still good enough as a flagship laptop. So, be it gaming or productivity, the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022) shines easily even though it’s still limited to 8 cores.

In all of these 3DMark benchmarks, you see the ROG Zephyrus G14 gaming laptop exceeding all expectations to provide you with some incredible numbers:

In all of these 3DMark benchmarks, you see being paired with a strong RX 6800S GPU with 8GB GDDR6 memory gives you healthy scores across a number of productivity tests which benefit from a bigger VRAM along with exclusive AMD benefits.

As you see in the SSD speed tests, this is a PCIe Gen 4 SSD, an upgrade over last-gen, however, the speed is not flagship level indeed but still viable for daily usage. Overall, in terms of performance, this new ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022) is a great option and paired with incredible efficiency, you cannot get better than this.

Gaming

Now coming to the gaming aspect of this 14-inch ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022) which is a key improvement over last-gen because of the new RX 6800S, how much improvement could you expect?

Here we will show how this gaming laptop performs in some of the latest triple-A and Battle Royal games both in FHD and QHD:

As you see in the number of benchmarks, the new ROG Zephyrus G14 at Turbo performance mode gives some really promising numbers be it in triple-A titles or fast-paced games like CS:GO or Valorant. In new-age demanding games like God of War, Cyberpunk or Watch Dogs Legion you get pretty good numbers at QHD, over 60 FPS even without using FSR.

Yes, when you use FSR, expect 60+ FPS even at high settings be it an intensive game like Cyberpunk 2077. The bright and color-accurate display lets you enjoy endless gaming sessions in the comfort of your bed or anywhere you want to take your ROG Zephyrus G14 with you.

The improvement in hardware does make a difference and I have noticed that during my endless FIFA gaming sessions where the laptop had no stutter at all. It does get heated up but not abnormally even though it packs some beefy hardware while still gaining its 14-inch form factor.

Keyboard & Trackpad

ASUS has still maintained a tactile keyboard over generations now which is really comfortable to type on and has 4 dedicated hotkeys for quick access to key functions. The 1.7mm travel distance and dished caps make this gaming laptop one of the best to really type endlessly during work or play.

The biggest complaint I previously had was that the backlighting was limited to white only, however, this time the new ROG Zephyrus G14 features a new RGB keyboard along with Aura Sync support, making it fully customizable through the Armoury crate application pre-installed.

Another good thing I noticed, is that the trackpad has been enlarged by 50% and it now measures 128mm x 76mm. Yes, it’s much bigger than last year, which was not viable to use for everyday work but now that it has got bigger its usable for basic usage I would say still far from the satisfying feel of a dedicated mouse button but as its a larger glass touchpad, the improvement is always welcome.

I/O & Connectivity

Now, like its predecessors, this new ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022) won’t give you any subject to complain especially when it comes to connectivity and I/O. It sports an HDMI 2.0b port and 3.5mm headphone jack on the left along with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port which supports DisplayPort™ / power delivery.

On the right-hand side, you get two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, another USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port and finally one card reader (microSD) (UHS-II). For connectivity, you have the latest combo of Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth v5.2, which to be fair worked well in most aspects especially the Bluetooth I would say.

However, in terms of the Wi-Fi connectivity, I noticed the range this time is not as good as you expect because see a huge drop in Wi-Fi speeds if you go to another room a bit far from the router. Also, even while staying close to the router I noticed some occasional network lags which could be resolved via future software or firmware updates.

Thermals & Upgradability

Having to spend so much amount of money on this new ROG Zephyrus G14 will you get solid thermals to get you over the line in games or intensive workloads? Now, with ROG Intelligent cooling featuring liquid metal compound from Thermal Grizzly, 4 heatsinks, each lined with ultrathin copper fins as slim as 0.15mm, you can expect world-class cooling.

The new Arc Flow fans feature 84 blades shaped to reduce noise levels and increase airflow by up to 32% compared to traditional 71 blades fans, so while you will notice the fans spinning at max potential when pushed but you won’t hear huge noise. While in silent mode, you won’t even hear the fans spinning or notice the laptop getting warmed up.

Also, if you don’t know, this new ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022) will be the first ROG model to feature dust filters for both of its fans, which indeed helps the fans keep spinning at higher speeds for maximum points of time. You can use the five preferred modes to configure your fan noise, temps and max TDP you want to give: Windows, Silent, Performance, Turbo and Manual.

Being equipped with a comprehensive vapour chamber with up to 50% more coverage area than traditional heat pipe designs, the heat dissipation is much better than the predecessors which is evident as the laptop’s cooling is enough to tame the beasts like Ryzen 9 6900HS and RX 6800S.

If you want to upgrade the storage or RAM, the 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD cannot be expanded further as ASUS feels it to be “more than enough”, however, for RAM, there’s a 16GB DDR5 RAM slaughtered onto the motherboard and you can extend it with another DDR5 4800MHz stick to make it up to 32GB which is practically enough for most people.

Audio & Webcam

Talking about the audio on this ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022), the laptop comes with 4 speakers that feature Smart Amp technology along with Dolby Atmos support. As these are front firing they are quite good in terms of audio but not the loudest, however, they are true to the tone and enough to handle your media and gaming needs.

Also, the ROG Two-Way AI Noise Cancelling is an added feature for those who use the microphone for gaming or liver-streaming. The 720p IR webcam has finally been added to this 2022 variant of the ROG Zephyrus G14 along with Windows Hello support, it is easier than ever to log in to the laptop easily, however, the quality of the webcam is okay for most use cases.

Battery Life

Coming to battery life, which has been a strong side of this ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 as a gaming laptop and its tradition continues in this 2022 variant. However, because using a beefy GPU does impact up to some extent but I would recommend using the MUX switch to completely kill the discrete GPU if not needed.

After doing so, you can stretch up to 6 hours of battery life easily and do local video playback that can even be extended to 8 hours with medium brightness. However, in an ideal use case, most people will get 4-5 hours of battery life, which for a gaming laptop is good enough and keep the mode silent to extend max battery life.

Having a 76Whr battery and fast Type-C 100W Power Delivery charging technology does help if you are travelling a lot and need quick power as the quick PD charger can take the ROG Zephyrus G14’s battery from 0 to 50% in just 30 minutes.

Verdict

Now, comes the most important question of this review, should you go for this ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (2022), now with increased price and specs? Well, it depends on how much you can spend and the affection you have towards this special gaming laptop, now having that AMD Advantage benefit.

If you love the great display, latest hardware specs with beastly all-AMD combo along with a wide range of AMD exclusive features, latest I/O & connectivity, good battery life, and an overall package that serves more than just a usual gaming laptop, then the ROG Zephyrus G14 still retains its original value as a smaller & portable 14-inch gaming laptop.

The key upgrades of including a webcam, and robust cooling along with all the benefits you already enjoyed with this series, just get better. Obviously, there’s a good increase in pricing but that is mostly due to the overall shortage and in general component price hikes, however, as a productivity/gaming laptop it still reigns supreme.

As a writer and gamer, I would love a Windows laptop with high-end specs in a portable form factor while still retaining powerful specs and a great display, this is the one I would also consider for myself effortlessly. However, for you, if this fits your budget, and meets your performance requirements, it is still an iconic gaming laptop even in 2022.

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