Okay, I am pretty late in making this article as in India, the laptop was available pretty late, and due to stock issues, I could not get it. Indeed it’s been almost 7 months since this gaming laptop has been launched; however, fortunately, I got hands-on with the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 powered by Ryzen 9 4900HS and RTX 2060 Max-Q.
The gaming laptop is indeed the best in 2020, and various reasons are supporting that, but it’s mainly because of the insane Ryzen 9 4900HS. Paired with an RTX 2060, the laptop gives great gaming performance and proves its worth for productivity and content creation.
Honestly, at first, seeing the laptop, I never felt this is a gaming one, as it’s so sleek, considering this to be a gaming laptop and Ryzen 9 in it. Overall design impressions and other views will be reserved for a full review, and this will be a performance benchmark article followed by a dedicated article on gaming benchmarks.
Performance
I knew the processor would be a beast and in India, the Ryzen 9 variant was not available at launch and did take some time to arrive. However, the prices and stocks issues have always remained a concern for the ROG Zephyrus G14 because of the heavy demand, thanks to the pandemic.
Having used a Ryzen 4000U series powered VivoBook Flip 14 laptop as a daily driver, I always wanted to test a Ryzen 4000H APU, and I did get to test the best one. The Ryzen 9 4900HS is an 8 core, 16 threaded processor with 3.0GHz base clock speed and up to 4.3GHz boost clock speed, drawing a lower 35W TDP.
It comes paired with 16 GB DDR4 3200MHz RAM and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q 6GB GDDR6 GPU. This, on paper, is a sick combo that can not only excel in gaming as well as productivity, considering you get a 14-inch 120Hz FHD IPS-level panel with Adaptive-Sync technology and excellent colour accuracy.
One of the biggest things I hate about gaming laptops is they had been bulky for years now, and battery life is pretty bad. Thanks to AMD’s efficient chips, the ROG Zephyrus remains silent and cool during normal work or until you summon the performance mode for heavy tasks or plug-in the charger.
To get the best performance out of the laptop, use it while charging, or if you want to play or work without the charger, you use the silent mode to save battery life. Be it working or gaming, this laptop is excellent either way and although it’s costly but worth spending.
Benchmarks
The first thing you have to do is UPDATE THE BIOS, yes, its very important because the version with which comes you this performance:
Whereas updating to the latest BIOS takes the performance to:
There is a huge difference in clock speeds as the processor stretches its arm to the maximum with sustained TDP, and you hear the fans are actually ramping up. So, I updated Windows 10 to the latest version, used the latest AMD and NVIDIA drivers for the tests.
Starting with Cinebench R20, we see the Ryzen 9 4900HS scoring around 4065 points in multi-core whereas scoring 468 points in single-core, having an excellent 8.69 MP ratio. This score beats even a desktop Ryzen 7 2700X or even a Core i9-10980HK as per this database.
Coming to Cinebench R15, we get a score of 1749 points which is indeed powerful as well beating the Core i9-10980HK comfortably.
On the Geekbench 5 side, we have a lucrative 7647 points in multi-core, which is absolutely incredible on a laptop! This score puts the ROG Zephyrus G14 with Ryzen 9 4900HS above the Core i7-9700K and just inches apart from the desktop Core i9-9900.
Drawing just 35W of TDP, this kind of performance is great, however, the single-core score is pretty similar to what I got with my Ryzen 7 4700U, this area needs improvement by AMD with Ryzen 5000.
The PCMark 10 scores also show the laptop as an excellent contender for productivity and content creation. Overall, it got a score of 5503 points which is brilliant for gaming as well as productivity, and in Productivity, it got a score of 7037 points, 8439 points in Essentials, and 7618 in content creation.
In GeekBench 5, the RTX 2060 Max-Q graphics got a score of 66991 points which is also pretty impressive and even better than a desktop AMD Radeon RX 5700 GPU.
In 3DMark FireStrike, we see an incredible score of 13,537 points that shows how powerful both the RTX 2060 and Ryzen 9 4900HS combo is. The graphics score I got was 14,508 points and a physics score of 20,053 points, making it one of the most powerful gaming laptops out there.
The scenario almost remains the same in 3DMark FireStrike Extreme, the laptop managing a whopping 6726 points. If you closely notice, the CPU performance is what really impressed me; with heavier loads, the Ryzen 9 4900HS doesn’t throttle, at all.
In 3DMark Time Spy, the laptop performs quite well putting up a score of 5801 points where the GPU was scoring 5503 points whereas the CPU was scoring around 8394 points.
Whereas in Time Spy Extreme, the ROG Zephyrus G14 puts up a respectable score of 2694, proving its worth in extreme test cases as well.
Last but not the least, I even tested the RTX 2060 Max-Q’s ray tracing capabilities in 3DMark’s Port Royal test, where the GPU shined with a score of 3136 points, proving you can use ray tracing on this mobile GPU.
To put this CPU to test I even tried HandBrake where I did these two rendering tests:
- 1080p low to high 2:30 min video in 45 seconds
- 720p low to 1080p high 3:30 min video in 1.58 seconds
Literally, the rendering speeds can leave you spellbound, so whether it’s gaming or productivity, indeed the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 with Ryzen 9 4900HS and RTX 2060 Max-Q is amazing! Soon, I will be posting the gaming benchmarks of the laptop for over 15 modern titles, so keep an eye here.
Check out the laptop here: https://amzn.to/2VyWNLa
