i only got a day's notice that the ASUS zephyrus g14 would be arriving with
AMD's new ryzen 9 4900 hs an eight core
processor for thin and light gaming laptops that consumes just 35 watts now
that wouldn't be a problem except that the only comparable a core Intel laptop
that i had on hand uses the core i9 9880
hk their flagship mobile processor that
draws watts boosts to 5 gigahertz and only
exists in much thicker not to mention heavier designs for funsies though i
decided you know what let's fire up cinebench r20 on both of them anyway and
see what happens i was fully expecting the AMD processor to get destroyed and
our video to be delayed until we had a fair comparison except that that's not
how things went down the ryzen 9
hs killed the i9 9880hk delivering
nearly a quarter more performance and i was worried maybe Windows update or
something was running in the background on the Intel machine so i ran the test a
couple more times but the results stayed the same
AMD just chokesland the fastest mobile
processor on the market of course though
there's more to life than just cinebench and i need to see if it can dominate
elsewhere thermal grizzlies conduct not liquid metal thermal interface material offers
maximum cooling performance check it out and keep things cool at the link below
thing is the zenbook pro duo is a powerful machine but it was designed
more for creative professionals so our
next sanity check then was to grab a different 8-core laptop
meet the acer helio 700 the epitome of mobile
xs now it technically uses the same core i9
9880hk but this is on a different level like
check this out when you are ready to game you actually move the entire
keyboard down and press the turbo button
revealing these two huge fans that can suck in enough air to allow the
processor to draw up to
120 watts
surely the puny zephyrus will be absolutely crushed by this no
compromises gaming beast right
let me put it this way if i'm working at Intel
i'm gonna probably need a new pair of boxers in a sec lttstore.com by the way
because dang two acer's credit at least the 4900 hs
had to kind of work for it this time and besides we're all getting kind of tired
of watching AMD kick ass at multi-threaded applications let's talk
about single threat
oh even with acer's overclock locking the
i9 9880 hk at a ripping 5 gigahertz
which is unsustainable in basically any other design and barely even a laptop at
this point from test to test it was a toss-up whether the r9 or the i9 would
win and for the rest of our testing the results remained about the same the
zephyrus g14 crushed the zenbook pro and
matched or edged ahead of the helio 700
and guys the emphasis here needs to be on how crazy it is that this small
laptop was able to hang with this one
bear in mind of course this has more powerful graphics for games now during
our blender bmw CPU render the ryzen 9 4900 hs in the zephyrus g14 reached a
maximum temperature of 91.8 degrees which is toasty but not throttling and
it drew a reported average of about 50 watts
by comparison our 9880 hk and the helio 700 hit 96 degrees and reported drawing
about 90 watts think about that the Intel chip needed 40 more watts of power
and the winds of boreas just to match AMD in performance
bringing us to an interesting question though how on earth is the ryzen 9 4900
hs which i never saw break 4.4 gigahertz
matching or even beating a 5 gigahertz
Intel chip well we've talked about this before but ryzen 4000 series uses AMD's
zen 2 architecture which boasts about a 15 increase in ipc or instructions per
cycle over last gen more ipc basically means that more work
can be done at a given clock speed so with some simple napkin math
oh wow that's a fancy napkin 4.4 times
1.15 gives us 5.06 the excellent single
threaded performance means then that the zephyrus g14 not only kicks ass for
productivity but it also tears through games ours is equipped with an NVIDIA
rtx 2060 max q and guys all i can say is who says green and
red don't go well together this combo made short work of the full power rtx
2060 in the zenbook pro duo now that
my kind of christmas but there's always a catch right one of
my favorite lines to repeat in gaming laptop videos is with great power comes
great power consumption at which point we all
have a good laugh about the two to three hours of battery life in gaming machines
or less than an hour if you have the audacity to actually game on them
stop not with the zephyrus g14
now given the 76 watt hour battery eight core processor and 120 hertz display i
would have wagered something like five hours of battery life if i was feeling
optimistic but it got 10. now that is just for light office
work with the brightness turned down and the keyboard backlight off but to put it
in perspective the freaking dell xps 13
2 and 1 got half an hour less than that running the same test this all means
then that AMD has gifted the world a processor as powerful as Intel's core i9
9880 hk but that can be integrated in a design that's just 20 millimeters thick
and sips power like a 25 watt quad core
when you're just browsing the web which brings us to AMD's largest mobile hurdle
so far oem support a powerful and
efficient processor is nothing if it gets relegated to b-tier designs so
let's change gears and focus on the zephyrus g14 itself for a little bit the
build quality is excellent not quite up there with a razer blade 15 or alienware
m15 with a bit more visible plastic and
some of the most uneven keyboard backlighting that i've seen in quite a
while but it avoids any egregious gamer
styling it's not super flexy and i'd give it
easily an a minus the i o is also solid with my only complaint being that the
type a ports are in a pretty rough spot if you want to plug a mouse in
aside from the light piping the keyboard is excellent though which is kind of
funny because a stiff top of the stroke with a long travel sounds like it's
going to end up mushy but ends up feeling more like
like stealthy it's really quiet and the standard layout and great key feel makes
it almost immediately blend into the background while my work or my game can
take center stage the pad is then more of the same besides being slightly on
the small side it just does its job so you can do your job
that is as long as your job doesn't involve working from home now we had no
way of knowing that the kovid 19 pandemic was coming
or that it would have this kind of an impact but we still get to say
i told you so ASUS stop stripping webcams off your laptops something is
still better than no thing when i need to jump on a video call with someone at
the last second and i'm scrambling and no webcam also means no Windows hello
facial recognition now the power button is a fingerprint
reader that caches your authentication temporarily then logs you in once the
Windows lock screen comes up so at least you don't have to touch it twice
which is okay or at least it would be if it worked more consistently we got about
15 success on it so some driver improvements needed there rounding out
the experience the display is another strong area though with both a fast 120
hertz refresh rate and factory calibrated colors and the final nice
touch is an Intel wi-fi 6 card that's great to see because that's definitely
one area of mobile computing where team blue still gets a big fat w the version
with the rtx 2060 max q starts at 1449.99 and at that price i can
wholeheartedly recommend the zephyrus g14 as a do it all laptop gaming school
work i don't remember a device like this as a whole package
that represented so few compromises for so few people
in quite some time i think it's fair to
say that this not this laptop specifically but this process this
mobile launch could be AMD's most important launch if not ever than at
least in the last 10 years now i get that our audience guys you guys are
super into diy pcs but laptop sales are
more than double desktop sales like think about it at shows like ces
manufacturers like dell and lenovo individually have a bigger presence than
all of AMD and until now nearly every
single laptop they've sold has contained an Intel processor that
is finally about to change which is going to put yet another big revenue
boost into AMD's coffers to keep r d up
and keep the pressure on Intel we can't pronounce AMD the king of the mobile CPU
market yet word on the street is that Intel isn't going to just take this
lying down but what we can say is that
as it did in desktops workstations and
servers zen 2 has brought competition back
to mobile was there ever competition in high-end
mobile no not really oh
um how about has there been a segue to our
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out today at the link in the video description thanks for watching guys if
you want to watch more destruction of Intel uh maybe check out this video from
when Intel dropped their new high-end processors half a day before the last
threadripper launch that was that was rough hey