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as Su sponsored this video for me to tell you guys that hey that can't be

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right it is the new zephrus G14 is

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slower than the old one and they sponsored us to say that exactly yes

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obviously I'm missing something here well it does make a lot of sense when

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you start comparing it to the old one

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oh I see last year's G14 was available

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with up to an RTX 4090 mobile GPU but

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what ASUS has realized is that the vast majority of their customers in this

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segment don't want to pay a king's ransom for a 490 preferring the configs

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with a 4070 or lower and what they and

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everyone else also didn't realize was that the RTX 470 mobile can suck back up

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to 140 Watts but you get diminishing returns after about 90 so by locking

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into a 4070 they were able to make the new model 4 mm thinner and drop 200 g of

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mass which makes a lot of

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sense for years brands have been saying

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that they've made the thin and light gaming laptop but it's hard to find

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examples where they stuck the landing on both the size and the design like this

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especially with them open we don't need that giant vent space

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under it anymore and there's a number of factors that contribute to that

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perceived niess starting with the CNC m

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aluminum chassis even though we're just looking at the keyboard trackpad and

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palm rest cover thing look at that I've

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seen entire laptops with this much

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Flex the trackpad is glass topped not to

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mention absolutely flipping huge for a

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gaming laptop man these look awesome oh man I wish they left it like this here's

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the old model for comparison and speaking of the old model they have

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killed the fingerprint reader on the new one they are all in on infrared facial

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recognition now which must have been a blow to the engineer who was extremely

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proud of their triangular fingerprint reader but guys I've been daily driving

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facial recognition lately and there's no comparison this is so much more

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convenient and as someone who does most of my gaming on my desktop at home

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rather than on my laptop I would say the same thing about the reduction in weight

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here let's go ahead and put the old one on here 1.72 kilos new

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one 1.4 eight oh wow you guys undersold

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it it's even more than they said but lonus you might say I want animations on

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the back panel of my machine and I want an RTX 490 in my compact gaming laptop

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so my number is higher than my friends well have no fear they are going to

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continue selling the old G14 for a bit we'll have it linked down below but if

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you want more performance the way ASUS thinks you should probably go is the

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brand new zephrus g16 we're going to talk about how much

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faster it is in a little bit but first this is actually my first time touching

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this that is a Sleek machine both of

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these new models have OLED panels a 3K 120 HZ on the G14 and a QHD plus 240 HZ

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on the g16 which I think you guys will probably know which one I prefer that's

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like right in the sweet spot but even that is not what's special about these

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everyone in their dog has OLED laptops these days but these are the First with

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variable refresh rate Tech but why did

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that take so long I mean we have variable refresh rate on TVs monitors

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and even phones and variable refresh rate has obvious advantages for gamers

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like smoother animations and reduced screen tearing well the reason is that

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it turns out getting variable refresh rate to work on an OLED laptop is

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uniquely difficult see with a normal IPS

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panel where the backlight is always on and then you're just updating the image

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in front of it changing the refresh rate doesn't affect image brightness but on a

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self- emissive display that all goes out the window you see OLED brightness is

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determined partially by how bright each

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pixel is but also by how often each

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pixel fires and for how long they don't

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just shine continuously so if you've got

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a game that's running at 100 frames per second and then that drop to 80 FPS and

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you're using variable refresh rate your screen refreshes go from 100 times a

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second to 80 times a second which means

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you're going to end up with 80% of the brightness then as your frame rate

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fluctuates up and down the image is going to turn into a flickery mess but

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then coming back to the TVs and the monitors again how do they do it it's

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actually really cool they achieve variable refresh rate by recalculating

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the brightness of every pixel for every

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displayed frame that's great but it's

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very computationally expensive so it's not an ideal solution for a mobile

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device where you're going to want your battery life and your power budget going

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towards driving more gaming performance rather than driving panel overhead and

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the even bigger problem is that in a lot of cases these OLED TVs still have

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problems with flickering when there are big swings in frame

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rate so how do then well instead of

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recalculating the brightness of each pixel ASUS locked the emission rate of

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the sub pixels at a Bonkers 960 HZ for

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the g16 and 480 HZ for the G14 that

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means that when running at their full refresh rate that same frame is going to

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be displayed four times in a row and then as the frame rate drops well the

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pixels just keep on firing at that same blazing fast r as many times as they

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need to so they just flash more times displaying that same frame for longer

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but at the same brightness now as part

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of our investigation into ASUS's claims we looked into well um how about phones

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how are they handling variable refresh rate and as it turns out it's kind of a

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hack I mean it works and it is variable

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but only between a handful of refresh rates that have the emission timing pre

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calculated this might also explain valve's kg answer when I asked them why

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the steam deck OLED doesn't have vrr it's really hard which is super cool but

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not cheap so on the g16 if you want to save a buck or you really want a matte

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display there's also a QHD plus 240 HZ IPS panel however having a beautiful

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high refresh rate panel variable refresh rate all that good stuff is only as good

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as the frames that are displayed on it so let's try them out now we can't show

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you guys any FPS counters because thanks

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in tell and AMD ndas but we are allowed

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to game on them and nobody told me I can't guess and as you guys have

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probably seen in the past I'm usually pretty good at it so uh while we got our

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for of files validated on the AMD machine let's check out

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wow uh we're going to have a problem here when I said I'm usually pretty good

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at this I meant I can tell the difference between 40 FPS and 50 and

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90 when it's running at what appears to be well in excess of 100 frames per

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second it is very very difficult to tell

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and this is cranked with TAA yeah and

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this is that native res I mean it must be it's so sharp holy does this ever

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look good HDR is enabled two and Holy balls turning our attention to the AMD

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side of things 240 HZ that's really smooth but

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uh it's always 120 HZ it's really clear

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that there's a point of diminishing returns here I can tell performance is a

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little bit lower but look at this it's not the kind of

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thing that you would feel in gameplay at all it's also not even that oh this

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one's running at a higher res too yeah oh right just cuz the panel's higher

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it's not even that loud like you you can hear it but like

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kind of kind of like this machine it's not even that much thicker than my

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framework is it a touchscreen no touchcreen all right well that's one

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thing 550 nit Peak brightness though

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dang on an OLED that's a lot of brightness you got that perfect black to

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achieve this kind of performance the G14 is running up to a ryzen 98945 HS so

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that's AMD's new hawkpoint CPUs which are very similar to their 7,000 series

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CPUs but with some AI bted on because I

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don't know rabbits are old news and it's now the year of the AI uh it can have up

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to an RTX 470 and down to an RTX 4050

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with a total of 100 watts of system power so that's 35 watts to the CPU 65

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watts to the GPU and then 25 watts of dynamic boost to the GPU so wow that's

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up to 90 Watts on the GPU freaking awesome the RAM is soldered runs it up

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to 6,400 megatrans per second the battery is 73 W hour which hilariously

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is also smaller than last gen I have good news though the m.2 slot is not

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soldered so you can put in any drive you want and neither is the Wi-Fi slot which

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if you've ever used the uh mediatech Wi-Fi chipsets that ship with some am

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laptops you might want to actually replace with an Intel one but it's a whole thing with Intel Wi-Fi and Intel

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laptops AMD Wi-Fi AMD laptop anyway the point is on the g16 you get up to an

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Intel Core Ultra 9 185h which is you want to hold up the g16 for that ready

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it go oh excuse me the g16 which can be

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equipped with up to a core ultr 9 185h which is something apparently a good one

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up to an RTX 4090 all the way down to an RTX 4050 it should be noted the config

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is a little different depending on what kind of GPU you put in it a 4050 or 4070

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is going to get a heat pipe cooler and then the 4080 and 4090 get a vapor

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chamber that increases the system Power by 20 watts giving you up to 125 watts

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to the GPU in manual mode now ASUS wasn't shy about saying look you're not

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going to be getting the most out of a 4090 with 125 watts available to it and

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it will be faster than a 4080 but the

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performance jump will be pretty questionable for gamers for the increase

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in price so then our question was okay well why do you offer that solution at

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all and the answer is that not everyone uses these for games and for

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professional workloads the extra vram and the Kuda cor of the 490 could be

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well worth the increased price of admission it's just down to your

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workload benefiting everyone is the super fast

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7457 megat transfer per second ddr5 memory that has everything to do with

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how close it is to the CPU andus works together on that it's got two SSD slots

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one and uh two and same battery 73 W

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hours 90 hours 90 wat hours o nice coming back to the outside of the

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machines on the right side we've got either a micro SD card reader or SD card

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reader USB type A as well as a USB type c that is connected directly to the

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dedicated GPU through a MX and then on the left side we've got a headphone

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microphone combo Jack another usba USB 4

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on the G14 Thunderbolt 4 on the g16 cuz

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that Intel sauce HDMI 2.1 and ASUS's

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slim powerjack TM now some of you

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including me might be confused as to why ASUS bothered to create a whole new

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power plug I mean the G14 only has a 180

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W power brick and theoretically USBC can deliver up to 240 Watts so why didn't

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they just why didn't you just use that from their own internal testing ASUS

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found that USBC it's pretty good up to around 150 watts but unless you change

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something the pins in here were never designed to handle this kind of power

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and they can only handle a Max current of around 5 amps meaning that to deliver

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240 Watts you've got to run it at 48

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volts and if you increase the voltage of

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your power brake up to 48 volts and then

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step it back down to the 20 volts that most laptop motherboards run on that

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results in 24 watts of waste that is

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just going to heat whenever you're plugged in and you have to add the

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circuitry to deal with 48 volts in both the laptop and the power adapter and the

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whole thing gets rather expensive rather quickly

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hence the ASUS slim powerjack TM do I really have to say the

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TM I think it's funny it runs at the 20

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volts that the main board needs and has large enough pins to throw more current

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into the device making the whole solution cheaper and ASUS claims they

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can deliver up to 330 Watts with 99%

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efficiency and it's reversible similar to how the ratchet on the LTT retro

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screwdriver is reversible LTT Store.com

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of course as interesting as all of that is what we really care about is the

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power of the speaker system it's got six

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speakers total two tweeters plus four Force cancelling woofers and you guys

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are claiming what is this this will be

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the best sounding Windows laptop that is extremely bold considering that other

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manufacturers have made similar claims about their new CES 2024 laptops the

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tweeters are apparently not tuned correctly yet that whoo hi um but we

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still want to give it a quick sniff test with crab Brave to see how we're feeling about these very bold

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claims crank it huh well no I wanted to

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hear it not distorted

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first TBD but I'm not going to a BS yet sound

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pretty good the extension actually pretty impressive yeah did you say

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impressive no I didn't say anything probably the coolest thing

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about it is that for the G14 pricing should be similar to the old model spec

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for spec with availability at the end of February and for the g16 pricing should

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be similar to the old M16 model with availability in late January thanks to

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Seuss again for sponsoring this video and being cool about having realistic

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talking points it's legitimately helpful to get these behind the curtains looks

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at the reasoning behind decisions that on the surface might seem kind of weird

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like it's slower but after you spend some time

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learning about it makes a lot of sense just like it would make sense to

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go check out uh what would be another cool video for them to watch oh the one

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where we recently water cooled in ASUS strick scar 16 that was cool