as Su sponsored this video for me to tell you guys that hey that can't be
right it is the new zephrus G14 is
slower than the old one and they sponsored us to say that exactly yes
obviously I'm missing something here well it does make a lot of sense when
you start comparing it to the old one
oh I see last year's G14 was available
with up to an RTX 4090 mobile GPU but
what ASUS has realized is that the vast majority of their customers in this
segment don't want to pay a king's ransom for a 490 preferring the configs
with a 4070 or lower and what they and
everyone else also didn't realize was that the RTX 470 mobile can suck back up
to 140 Watts but you get diminishing returns after about 90 so by locking
into a 4070 they were able to make the new model 4 mm thinner and drop 200 g of
mass which makes a lot of
sense for years brands have been saying
that they've made the thin and light gaming laptop but it's hard to find
examples where they stuck the landing on both the size and the design like this
especially with them open we don't need that giant vent space
under it anymore and there's a number of factors that contribute to that
perceived niess starting with the CNC m
aluminum chassis even though we're just looking at the keyboard trackpad and
palm rest cover thing look at that I've
seen entire laptops with this much
Flex the trackpad is glass topped not to
mention absolutely flipping huge for a
gaming laptop man these look awesome oh man I wish they left it like this here's
the old model for comparison and speaking of the old model they have
killed the fingerprint reader on the new one they are all in on infrared facial
recognition now which must have been a blow to the engineer who was extremely
proud of their triangular fingerprint reader but guys I've been daily driving
facial recognition lately and there's no comparison this is so much more
convenient and as someone who does most of my gaming on my desktop at home
rather than on my laptop I would say the same thing about the reduction in weight
here let's go ahead and put the old one on here 1.72 kilos new
one 1.4 eight oh wow you guys undersold
it it's even more than they said but lonus you might say I want animations on
the back panel of my machine and I want an RTX 490 in my compact gaming laptop
so my number is higher than my friends well have no fear they are going to
continue selling the old G14 for a bit we'll have it linked down below but if
you want more performance the way ASUS thinks you should probably go is the
brand new zephrus g16 we're going to talk about how much
faster it is in a little bit but first this is actually my first time touching
this that is a Sleek machine both of
these new models have OLED panels a 3K 120 HZ on the G14 and a QHD plus 240 HZ
on the g16 which I think you guys will probably know which one I prefer that's
like right in the sweet spot but even that is not what's special about these
everyone in their dog has OLED laptops these days but these are the First with
variable refresh rate Tech but why did
that take so long I mean we have variable refresh rate on TVs monitors
and even phones and variable refresh rate has obvious advantages for gamers
like smoother animations and reduced screen tearing well the reason is that
it turns out getting variable refresh rate to work on an OLED laptop is
uniquely difficult see with a normal IPS
panel where the backlight is always on and then you're just updating the image
in front of it changing the refresh rate doesn't affect image brightness but on a
self- emissive display that all goes out the window you see OLED brightness is
determined partially by how bright each
pixel is but also by how often each
pixel fires and for how long they don't
just shine continuously so if you've got
a game that's running at 100 frames per second and then that drop to 80 FPS and
you're using variable refresh rate your screen refreshes go from 100 times a
second to 80 times a second which means
you're going to end up with 80% of the brightness then as your frame rate
fluctuates up and down the image is going to turn into a flickery mess but
then coming back to the TVs and the monitors again how do they do it it's
actually really cool they achieve variable refresh rate by recalculating
the brightness of every pixel for every
displayed frame that's great but it's
very computationally expensive so it's not an ideal solution for a mobile
device where you're going to want your battery life and your power budget going
towards driving more gaming performance rather than driving panel overhead and
the even bigger problem is that in a lot of cases these OLED TVs still have
problems with flickering when there are big swings in frame
rate so how do then well instead of
recalculating the brightness of each pixel ASUS locked the emission rate of
the sub pixels at a Bonkers 960 HZ for
the g16 and 480 HZ for the G14 that
means that when running at their full refresh rate that same frame is going to
be displayed four times in a row and then as the frame rate drops well the
pixels just keep on firing at that same blazing fast r as many times as they
need to so they just flash more times displaying that same frame for longer
but at the same brightness now as part
of our investigation into ASUS's claims we looked into well um how about phones
how are they handling variable refresh rate and as it turns out it's kind of a
hack I mean it works and it is variable
but only between a handful of refresh rates that have the emission timing pre
calculated this might also explain valve's kg answer when I asked them why
the steam deck OLED doesn't have vrr it's really hard which is super cool but
not cheap so on the g16 if you want to save a buck or you really want a matte
display there's also a QHD plus 240 HZ IPS panel however having a beautiful
high refresh rate panel variable refresh rate all that good stuff is only as good
as the frames that are displayed on it so let's try them out now we can't show
you guys any FPS counters because thanks
in tell and AMD ndas but we are allowed
to game on them and nobody told me I can't guess and as you guys have
probably seen in the past I'm usually pretty good at it so uh while we got our
for of files validated on the AMD machine let's check out
wow uh we're going to have a problem here when I said I'm usually pretty good
at this I meant I can tell the difference between 40 FPS and 50 and
90 when it's running at what appears to be well in excess of 100 frames per
second it is very very difficult to tell
and this is cranked with TAA yeah and
this is that native res I mean it must be it's so sharp holy does this ever
look good HDR is enabled two and Holy balls turning our attention to the AMD
side of things 240 HZ that's really smooth but
uh it's always 120 HZ it's really clear
that there's a point of diminishing returns here I can tell performance is a
little bit lower but look at this it's not the kind of
thing that you would feel in gameplay at all it's also not even that oh this
one's running at a higher res too yeah oh right just cuz the panel's higher
it's not even that loud like you you can hear it but like
kind of kind of like this machine it's not even that much thicker than my
framework is it a touchscreen no touchcreen all right well that's one
thing 550 nit Peak brightness though
dang on an OLED that's a lot of brightness you got that perfect black to
achieve this kind of performance the G14 is running up to a ryzen 98945 HS so
that's AMD's new hawkpoint CPUs which are very similar to their 7,000 series
CPUs but with some AI bted on because I
don't know rabbits are old news and it's now the year of the AI uh it can have up
to an RTX 470 and down to an RTX 4050
with a total of 100 watts of system power so that's 35 watts to the CPU 65
watts to the GPU and then 25 watts of dynamic boost to the GPU so wow that's
up to 90 Watts on the GPU freaking awesome the RAM is soldered runs it up
to 6,400 megatrans per second the battery is 73 W hour which hilariously
is also smaller than last gen I have good news though the m.2 slot is not
soldered so you can put in any drive you want and neither is the Wi-Fi slot which
if you've ever used the uh mediatech Wi-Fi chipsets that ship with some am
laptops you might want to actually replace with an Intel one but it's a whole thing with Intel Wi-Fi and Intel
laptops AMD Wi-Fi AMD laptop anyway the point is on the g16 you get up to an
Intel Core Ultra 9 185h which is you want to hold up the g16 for that ready
it go oh excuse me the g16 which can be
equipped with up to a core ultr 9 185h which is something apparently a good one
up to an RTX 4090 all the way down to an RTX 4050 it should be noted the config
is a little different depending on what kind of GPU you put in it a 4050 or 4070
is going to get a heat pipe cooler and then the 4080 and 4090 get a vapor
chamber that increases the system Power by 20 watts giving you up to 125 watts
to the GPU in manual mode now ASUS wasn't shy about saying look you're not
going to be getting the most out of a 4090 with 125 watts available to it and
it will be faster than a 4080 but the
performance jump will be pretty questionable for gamers for the increase
in price so then our question was okay well why do you offer that solution at
all and the answer is that not everyone uses these for games and for
professional workloads the extra vram and the Kuda cor of the 490 could be
well worth the increased price of admission it's just down to your
workload benefiting everyone is the super fast
7457 megat transfer per second ddr5 memory that has everything to do with
how close it is to the CPU andus works together on that it's got two SSD slots
one and uh two and same battery 73 W
hours 90 hours 90 wat hours o nice coming back to the outside of the
machines on the right side we've got either a micro SD card reader or SD card
reader USB type A as well as a USB type c that is connected directly to the
dedicated GPU through a MX and then on the left side we've got a headphone
microphone combo Jack another usba USB 4
on the G14 Thunderbolt 4 on the g16 cuz
that Intel sauce HDMI 2.1 and ASUS's
slim powerjack TM now some of you
including me might be confused as to why ASUS bothered to create a whole new
power plug I mean the G14 only has a 180
W power brick and theoretically USBC can deliver up to 240 Watts so why didn't
they just why didn't you just use that from their own internal testing ASUS
found that USBC it's pretty good up to around 150 watts but unless you change
something the pins in here were never designed to handle this kind of power
and they can only handle a Max current of around 5 amps meaning that to deliver
240 Watts you've got to run it at 48
volts and if you increase the voltage of
your power brake up to 48 volts and then
step it back down to the 20 volts that most laptop motherboards run on that
results in 24 watts of waste that is
just going to heat whenever you're plugged in and you have to add the
circuitry to deal with 48 volts in both the laptop and the power adapter and the
whole thing gets rather expensive rather quickly
hence the ASUS slim powerjack TM do I really have to say the
TM I think it's funny it runs at the 20
volts that the main board needs and has large enough pins to throw more current
into the device making the whole solution cheaper and ASUS claims they
can deliver up to 330 Watts with 99%
efficiency and it's reversible similar to how the ratchet on the LTT retro
screwdriver is reversible LTT Store.com
of course as interesting as all of that is what we really care about is the
power of the speaker system it's got six
speakers total two tweeters plus four Force cancelling woofers and you guys
are claiming what is this this will be
the best sounding Windows laptop that is extremely bold considering that other
manufacturers have made similar claims about their new CES 2024 laptops the
tweeters are apparently not tuned correctly yet that whoo hi um but we
still want to give it a quick sniff test with crab Brave to see how we're feeling about these very bold
claims crank it huh well no I wanted to
hear it not distorted
first TBD but I'm not going to a BS yet sound
pretty good the extension actually pretty impressive yeah did you say
impressive no I didn't say anything probably the coolest thing
about it is that for the G14 pricing should be similar to the old model spec
for spec with availability at the end of February and for the g16 pricing should
be similar to the old M16 model with availability in late January thanks to
Seuss again for sponsoring this video and being cool about having realistic
talking points it's legitimately helpful to get these behind the curtains looks
at the reasoning behind decisions that on the surface might seem kind of weird
like it's slower but after you spend some time
learning about it makes a lot of sense just like it would make sense to
go check out uh what would be another cool video for them to watch oh the one
where we recently water cooled in ASUS strick scar 16 that was cool