Just how light can a light gaming laptop get? The Asus Republic of Gamers brand has marked the four-year anniversary of its first ultra-thin Zephyrus G14 by going back to the drawing board, all to shave off bare fractions of the total pounds and centimetres of its lightweight laptop brand. At this rate, the Zephyrus will reach the point that the gaming laptop will weigh so little it could be carried away on a Zephyr.
The last few generations of the Zephyrus didn’t do much to change up ROG’s originally lauded lightweight design except for adding ever-more-capable CPUs and GPUs. That’s still true with the 2024 models. The Zephyrus goes up to an AMD Ryzen 8000 series processor and a GeForce RTX 4070 GPU. The G16 is able to manage an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor 185H and a GeForce RTX 4090, promoting Intel’s chips as the new grand poobah of high-class gaming CPUs.
Despite all that, the big upgrade is the new OLED panels on the G14 and G16. This “Nebula Display” is a 120Hz panel on a 3K resolution display. They’re both VESA Display HDR True Black 500 certified, so expect the same kind of quality colors and deep blacks you get with OLED displays.
Asus boasted that thanks to an all-CNC aluminium chassis, the ROG team managed to reduce the total weight to about 3.3 pounds on the G14 (about .5 pounds less than previous versions) and about 4 pounds with the 16-inch model (0.4 pounds less than last year’s). All closed up, the Zephyrus G14 measures just .62 inches thick, while the G16 is slightly thinner at 0.58 inches. It’s a difference measured in millimetres, and it feels a bit like we’re penny-pinching on pounds. In person, the difference in outer shell weight feels largely negligible.
In the race for ultra-thin laptops, fractions of an inch might not matter as much as overall battery life and heat distribution. The new Zephyrus models contain a 73 Wh and 90 Wh battery for the G14 and G16, respectively. The company stressed that its fan system is up to keep things cool, especially with an extra auxiliary fan that’s supposed to move air over the motherboard and draw heat from the GPU.
Additionally, the G16 models that sport an RTX 4080 or 4090 have their own vapour chamber to support the bigger graphics cards. Older Zephyrus models could still run hot despite all the work Asus has put into its dust filters and heat pipes, so even with new 2nd-gen “Arc Flow Fans,” we shouldn’t expect to run a Zephyrus in a hot room without running into issues.
You’d be forgiven if you didn’t spot the obvious differences at face value. The lid has been updated to include a single LED lighting array down the center, which, to my mind, reminds me of an unfinished “X” logo from what became of Elon Musk’s Twitter, but I’m not here to hold that against Asus.
The keyboard now stretches further to the edge of the shell with larger individual keycaps, and the touchpad has also grown a fair bit. The speakers are also slightly bigger, and Asus claims they are capable of generating 47% more volume than in the past. The newly-announced model range includes a “Platinum White” colourway, which would compliment a more colourful backlit keyboard. If you’re looking for looks, you might also check out the new light HP Omen 14 and its rainbow-backlit keyboard.