ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 2024 Philippines hands-on initial verdict: The 2024 refresh of ASUS’ gaming beast is every bit as powerful and as portable as you’d expect. The simplified lid is a little disappointing but is better overall if you’re looking for a less ostentatious-looking gaming laptop.

Pros

• Slim for such a powerful machine
• Incredible looking display
• Excellent daily driver
• Fantastic speakers

Cons

• Loud fans when you’re gaming
• The laptop RTX 4080 can’t match the desktop version
• Expensive

The ROG Zephyrus series has always been about delivering maximum performance in a package that’s as thin as humanly possible, but it looks like ASUS has outdone itself with the 2024 version of the Zephyrus G16. This 16-inch laptop is deceptively thin and light despite packing an RTX 4080 GPU in it. The ROG Zephyrus G16 (2024) is a monster gaming laptop, but it’s not perfect as you’ll read about later.

 

READ MORE:

• ROG Zephyrus G14 (GA402) 2023 Review Philippines
• ASUS Brings ROG Zephyrus Duo 16, TUF A16 Advantage to the Philippines
• The ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 Has Mini-LED or Dual Spec Display Options

 

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 2024 Philippines: Design and display

If you’ve seen or owned any of ASUS’ previous ROG Zephyrus laptops, you know what to expect from the Zephyrus G16 2024. The chassis is made from a milled block of aluminum, so it’s very strong, and since it’s not cast, it’s very light as well. Our review unit came in a light grey, almost white, colorway, though there is a black variant floating around as well.

One thing that I don’t particularly care about is the replacement of the usual AniME Matrix back panel on previous generations for a more sedate, Slash Lighting. It’s exactly as it sounds – it’s a big slash on the side running diagonally that has LEDs in it that you can control and customize. It’s a little more low-key than the previous AniME Matrix that was on previous-generation machines, but because of the simpler LED layout, there’s less you can do with it. If you want to be completely stealthy, you can turn it off completely.

The chassis is quite big since our review sample is a 16-inch version, which gives you plenty of ports to connect to. There are two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-As for older USB devices, as well as one Type-C port that supports DisplayPort and one Thunderbolt 4 port. Both of these ports can be used to deliver power to the laptop.

The most surprising thing about this laptop is how light it is for its size and its specs. Overall weight is at almost two kilos which granted, is quite hefty for a laptop. But when you consider the hardware that you get with it, that weight becomes more palatable. This was the laptop I decided to bring with me during MWC 2024 as my main content creation machine because of how powerful it was.

ASUS stuffed the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2024) with their ROG Nebula display, essentially a 2.5K (2560 x 1600, WQXGA) 16:10 aspect ratio OLED panel with ridiculously small bezels and an insane refresh rate. You’re looking at a panel that has a refresh rate of 240Hz, which makes it perfect for competitive gaming. The display also comes with Pantone validation, which lends it well to content creation.

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 2024 Philippines: Keyboard, trackpad and speakers

The ROG Zephyrus G16 (2024) is a large laptop, which means there’s enough room in the chassis to put in a full QWERTY keyboard and large glass trackpad, plus two large speakers.

The keyboard is your typical ASUS fare – it has excellent travel, is evenly spaced, and has per-key RGB lighting that can be controlled via the ASUS ROG Armory Crate app that comes with the laptop. There are four additional buttons near the hinge of the laptop that you can use to quickly increase volume, mute the mic, and access Armory Crate.

The trackpad is quite large and sensitive, though it won’t replace a mouse for PC gameplay. To that end, ASUS bundles a wired Strix Impact mouse with every purchase of the laptop. It’s a serviceable mouse as far as wired options go but it’s fairly basic, lacking side buttons and other niceties that gamers have become accustomed to in higher-end mice.

As for the speakers, they’re really good. They put out tremendous volume for something so small, easily filling the room with sound. There’s a sub in the chassis somewhere because of all the bass it’s producing.

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 2024 Philippines: Performance, software and battery life

There are several variants of the ROG Zephyrus G16, with the one lent to us being the best. We’re talking about a 2TB of NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD storage, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H as well as a laptop version of NVIDIA’s RTX 4080 GPU.

Those specs are as high-end as you get, though if we wanted to nitpick we’d have expected an RTX 4090 GPU instead, but as it stands the RTX 4080 is good enough.

We haven’t had that much time to do a deep dive into the performance of this particular laptop yet, but like I mentioned before I used it as my primary content creation device during our MWC coverage. With the laptop plugged in using the larger power brick, it managed to render a 10-minute 15-second video shot in full 4K in 10 minutes and 15 seconds. I swear that’s not me being clever, and additionally, if you rendered that same video in 1080p because of bandwidth limits in the hotel you’re staying at, the job would be done a lot quicker – just 3 minutes and 47 seconds.

In games like Helldivers 2, the laptop was able to deliver performance 70 to 75 FPS in 1440p with graphics set to ultra and the resolution scale set to quality. That’s fairly impressive considering that HD2 is a very graphically intense game on its own and hasn’t been fully optimized yet as it’s a new title. We’ll have more complete numbers for the laptop’s performance once we have more time with it.

There are several power profiles that you can choose from that have their own fan and power limits built-in. Probably my biggest pet peeve with this laptop is that the fans on performance mode are very loud – not an issue if you’re wearing headphones but annoying when you’re not.

The Zephyrus G16 is armed with a 90wHr battery split into a 4-cell configuration. Our particular laptop is power hungry given all the performance parts inside of it, though if you’re off the cord and just on battery the GPU switches to the built-in Intel ARC graphics for lower power consumption.

Off the cord, you’re looking at an hour, maybe an hour and a half max, which is not great, but these kinds of laptops aren’t supposed to be used on battery power anyway, at least for long periods.

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 2024 Philippines: Wrap-up and verdict

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 2024 is a thin and light laptop that has a lot of power under the hood. It’s the perfect content creation device for anyone who wants to churn through 4K footage without any problems, and it’s a fantastic gaming machine in its own right.

ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 2024 Philippines: Price

Like any top-tier gaming laptop, the main issue you’ll have with this is price. Our configuration of the laptop retails for a whopping Php 249,995, though the Core i7, RTX 4070 variant is priced slightly lower at Php 179,995. that’s still considerably expensive for a laptop, and you’ll have to consider your finances if you want to purchase this.