ROG Zephyrus G15, the new gaming laptop from ASUS, tries to cater to gaming as well as creative users.
The device sports a magnesium + aluminium design with a catchy Moonlight White colour. It isn’t flashy but stands out without trying too much. The indicator lights for power, battery and processing sit between the keyboard and the display as well as on the backend of the lid, which is useful when your lid is closed. Plus, the dot matrix lid complements the design well.
There are vents for heat dissipation on sides, bottom and near the hinge, and they do a good job. The laptop rarely get heated thanks to six heat pipes. The does not make much noise but does the job.
The notebook is powered by AMD’s Ryzen 9 6900 octa-core chip clocked up to 3.3Ghz with Radeon Grapics alongside GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GPU. The 1TB M.2 SSD model with 16 GB of DDR5 RAM.
handled games quite well, not slowing any signs of slowdown while playing Far Cry 6, though you might see graphics performance take a hit in a game like The Witcher 3, even when the laptop is plugged in. The laptop scored 879 in Geekbench’s single core CPU test and 7203 in the multi-core. Regarding the complete Geekbench test, the score was 95176. The one performance issue I faced was, the notebook often took its time to wake up from sleep. At times, it had to be rebooted entirely, defeating the purpose for setting it to sleep. It happened quite a few times.
The laptop has an interesting hinge mechanism. When it’s opened, the hinge and the base of the laptop are lifted a little. This not only gives a little better space for heat but can also make typing on the keyboard with slightly better feedback when used on a flat surface. The keys are spaced out and quite large but perhaps not the best when it comes to keypress and travel, where it can feel a little too soft, though not by much. The trackpad is also quite large but again not the largest we have seen on a gaming laptop. Given the compact chassis size with the display, it’s a decent combination but certainly not the best.
There’s a Quad HD (2560 x 1440) 15.6-inch display (16:9 aspect ratio) that supports HDR and Dolby Vision. The display has a matte finish and doesn’t get a lot of smudges and fingerprints. It also supports 240Hz refresh rate and adaptive sync (both useful for games, mostly). The display is quite bright and has punchy colours with nice HDR output (Dolby Vision never worked for me). For gaming, the higher refresh rate shines through and colours come out well. The six-speaker setup (two alongside the keyboard and four at the bottom) are quite loud and clear, they may not be bass-heavy but do a good enough job if you aren’t using headphones while playing your games. The backlit chicklet keyboard does a decent job of handling LED changes with the games, though the lighting could be a bit brighter considering the all-white keyboard.
The notebook is equipped with a 90Wh battery that supports fast charging. You get a big 16amp three-pin power adapter in the box. It’s not a very common plug in houses these days, so you might have to see for that. The laptop also supports power delivery via the USB type C ports. It charges from 1% to full in about 90 minutes. For ports, there’s a 3.5mm jack, an HDMI 2.0b port, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports (one on each side), 1x RJ45 LAN port, 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type C wit DisplayPort and power delivery on the left and a microSD card reader on the right.
Wrapping it up, the ROG Zephyrus G15 does provide a pretty package with a lot of performance. It has a nice display, a good battery life, not the best graphics performance but still at par, better thermals than before plus a good combination of I/O connectivity. If you’re in the market for gaming on the go and not necessarily for content creation, this model can be considered, especially if you want the notebook to not be flashy but still sort of stand out.
