The Asus ROG Zephyrus G15: A Gaming Laptop Review

When it comes to gaming laptops, Asus has always been at the forefront of innovation and performance. The latest addition to their lineup is the ROG Zephyrus G15, a beast of a laptop that promises to deliver top-notch performance and features. In this review, we'll delve into the details of this laptop and explore its strengths and weaknesses.

The first thing that caught my attention was the design of the G15. The laptop's chassis is quite light, weighing in at just 1.9 kilograms, making it one of the most portable gaming laptops on the market. The laptop also boasts a sleek and slim design, with a thickness of only 20 millimeters. This makes it an ideal choice for those who want to take their gaming laptop with them wherever they go. However, the plastic chassis does feel a bit plasticky, and I've noticed that it creaks a little bit depending on how you hold it.

One of the standout features of the G15 is its performance. Powered by the latest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card, paired with the AMD Ryzen 5900H processor, this laptop can handle even the most demanding games at high settings. The dual fan setup ensures that the laptop stays cool under load, and the massive trackpad provides plenty of real estate for navigating your desktop. However, I did notice that there's a bit of screen wobble, which isn't ideal.

The G15 also features a beautiful 15.6-inch Full HD display with an 85 screen-to-body ratio. The bezels are slightly thicker than those on the Dell XPS 15, but the overall footprint of the laptop is still five percent smaller than last year's model. The display itself looks stunning, and the Dolby Atmos tuned speakers provide excellent sound quality.

One of my favorite features of the G15 is its battery life. With a massive 90Wh battery, this laptop can easily go for seven hours on a single charge, even with heavy gaming use. This makes it an ideal choice for those who want to take their gaming laptop with them on long trips or road trips.

The G15 also features a range of connectivity options, including HDMI, full-size Ethernet, USB-A 3.2, and Type-C USB 3.2. The laptop also supports Thunderbolt 4, although I was disappointed to find that there's no Thunderbolt support due to the use of an AMD processor. However, these ports provide plenty of flexibility for connecting peripherals and displays.

In terms of storage and RAM, both options are upgradable, which is a nice bonus. However, the warranty will not cover the replaced parts, so be sure to plan ahead before making any upgrades.

The G15 also features a range of innovative cooling technologies, including the Asus Ergo Lift design. This means that opening the laptop's lid actually lifts the keyboard up, which helps with airflow and cooling. The laptop also supports a range of display options, including 240Hz refresh rates and NVIDIA G-Sync technology.

In terms of price, the ROG Zephyrus G15 is definitely not cheap. With a starting price of around £1,600, it's out of reach for most people. However, if you're willing to spend the money, this laptop promises to deliver top-notch performance and features.

Overall, I'm thoroughly impressed with the Asus ROG Zephyrus G15. The combination of its new hardware, updated display, bigger battery life, and slightly refreshed design make it one of the best gaming laptops on the market. While it's certainly not for everyone, those who are willing to spend the money will be rewarded with incredible performance and features.

But what about the competition? How does the G15 stack up against other high-end gaming laptops? In our next video, we'll be reviewing the RTX 3060 model, which costs around £1,600. While it's not as powerful as the RTX 3080 model, it still promises to deliver excellent performance and features.

If you want to see more from us, be sure to hit that subscribe button and give us a thumbs up if you enjoyed this video. We'll catch you next time on The Tech Chat!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enit's not very often we get new graphics cards new processors and new screen options all at the same time but here we are with the rog zephyrus g15 and it's one of about a million or so new gaming laptops asus have launched for 2021 but i think this may well be my favorite so i've got the all-singing all-dancing top spec model here with a brand new nvidia rtx 3080 that's the 8 gig vram version there's also a 16 gig version of the card although not for the g15 along with an amd ryzen 9 5900 hs 32 gigs of ram one terabyte of fast nvme storage and a 15 inch quad hd 165 hertz screen but as you would expect for this spec it's not exactly cheap it's 2 600 pounds so probably 27 2800 or so but while i can't wait to show you just how fast this is i think i'm actually a little bit more excited about the entry level model which costs 1600 pounds and comes with the new rtx 3060 and also a ryzen 7 5800 h but i think for most people that'll be the perfect combination this flagship really is if you just want the best of the best and crucially if you want to max out this 165 hertz quad hd screen and since the 3080 is the fastest mobile card in the world right now and aside from the unlocked ryzen 9 5900 hx this hs is basically amd's top end mobile chip as well so let's see just how fast this is and for a bit of context i want to bring in this guy this is the 2020 razer blade 15 advanced with an rtx 2080 super so this is the previous flagship graphics card along with an i7 10 87 5h processor so not the exact same laptop i don't have unfortunately the previous g15 but this should be pretty interesting to see just how much faster the new amd chips are and also the new 3000 series of graphics so let's get a couple of benchmarks out of the way first and when it comes to the processor in gig bench 5 the 5900hs in the g15 is a pretty decent 15 to 20 boost over the i7 even though they are both a core 16 thread chips but then let me bring in the cinebench results and just look at that crazy difference in multi-core performance i couldn't quite believe this result myself so i ran the cinebench multi-core several times on both in fact i always run all my tests at least three times then usually take an average but if we go with the top performing score on this versus this it was 80 faster in multi-core which is pretty mind-blowing and kind of anomalous considering we're not seeing that similar gain in geekbench multicore the only thing i can put it down to is because with cinebench it's a 10 minute test rather than geekbench which is like a minute long so we're actually seeing the effects of throttling and i think the g15 has a slightly beefier and more advanced cooling setup than the razer combined with the just general cpu upgrade anyway also it's worth considering that the intel chip is 45 watts and the ryzen is 35 watts but built on the smaller seven nanometer process compared to 14 on the intel so the new amd chips are more efficient and also between 20 and 80 faster that's very impressive from amd although we're yet to see intel's 2021 rocket lake h-series chips although they should be coming out very soon now switching to some graphics tests and the 3080 is 41 faster in opengl and 27 faster in cuda in geekbench 5 versus the 2080 super in 3dmark across the time spy and wildlife tests we're looking at a solid 30 boost on average so the question is are we then going to see a 30 boost in real world gaming performance well from what i've tested so far not quite it seems to be closer to about 23 the boost is fairly consistent among games i tested with the exception of shadow of the tomb raider offering just a 10 improvement it's a bit of a shame we're still not quite hitting 1080p 60 in cyberpunk although this is with maxell settings so if you were to switch to balanced dlss or drop a setting or two then you'll easily get there however another headline of the g15 is that we have this quad hd 15 inch screen with a 165hz refresh it's fast as well with a three millisecond response time it supports adaptive sync and it's surprisingly color accurate as well covering a hundred percent of the dci p3 color gamut and it's pantone calibrated which is handy if you're thinking about using this as an editing workstation as well so i think this is a really good balance between that extra sharpness due to the higher pixel density while still having a smoother high refresh rate because previously if you wanted a sharper screen and maybe one that was also a bit more color accurate then you'd have to go for a 4k panel like we have on the razer which as you guys know just destroys your frame rate and also your battery life but the jump up to 1440p does still impact performance but what's really interesting is if we bring back the razer laptop this time i've also set it to 1440p down from its 4k native res and it shows the g15 gives us a bigger 28 average boost at quality compared to 23 at full hd but we're not quite seeing that same 40 50 even up to 100 improvement we saw on desktop coming from the rtx 2000s to the 3000s which was pretty insane actually that's why everyone in the dog is trying to buy one and still struggling with these new generation of laptops we seem to be looking at around a 25 boost on average depending on the game of course coming from the 2080 super but bear in mind that's only a year old and actually that was sort of seven eight percent faster than the 2080 already so i think if you're gonna come from an rtx 2080 laptop from say 18 months ago or two years ago you're probably going to get a 35 boost on this and actually even better performance if you've got a high resolution screen whether it's quad hd or even 4k a quick side note though and i think nvidia have made things possibly a bit more confusing because they've dropped the max q and also the lesser scene max p model names of laptop gpus now in the geforce experience this just says rtx 3080 laptop gpu which makes sense it's not as fully powered as a desktop version but with max q in the past you kind of knew that was going to go in thin and light laptops but now they're just calling them all laptop variants i think for some people if you just go into a store and you buy a gaming laptop unless you look at the specs and the specific tdps of the graphics card which i'm not sure how many people will be doing you're not really going to know straight away at least whether this 3080 would be faster than this 3080 in a similarly sized laptop but at least between these two they are both 80 watt tgp parts so i guess you could say this is equivalent to what you would have called a max q variant but let's get back to the g15 and as impressive as the performance is it's not really meant for pro esports gamers for that you'd probably want one of their scar or strix laptops with a 300 or 360 hertz refresh option but for people like say well me who's not a pro gamer but i call myself an enthusiast i think this combination of resolution and refresh rate is perfect for me there are also full hd 144 and 165 hertz options for the g15 which i think would be a better bet if you're gonna go with a 360 or 3070 graphics card although i'd actually avoid the basic 144hz option as the response time is much higher at about 25 milliseconds and the color accuracy is pretty poor now just a quick word on temperatures and i measured a peak of 51 degrees celsius by the fans at the top of the chassis which is quite toasty but importantly the keyboard and the trackpad never got uncomfortably warm there's also four different fan speeds depending on how loud you're happy for it to get for me i mostly keep it in turbo mode for the best performance which is quite noisy but with headphones it's not that big of a deal and it does give you a few extra frames and games but whichever spec you go for whether it's the 1700 pound uh 360 option of this all the crazy top spec uh 2600 pound 3080 i've got in here you get this same chassis which i must say i'm a big fan of it weighs just 1.9 kilograms so actually a little bit less than say the dell xps 15. it's a hair under 20 millimeters thick i think given the performance we get of this and also how they've crammed in pretty much every port under the sun including hdmi full size ethernet uh usb a 3.2 type-c usb 3.2 which will also include displayport 1.4 although of course no thunderbolt support because it is an amd machine but you've got pretty much everything you need although this does still charge via the dc connector but it is faster charging than before and it does also support type c power delivery although i wouldn't really recommend that if you're gaming but it does mean you can get away with a smaller power brick if you want although actually the power brick for this g15 is actually pretty small already the overall footprint of the g15 is actually five percent smaller than last year and we're also now getting a 85 screen to body ratio up from 81 thanks to the slightly thinner bezels although sadly we don't get a webcam on here although you can always buy a better quality external one anyway i'm also a really big fan of this moonlight white color the white chassis contrasts nicely with the black bezels which means they're not too distracting when gaming it also comes in eclipse gray but i think the white's a little bit more snazzy looking and we have this dot matrix design on the back with let me count one two three four five six eight thousand two hundred and seventy nine holes we also have this shimmery rainbow color effect all g15s get this although we don't have the option for the fancy matrix led lights on the g4 teams the g15 also has asus ergo lift design so opening it up also lifts the keyboard up which then helps with cooling but it can go all the way back to 180 degrees not that you'd necessarily want to play like this but it does mean you can have basically any viewing angle you want we're also getting a massive trackpad a well-spaced backlit keyboard although it's just white there's no fancy custom rgb lighting here fantastic sounding dolby atmos tuned speakers which flank the sides and also be getting a windows hello fingerprint reader built into the power button i think it's a great looking laptop although the plastic chassis does well feel a little bit plasticky i've also noticed it creaks a little bit depending on how you hold it and if you pick it up and also while the 180 hinge is nice to give you options for viewing angles i've noticed we do get quite a bit of screen wobble which isn't ideal but i'm nitpicking a little bit none of those are really big deals but let's have a look under the hood and inside we've got this dual fan setup we're also getting a bigger battery this time it's 90 watt hours up from 76 on last year's model plus we're getting the faster charging and the smaller power brick and as you can see both the ram and the ssd are upgradable which is a nice bonus although your warranty won't cover the replaced parts now speaking of the battery in my one hour youtube test where we had the laptop in battery saver mode with 50 brightness it used just seven percent of the battery in one hour so with light non-gaming use you can expect around seven hours of use which is very impressive and so that is the rg zephyrus g15 what do you guys think would you be tempted to buy one of these i think the combination of the new hardware the new screens the bigger and longer lasting battery life and the slightly refreshed design i mean overall it's one of the best gaming laptops i've ever used and the performance from that 3080 paired with that 5900 hs is just incredible but for 2600 pounds this is gonna be way out of the price range for most people so as i mentioned at the beginning i'm kind of more excited about how the rtx 3060 model will perform which costs about 1600 pounds or so which i think for a lot of people is well still a lot of money but a bit more affordable thank you so much for watching guys if you want to see more from me then hit that subscribe button and give me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video and i'll catch you next time right here on the tech chatit's not very often we get new graphics cards new processors and new screen options all at the same time but here we are with the rog zephyrus g15 and it's one of about a million or so new gaming laptops asus have launched for 2021 but i think this may well be my favorite so i've got the all-singing all-dancing top spec model here with a brand new nvidia rtx 3080 that's the 8 gig vram version there's also a 16 gig version of the card although not for the g15 along with an amd ryzen 9 5900 hs 32 gigs of ram one terabyte of fast nvme storage and a 15 inch quad hd 165 hertz screen but as you would expect for this spec it's not exactly cheap it's 2 600 pounds so probably 27 2800 or so but while i can't wait to show you just how fast this is i think i'm actually a little bit more excited about the entry level model which costs 1600 pounds and comes with the new rtx 3060 and also a ryzen 7 5800 h but i think for most people that'll be the perfect combination this flagship really is if you just want the best of the best and crucially if you want to max out this 165 hertz quad hd screen and since the 3080 is the fastest mobile card in the world right now and aside from the unlocked ryzen 9 5900 hx this hs is basically amd's top end mobile chip as well so let's see just how fast this is and for a bit of context i want to bring in this guy this is the 2020 razer blade 15 advanced with an rtx 2080 super so this is the previous flagship graphics card along with an i7 10 87 5h processor so not the exact same laptop i don't have unfortunately the previous g15 but this should be pretty interesting to see just how much faster the new amd chips are and also the new 3000 series of graphics so let's get a couple of benchmarks out of the way first and when it comes to the processor in gig bench 5 the 5900hs in the g15 is a pretty decent 15 to 20 boost over the i7 even though they are both a core 16 thread chips but then let me bring in the cinebench results and just look at that crazy difference in multi-core performance i couldn't quite believe this result myself so i ran the cinebench multi-core several times on both in fact i always run all my tests at least three times then usually take an average but if we go with the top performing score on this versus this it was 80 faster in multi-core which is pretty mind-blowing and kind of anomalous considering we're not seeing that similar gain in geekbench multicore the only thing i can put it down to is because with cinebench it's a 10 minute test rather than geekbench which is like a minute long so we're actually seeing the effects of throttling and i think the g15 has a slightly beefier and more advanced cooling setup than the razer combined with the just general cpu upgrade anyway also it's worth considering that the intel chip is 45 watts and the ryzen is 35 watts but built on the smaller seven nanometer process compared to 14 on the intel so the new amd chips are more efficient and also between 20 and 80 faster that's very impressive from amd although we're yet to see intel's 2021 rocket lake h-series chips although they should be coming out very soon now switching to some graphics tests and the 3080 is 41 faster in opengl and 27 faster in cuda in geekbench 5 versus the 2080 super in 3dmark across the time spy and wildlife tests we're looking at a solid 30 boost on average so the question is are we then going to see a 30 boost in real world gaming performance well from what i've tested so far not quite it seems to be closer to about 23 the boost is fairly consistent among games i tested with the exception of shadow of the tomb raider offering just a 10 improvement it's a bit of a shame we're still not quite hitting 1080p 60 in cyberpunk although this is with maxell settings so if you were to switch to balanced dlss or drop a setting or two then you'll easily get there however another headline of the g15 is that we have this quad hd 15 inch screen with a 165hz refresh it's fast as well with a three millisecond response time it supports adaptive sync and it's surprisingly color accurate as well covering a hundred percent of the dci p3 color gamut and it's pantone calibrated which is handy if you're thinking about using this as an editing workstation as well so i think this is a really good balance between that extra sharpness due to the higher pixel density while still having a smoother high refresh rate because previously if you wanted a sharper screen and maybe one that was also a bit more color accurate then you'd have to go for a 4k panel like we have on the razer which as you guys know just destroys your frame rate and also your battery life but the jump up to 1440p does still impact performance but what's really interesting is if we bring back the razer laptop this time i've also set it to 1440p down from its 4k native res and it shows the g15 gives us a bigger 28 average boost at quality compared to 23 at full hd but we're not quite seeing that same 40 50 even up to 100 improvement we saw on desktop coming from the rtx 2000s to the 3000s which was pretty insane actually that's why everyone in the dog is trying to buy one and still struggling with these new generation of laptops we seem to be looking at around a 25 boost on average depending on the game of course coming from the 2080 super but bear in mind that's only a year old and actually that was sort of seven eight percent faster than the 2080 already so i think if you're gonna come from an rtx 2080 laptop from say 18 months ago or two years ago you're probably going to get a 35 boost on this and actually even better performance if you've got a high resolution screen whether it's quad hd or even 4k a quick side note though and i think nvidia have made things possibly a bit more confusing because they've dropped the max q and also the lesser scene max p model names of laptop gpus now in the geforce experience this just says rtx 3080 laptop gpu which makes sense it's not as fully powered as a desktop version but with max q in the past you kind of knew that was going to go in thin and light laptops but now they're just calling them all laptop variants i think for some people if you just go into a store and you buy a gaming laptop unless you look at the specs and the specific tdps of the graphics card which i'm not sure how many people will be doing you're not really going to know straight away at least whether this 3080 would be faster than this 3080 in a similarly sized laptop but at least between these two they are both 80 watt tgp parts so i guess you could say this is equivalent to what you would have called a max q variant but let's get back to the g15 and as impressive as the performance is it's not really meant for pro esports gamers for that you'd probably want one of their scar or strix laptops with a 300 or 360 hertz refresh option but for people like say well me who's not a pro gamer but i call myself an enthusiast i think this combination of resolution and refresh rate is perfect for me there are also full hd 144 and 165 hertz options for the g15 which i think would be a better bet if you're gonna go with a 360 or 3070 graphics card although i'd actually avoid the basic 144hz option as the response time is much higher at about 25 milliseconds and the color accuracy is pretty poor now just a quick word on temperatures and i measured a peak of 51 degrees celsius by the fans at the top of the chassis which is quite toasty but importantly the keyboard and the trackpad never got uncomfortably warm there's also four different fan speeds depending on how loud you're happy for it to get for me i mostly keep it in turbo mode for the best performance which is quite noisy but with headphones it's not that big of a deal and it does give you a few extra frames and games but whichever spec you go for whether it's the 1700 pound uh 360 option of this all the crazy top spec uh 2600 pound 3080 i've got in here you get this same chassis which i must say i'm a big fan of it weighs just 1.9 kilograms so actually a little bit less than say the dell xps 15. it's a hair under 20 millimeters thick i think given the performance we get of this and also how they've crammed in pretty much every port under the sun including hdmi full size ethernet uh usb a 3.2 type-c usb 3.2 which will also include displayport 1.4 although of course no thunderbolt support because it is an amd machine but you've got pretty much everything you need although this does still charge via the dc connector but it is faster charging than before and it does also support type c power delivery although i wouldn't really recommend that if you're gaming but it does mean you can get away with a smaller power brick if you want although actually the power brick for this g15 is actually pretty small already the overall footprint of the g15 is actually five percent smaller than last year and we're also now getting a 85 screen to body ratio up from 81 thanks to the slightly thinner bezels although sadly we don't get a webcam on here although you can always buy a better quality external one anyway i'm also a really big fan of this moonlight white color the white chassis contrasts nicely with the black bezels which means they're not too distracting when gaming it also comes in eclipse gray but i think the white's a little bit more snazzy looking and we have this dot matrix design on the back with let me count one two three four five six eight thousand two hundred and seventy nine holes we also have this shimmery rainbow color effect all g15s get this although we don't have the option for the fancy matrix led lights on the g4 teams the g15 also has asus ergo lift design so opening it up also lifts the keyboard up which then helps with cooling but it can go all the way back to 180 degrees not that you'd necessarily want to play like this but it does mean you can have basically any viewing angle you want we're also getting a massive trackpad a well-spaced backlit keyboard although it's just white there's no fancy custom rgb lighting here fantastic sounding dolby atmos tuned speakers which flank the sides and also be getting a windows hello fingerprint reader built into the power button i think it's a great looking laptop although the plastic chassis does well feel a little bit plasticky i've also noticed it creaks a little bit depending on how you hold it and if you pick it up and also while the 180 hinge is nice to give you options for viewing angles i've noticed we do get quite a bit of screen wobble which isn't ideal but i'm nitpicking a little bit none of those are really big deals but let's have a look under the hood and inside we've got this dual fan setup we're also getting a bigger battery this time it's 90 watt hours up from 76 on last year's model plus we're getting the faster charging and the smaller power brick and as you can see both the ram and the ssd are upgradable which is a nice bonus although your warranty won't cover the replaced parts now speaking of the battery in my one hour youtube test where we had the laptop in battery saver mode with 50 brightness it used just seven percent of the battery in one hour so with light non-gaming use you can expect around seven hours of use which is very impressive and so that is the rg zephyrus g15 what do you guys think would you be tempted to buy one of these i think the combination of the new hardware the new screens the bigger and longer lasting battery life and the slightly refreshed design i mean overall it's one of the best gaming laptops i've ever used and the performance from that 3080 paired with that 5900 hs is just incredible but for 2600 pounds this is gonna be way out of the price range for most people so as i mentioned at the beginning i'm kind of more excited about how the rtx 3060 model will perform which costs about 1600 pounds or so which i think for a lot of people is well still a lot of money but a bit more affordable thank you so much for watching guys if you want to see more from me then hit that subscribe button and give me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video and i'll catch you next time right here on the tech chat\n"