ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 (2024 Edition) Gaming Laptop Review: AMD "Strix Point" Ryzen AI 9 HX 370

TweakTown's Rating: 94%

The Bottom Line

The ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 (2024 Edition) gaming laptop is a well-built work of art that can bring performance when needed and at a reasonable price.

Pros

• + AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370
• + 16" 1600p Dolby Vision panel at 240Hz
• + Dual NVMe
• + USB4
• + Wi-Fi 7

Cons

• - GeForce RTX 4070 limited VRAM (8GB)
• - Soldered LPDDR5X memory

Should you buy it?

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Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

The ROG Zephyrus is a mid-range portfolio offering from the ASUS ROG gaming brand that tows both sides of the market with Intel and AMD-powered systems. More recently, with the launch of Strix Point APUs, AMD has brought Zen 5 architecture to mobile, and with that, ASUS has launched an entire lineup under the G16 branding, and we just so happened to get our hands on a unit for testing!

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Hardware for the 2024 Zephyrus G16 comes in several flavors, all powered by the new AMD Ryzen 9 AI HX 370 APU. This APU has 12 cores and 24 threads in a traditional CPU design. Base and boost clocks come in at 2GHz and 5.1GHz, respectively, while the onboard NPU, which AMD calls their XDNA NPU, offers 50 TOPS of performance. The memory situation for Zephyrus could be better, as this unit does feature soldered LPDDR5X. That said, this allows for higher speed memory of 7500MHz - ASUS sent our unit with 32GB, the maximum available for this lineup.

NVIDIA supplies the graphics for the G16 on both sides of the aisle. Our unit shipped with the GeForce RTX 4070 offering with 8GB of VRAM. It connects to the 16" WQXGA panel with a beautiful 1600p resolution backed by Dolby Vision HDR 100% DCI-P3 certified, so creative professionals will surely enjoy it.

This machine's connectivity is excellent. Two USB3.2 Gen 2 use the Type-A port and two USB-C, one taking advantage of USB4 and the other using USB3.2 Gen 2. And it's worth noting that both USB-C ports support DisplayPort connectivity and Power Delivery. Additionally, we have HDMI 2.1 and an SD card slot that supports the SD Express 7.0 specification.

The pricing of the ROG Zephyrus G16, as configured above, comes in at $2299.

Overview

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The G16 was delivered to our door in its retail form as usual.

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The power adapter is branded ASUS and is a 200W model.

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Unboxing, the Zephyrus is an absolute masterpiece with a modern design on an aluminum chassis.

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The machine's ports include power, HDMI, USB4, and a single USB 3.2 on the left side.

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The right side of the machine gives us the second USB-C, USB-A, and SD card slot.

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The bottom of the unit is nearly fully vented. Rubber feet keep the machine off your desktop.

Keyboard & Trackpad

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Opening up the G16, we have a solid workspace. The keyboard is a chiclet design that offers a centered design. It does offer a midrange tactile click, which is certainly in my wheelhouse. The lighting on this board is a single zone but supports AURA Sync. The trackpad is sizable, again, much to my liking, and it is nearly seamless to the chassis, which I adore even more. It offers a shallow tactile click across the surface, and movement is without issue.

Display

The display on this model is a 16" 2560x1600p panel offering a fantastic 240Hz refresh rate. It is 100% DCI-P3 certified, so it's ready for video production and does support Dolby Vision HDR. The colors on this panel were quite good; it is one of the better panels we have seen. It is not quite OLED, but we were getting close.

Cooling

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When the G16 is opened, the battery occupies the bottom half of the chassis, which is standard for vendors. Above, we have both NVMe slots flanking the M.2 PCIe Wi-Fi slot in the center.

The Zephyrus has quite extensive cooling. It includes three fans, with two more giant fans pushing through a massive copper heatpipe array that ASUS says can offer 0db ambient cooling under appropriate conditions. In the center, we have yet another fan that offers additional cooling directly to the motherboard. Additionally, these fans can push up to 11% more flow than 1st generation Arc Flow offerings in the previous Zephyrus.

Upgradability

Unfortunately, the Zephyrus G16 is not a very friendly machine in terms of upgradability; in fact, nothing apart from the two NVMe slots and perhaps the PCIe-based Wi-Fi card can be upgraded. Consumers must specify their model appropriately when purchasing and possibly consider future-proofing.

ASUS ROG Harpe Gaming Wireless Mouse

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BIOS/UEFI

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The ROG Zephyrus G16's BIOS is similar to that found on ROG motherboards. It has an "easy mode" that gives users access to all the basic options, such as system layout, CPU, GPU, memory, display resolution, USB ports, and storage. In addition to the accessible mode, an advanced mode displays hardware information in more detail. It includes options for Cloud Recovery, System Diagnostics, Armoury Crate, SVM Mode, and Display Mode, as well as settings for EZ-Flash to update the BIOS.

Software

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Performance can be tuned through the Armoury Crate while doubling as a full suite for hardware monitoring.

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The image above shows that the G16 supports slash slighting, which offers customization of the machine's lid.

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Additional options in Armoury Crate include tuning the display through Game Visual; several presets are available.

System & CPU Performance

Cinebench

Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that Intel and AMD have relied on to highlight their newest platforms during unveilings. The benchmark has two tests: a single-core workload that utilizes one thread or 1T and a multi-threaded test that uses all threads or nT of a tested CPU.

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In Cinebench 2024, the G16 landed with a 116 single core score and 1217 nT.

BAPCo CrossMark

CrossMark is an easy-to-run native cross-platform benchmark that uses real-world application models to measure overall system performance and responsiveness. CrossMark supports devices running Windows, iOS, and macOS platforms.

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CrossMark picked up 1829 overall, which puts the machine at the bottom middle of the charts.

AIDA64 Memory

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Memory performance was 89K read, 102K write, and 82K copy. The latency was 114ns.

Geekbench 6 and AI

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Geekbench scored 2836 in single-core workloads and 14766 in multi-core, sticking to the middle of our charts.

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We added in a quick AI run with the ONNX CPU workload. The G16 offered the highest Quantized and the best half-precision scores, coming in at 916 and 5161, respectively.

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Looking at the GPU, we picked up 105K in OpenCL and 112K in Vulkan. We also tested the 890M in the HX 370 and picked up 44K and 45K, respectively.

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DirectML on the RTX 4070 gave us a second AI workload for the G16. The Zephyrus pulled a solid 31K half-precision score and 18K single-precision.

Graphics & System I/O Performance

PCMark

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PCMark Extended landed at 10545, the middle of the pack of all gaming laptops tested.

3DMark

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Surprisingly, the CPU Profile for one and two cores has us near the top of the chart, with the G16 picking up 1173 single-core and 2283 multi-core.

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Increasing the core counts to four, eight, and sixteen, we pick up where we left off with 4255 at four threads and 6599 at eight. We finish with a score of 8292 at sixteen threads.

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Storage landed at the bottom of our charts. The Zephyrus did not come with the best drive from the factory, only pushing 152 MB/s throughput.

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Pushing into gaming benchmarks, Steel Nomad gives us a score of 2554 with the RTX 4070.

Gaming Performance

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In Cyberpunk 2077, the Zephyrus scored a solid 86 FPS with the low preset, 66 FPS at medium settings, and 55 FPS with the high preset. These are all solid and easily playable framerates from the HX 370 + RTX 4070 combo.

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Forza Motorsport is tricky because it uses dynamic rendering. The G16 came in at 104 FPS using the low preset. Performance held quite well moving into the medium setup at 103, losing nearly no FPS. Last, we have high settings, finishing testing at 93 FPS.

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With the low preset, Ashes initially delivered 109 FPS. When we increased it to high, we saw a modest drop to 105 FPS. Upon further rising to the crazy preset, we shook up the RTX 4070 a bit, pulling it down to 71 FPS.

Battery Life

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We did run through the gaming battery life test in PCMark, though we aren't sure how many choose to run games in this configuration. The ROG Zephyrus did quite well, offering nearly 2.5 hours of battery life in the gaming scenario.

Final Thoughts

The Zephyrus G16 is just our second look at an ASUS gaming laptop, both coming from the ROG arm of the company. The Zephyrus is different, offering a modern aesthetic that would make you think it's just a run-of-the-mill productivity machine without knowing the underlying hardware, which is genuinely quite good and capable. The chassis is an aluminum masterpiece with a unique slash lighting lid on a dark metallic colorway that pops on your desk like a work of art. The keyboard has a solid chiclet design, offering single-zone lighting. It provides plenty of feedback for those who need that comfort when typing while not making you fat finger keys when gaming.

The new AMD Zen 5-based Ryzen 9 AI HX 370 offers impressive performance compared to AMD's previous mobile products. Although Intel's Raptor Lake CPUs still perform better in single-thread or single-core workloads due to their higher IPC, the HX 370 excels in multi-core tasks, outperforming the entire Meteor Lake H lineup by a solid margin in many of our workloads, as evidenced by our charts.

In broader system-wide workloads, the HX 370 performs well in both CrossMark and PCMark, with Crossmark placing the G16 in the middle of the pack and PCMark showing the machine to be 100 points faster than the Legion 7i we recently reviewed, one of the better Intel-powered machines.

As for pricing, the Zephyrus G16 is reasonably priced at $2299, though it does appear that ASUS has the entire market on lockdown, with not one other vendor offering an HX 370-powered machine.