In addition to flagship dual-screen laptops, ASUS also has a very popular 14-inch thin and light gaming laptop ROG Zephyrus G14, which is updated to 2022 not only with AMD’s latest Ryzen 6000 series CPUs, but also introduced for the first time in this product line Radeon RX 6000 series notebook GPUs have become the representative model of AMD Advantage notebooks. Let’s see how it performs!
Specifications and Design
The ROG Zephyrus G14 2022 model tested this time is GA402RJ, which also maintains a 14-inch body, with a thickness of only 19.5 mm and a weight of 1.72 kg.
Although this one is not equipped with the cool AniMe Matrix dot matrix LED display, it uses a colorful reflective film instead, which is equally dazzling under the light. In addition, the number of CNC holes on the top cover has been increased from 6536 to 14969 in the previous generation. The PVD (Physical Vapor Deposition) method is used for the nameplate in the corner, and the color performance is richer, which greatly improves the overall appearance and texture. This time the screen hinge also supports 180° expansion.
The GA402RJ uses AMD’s Ryzen 9 6900HS CPU and Radeon RX 6700S GPU designed for thin, high-performance laptops, which draws up to 100W of power with AMD SmartShift technology and comes with 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM.
This laptop is also equipped with a MUX Switch chip, so that the GPU signal does not need to bypass the internal display, but go straight to the screen, which can further improve performance.
In order to solve the heat generated by the above two high-efficiency components in such a thin and light body, ASUS directly used a large-area vapor chamber (vapor chamber), a heat pipe, and then combined with liquid metal heat conduction and ultra-thin fan blade fan blowing , which can effectively take heat away from the fuselage, and even achieve a silent mode where the fan stops in low-load application scenarios.
The memory is also upgraded to DDR5 with the new processor, but it uses on-borda 8GB with 1 set of slots, and the default configuration is 8+8 GB to form dual channels. The system storage is a Micron 2450 PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD 1TB.
The display is another feature specification that has been greatly improved. This ROG Nebula display has an extended aspect ratio of 16:10, a screen ratio of 91%, a resolution of 2560×1600 and a 120 Hz update rate, a response time as short as 3ms, and color rendering capability. 100% DCI-P3 coverage, Pantone certified, with up to 500 nits brightness and support for Dolby Vision HDR. Variable rate supports Adaptive-Sync and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro.
Effectiveness measurement
From the perspective of various CPU tests, the Ryzen 9 6900HS, which ranks in the ROG Zephyrus G14 2022 thin and light body, can run relatively close to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D desktop processor with the same 8 cores, although it is definitely better than the Ryzen 7 5800X3D desktop processor. ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 Ryzen 9 6900HX slightly weaker.
In terms of games, the average flow rate of AAA games with Full HD 1080p environmental effects fully turned on can be roughly maintained at more than 80 fps, and some of the more demanding games have a minimum rating of 60 fps.
After the resolution is increased to WQHD 1440p, the pressure on the Radeon RX 6700S GPU will be slightly greater, and the picture fluency will be roughly maintained at 50 ~ 60 fps, but the heavy game will drop to regarding 30 ~ 40 fps.
Summarize
Different from high-performance flagship machines, the 2022 ROG Zephyrus G14 (GA402RJ) is a 14-inch thin and light, with CPU performance close to mid-to-high-end desktop PCs, decent GPU performance, and excellent texture. The body design is indeed a rare small-sized, thin and high-performance gaming notebook.
The fly in the ointment is still due to the limited space of the 14-inch body, and no physical RJ-45 network port is provided. And the micro SD card reader is less versatile, and it is relatively practical to change to one more set of USB Type-C.
All in all, the 2022 ROG Zephyrus G14 with AMD Advantage design really brings a very different spec to the gaming laptop market. If you need a laptop with a compact body but enough performance in the near future, the 2022 ROG Zephyrus G14 is indeed worth buying as a reference.