The ROG Zephyrus G14 gaming laptop from Asus is one of my favourite chassis in the gaming laptop game today. I love the look of it, the quality, its size—but most importantly the performance it's able to get out of the components squished inside it. The G14 also tends to fall on the cheaper side of the equation to, say, the latest Razer kit.
Well, I say that, but the 2022 model I reviewed, with an AMD Radeon RX 6800S GPU and 32GB of DDR5 memory, was a little too far on the pricey side for me. It cost around £2,000, or roughly $2,500, though I still can't find a comparable US model—a similar model with 16GB of RAM goes for $2,129. At the end of that review, I lamented that this machine would be absolutely awesome if Asus could just drop that price tag with "a scaled-back GPU" and "just 16GB of RAM."
And hey, that's exactly what we're looking at over at Best Buy right now: an identical Zephyrus G14 2022 model with an RX 6700S GPU and 16GB of DDR5 RAM for $1,500, down from $1,650.
In removing the 32GB of DDR5, I would guess Asus has already slimmed down the price tag considerably on the G14. The omission is okay, though. While 32GB is great if you don't mind the cost, the average PC game won't be at a loss without it. And DDR5 is superbly quick to make up for it, anyways.
The RX 6700S is also a much different GPU to the RX 6800S, with fewer cores running at a slower clock speed, but it's more of a sensible pick here. It still delivers all the benefits of AMD's RDNA 2 architecture, but with a lower power consumption at 80W (though Asus does boost this back to 100W with SmartShift), and will be plenty to push that 120Hz 1600p panel to its maximum in many games.
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6700S (8GB), Radeon Graphics RX 680M
Memory: 16GB DDR5 (8GB soldered, 8GB SO-DIMM)
Storage: 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD
Screen size: 14-inch
Aspect ratio: 16:10
Resolution: 2560 x 1600
Refresh rate: 120Hz
Features: Webcam, AniMe Matrix lighting, backlit keyboard
Connectivity: 3.5mm, HDMI 2.0b, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type C x2, microSD card reader, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A x2, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2
Battery: 76WHrs
That brings us onto what's not changed with this particular G14 model: everything else. The 14-inch screen on this unit is the same gorgeous one as in the model I reviewed, meaning it's vibrant and houses a 16:10 aspect ratio. But importantly, the 1600p resolution is a godsend for high fidelity gaming and doing other tasks on your laptop, such as actually working on it.
There there's the webcam, which makes for a quality improvement over the previous model of G14. The CPU is also the immensely impressive Ryzen 9 6900HS, which is one of AMD's latest numbers and most powerful.
Arguably the battery life isn't immense on this unit, though you may find the lower demands of the RX 6700S in this particular model lasts a little longer than our review unit while gaming.
Otherwise, I think if I had received this cheaper unit, especially at $1,500, it would have won me over. So I hope you'd be happy with this laptop if you followed my advice here and went for it at this cheaper price.
