I've seen many gaming laptops at CES 2024: budget-friendly Gigabytes, Cyberpower ones with liquid cooling loops, Meteor Lake-powered MSIs, and Razer Blade laptops that'll blow your socks off. Yet my pick of the bunch has to be the redesigned Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 2024.
Over the past few years the Zephyrus' specs have changed but everything else has (mostly) stayed the same. I still rate the older G14 2023 model as one of the best gaming laptops around, but I'm happy to see Asus has gone back to the drawing board for a new G14 in 2024.
The newer model features less plastic, more metal, and I'm told the new speakers located on either side of the keyboard can actually deliver decent audio. Admittedly I couldn't test that last bit inside the loud Asus booth, though the company claims the laptop is 252% louder than the last and can actually deliver decent bass response (within reason).
I can attest to how lovely to look at this new G14 is. First off, the AniMe Matrix lighting on the rear of every G14 for years now is gone, replaced by new slash lighting. It feels more grown up than the Matrix lighting, though maybe that's just because there's less of it.
The biggest improvement on the 2024 G14 is the use of an aluminium chassis with greater coverage of the entire device. This makes for a more rigid body that has less flex and feels better in-hand.
The eagle-eyed will also notice the touchpad is almost edge to edge now, starting immediately beneath the space bar with no top bezel.
There's only one model available today: the GA403UI. I'm sure more will show up in short time, though this model strikes a good balance. It comes with an RTX 4070 and Ryzen 9 8945HS, which is pretty much exactly what I'd ask for in a gaming laptop in 2024. There's really no need to stuff an RTX 4090 into something of this size.
One change over the previous years' model is the screen. Asus is using an OLED ROG Nebula Display here, which offers a resolution of 2880 x 1800. That's a 16:10 aspect ratio and makes for a much larger feeling screen than most 16:9. Rated to 120Hz and with a 0.2ms response time (thanks, OLED), this should be a pretty great gaming experience. Though you're not always going to hit that sort of refresh rate if you're planning to run everything at Ultra or want to crank ray tracing all the way up. At least DLSS 3 and frame gen can help with that.
Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines.
Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.
Rounding off the entire package you have 32GB of LPDDR5X, 1TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage, and heaps of connectivity options. The number of ports on the G14 is one of the reasons I've been a fan of these laptops for a while, and I'm happy to see Asus stick with that mentality here.
The battery is the same size as the last at 76WHrs, though overall this laptop weighs in at 1.5 Kg, 12% lighter than the 2023 model.
I had a chance to pick and move this laptop about a bit, but ultimately I didn't get to properly play around with it. Here's hoping it performs as good as it looks. You should be able to pick one up off the shelf next month, though there's no word on pricing. I'm not expecting this model to be the affordable hero the G14 used to be, but ideally it'd at least be a lot more affordable than a comparative Razer Blade.
