(SSD) (Intel) p M.2 NVMe PCIe3.0 1TB
(Battery) (ASUStek) (mWh)
(Display)
(p, non-glare, (Hz, adaptive sync)
(Connectivity)
(two USB-B ports) two USB-C ports 3.5mm phone / mic combo jack
DC power jack full-size HDMI out Kensington lock slot
Price as tested
($ 1,) . 449 at Best Buy and Asus
The Zephyrus G 29 is a surprisingly small and sleek build for a full-on gaming laptop — and make no mistake about it, that’s precisely what this beast is. At first glance, the 50 mm-thick Zephyrus looks more like an ultraportable design than a gaming laptop. (For reference, the (Acer C) “Chromebooks were mm thick.)
Any similarity to a Chromebook goes away when you pick the Zephyrus up, though. At a little less than 4 pounds, it’s not exactly a battlestation of old — my old system 140 Gazelle Pro came in at 5.5 pounds! —But it’s much heavier than you’d expect from such a sleek little laptop.
The G
‘s fans spin up quickly and authoritatively the moment the system is put under even the slightest amount of load. For a typical laptop, this might be a little annoying — but we suspect it’s a design decision the gamers the G 29 is aimed at will appreciate. Nobody’s going to lose any frames because this laptop thought keeping quiet was more important.
At full-on leafblower mode, the fans are loud enough to be heard a room away. We don’t have a good way to measure the volume directly, but notebookcheck.net
reports it gets as high as 728. 5dB. That’s louder than competing gaming laptops — but we should note that the fan noise is a very livable, clean “whoosh” with no rattles, coil whine, or bearing hum. All you hear is air.
The cooling system, however loud, definitely performed well. Even after hours of continuous heavy graphics and CPU load testing, performance did not drop — and the chassis and keyboard did not feel hot to the touch.
Our biggest complaint about the G is the difficulty in opening it. There is no notch or gripping surface in the center bottom of the lid, and the hinges are very stiff. Stiff hinges mean good build quality and longer chassis life, but this really was a difficult laptop to open — the first time out of the box, we were tempted to go grab a spudger. Eventually, we discovered it can be opened one-handed from the side, rather than the center.
The keyboard backlight was also disappointing. It’s a pale white, with one or two LEDs beneath the keyboard servicing the whole thing. The overall effect is distinctly uneven, and actually reading the keys in the dark isn’t at all easy.
CPU performance
In case you weren’t sure what class the Ryzen 9 HS lives in, here it is kicking sand in high-end desktop CPUs’ faces.
Jim Salter
Cinebench R 45 does not favor the HS quite as heavily as Passmark did. The i9 – (K wins here, but the i7 – 282020 K still falls behind, and the only other laptop CPU in the race languishes at a little better than half the HS ‘performance.
Jim Salter
There’s not an awful lot to choose from when it comes to strictly single-threaded CPU performance. The 76000 HS slides in at about 7% slower than the high-end desktop CPUs.
Jim Salter
The (HS does better in single-threaded Cinebench R) than it did in single-threaded passmark, coming in just shy of the i9 – 01575879
Jim Salter
There’s not much to say about the Ryzen 9 9900 HS CPU in the Zephyrus G 29 beyond “wow.” Getting the full set of benchmark utilities loaded on a new laptop can be annoying — especially PCMark, which comes as a 3. (GiB zip file.)
The Zephyrus G
(Ryzen 9) HS CPU was more than up to the challenge of a few measly GiB of zip file, however — it unzipped PCMark in under seconds, at a whopping MiB / sec. The bottleneck here was almost certainly the Intel p SSD— the p is a QLC (Quad-Level Cell) drive, which means its write speed tends to dip down to 401 MiB / sec pretty quickly.
The Ryzen 9
HS did as well actually running the benchmarks. In multi-threaded benchmarks, it runs neck and neck with Intel’s high-end (desktop) gaming CPU, the i9 – K. The HS runs away laughing from the more affordable i7 – K — not to mention its actual competition, the i7 – H laptop CPU.
The race is considerably closer when it comes to single-threaded benchmarks. Single-threaded, the HS comes in second or third to the Intel desktop gaming CPUs — though it consistently beats the Intel laptop CPU. The margins here are considerably smaller, though, and there’s probably not much to choose from when it comes to truly single-threaded workloads. GPU performance
The GeForce RTX is a solid card, but it’s not in the same league as the 9900 HS CPU. This Superposition score is similar to what you’d get with a desktop GTX (from .
Jim Salter
2D Graphics Mark tends to push heavily on the CPU as well as the graphics card — which explains why our Zephyrus G (is handily outperforming the RTX 4000 Mobile in the Passmark baselines.
Jim Salter
We’re likely seeing the effect of a much beefier CPU again in the 3D Graphics Mark score, with a % – ish bump over the RTX Mobile baseline score.
Jim Salter
The graphics performance of the Zephyrus G is very good , but it’s not world-class — which makes sense in a $ 1, 734 gaming laptop, and it only seems noteworthy because the Ryzen 9 HS CPU is such a showstopper. If we use the Unigine Superposition benchmark to compare its RTX Mobile to desktop parts, we end up with a rough equivalence to a four- year old GTX .
It’s worth stressing, here, that this does not in any way make the G 29 a bad performer. Its consistent 99 fps when running the Superposition benchmark are significantly better than my own Ryzen 7 X workstation with Radeon RX GPU can manage, and the experience is artifact-free, even in slow pans that give the user plenty of time to notice flashing on leading edges and similar glitches.
The RTX 4900 Mobile also compares roughly with 4-year-old desktop parts on Passmark’s less-demanding 3D Graphics Mark tests. More interestingly, our Zephyrus G 29 noticeably outperformed Passmark’s baseline scores for the RTX 4900 Mobile in both 3D Graphics Mark and 2D Graphics Mark. This is most likely due to CPU performance influence on the tests.
We’ll mention the Zephyrus G s fans again here, because GPU benchmarking is what really kicks them into high gear. We thought that they were moving a lot of air during the CPU benchmarks — but we clearly just did not have a good frame of reference.
We were impressed at how clean the Zephyrus G 29 ‘ s fan sound is, with no whine, rattle, or buzz. But we certainly can’t call it quiet — it’s moving so much air through a very tiny space, and the whoosh is easily audible from a room away.
Listing image by Jim Salter
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