ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 GA402RK 14" WUXGA 144Hz Gaming Laptop (AMD Ryzen R7-6800HS, AMD RX 6800S Graphics, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Windows 11) Includes LED Matrix Lighting, Eclipse Gray

I bought this Asus G14 after many months of research, I have not been disappointed by its build quality, compact size and design. It's a very well put together machine.I got the option with the anime matrix lighting on the lid, but its likely to spend most of its time facing a wall you could probably save a few hundred and get the non anime version.So far I've played Stray and Death stranding on high quality with no issues, I haven't tested out turbo mode yet as the machine does run hot as can be expected for such a small chassis containing a Ryzen 7 6800 and powerful Radeon GPU. The keys themselves remain at a comfortable temperature and they are a pleasure to type on.The trackpad is very large which some may like, the display is lovely with great colour accuracy and no sign of screen tearing yet.I recommend this laptop if you need a portable gaming machine thats capable of also blending in in study or work environments. It's not cheap but it feels cutting edge and I feel it's worth every penny.

I have used this laptop for about a month and while it does get hot, you have got to appreciate the power you are packing into a 14" chassis. If you are looking at this laptop ensure your use case fits the specs and that you won't just be using it for social media surfing but you will be gaming on it and in a decent environment on a desk or some form of tray on your lap.The performance is great, it's a 1080p high refresh panel and can achieve the frame rates in every game I'd care about hitting it in. It's about on par with my desktop 3070 at 1440p.Battery life if you tweak the settings and run it in silent mode etc and enabling frame rate caps globally iv gotten 8-10 hours of light/medium use out of the device which has been far more than I expected.Cracking device, great price, zero complaints from myself.

The build quality is some of the best I've seen out there , very solid and light at 1.7kg and the laptop design is clean. For gaming I connected this to a external monitor via USB C display port and it churned out excellent graphics and solid frames for gaming on GPU demanding titles like witcher 3, cyberpunk. You have the option to turbo boost the fans which can get very loud so recommend headphones. Laptop screen is bright and the 16:10 ratio makes it pleasant for both productive and gaming use.Unfortunately I had to return the laptop and its failed on a number of productivity and casual uses. Web pages suffered a few seconds delay to load up maybe its the inferior wifi card but i would expect better for the price. Secondly the keyboard is great to type on but the enter button is cut in half and the hash key above it which is very strange , i kept mistyping the enter key for hash and secondly there's no print screen so could not take instant screen grabs.The fans would kick off to maximum when I disconnected the charger then recharged it . I reinstalled win 11 which seemed to deal with the issue but those fans can get very loud if you don't configure it correctly in asus own tweaking software the armory crate. The length of cable from the charger to the large 230W power brick itself is very short and can cause cabling issues if sitting on high desk. The laptop was also installed with bloatware especially mcafee and asus on myasus software. Unless you install win 10 from a recovery drive , have the correct wifi driver then upgrade to win 11, a clean install with still leave you with bloatware to remove.On the subject of gaming, at first strange rainbow colors were appearing on the edge of the screen when I tested the laptop out playing Witcher 3 , and the game kept crashing but i found to not use ray tracing graphics setting to works ie only go up to ultra settings with RT disabled. The temps were reaching about 96C even with the maximum fan speeds applied but the keyboard did not feel hot to touch. What is odd is the heat is expelled towards a glued bottom bezel of the laptop screen which in the long term i think will fall apart.Not a fan of the anime matrix , always switched it off and i think its an unnecessary power draw from more important tasks.As a heavy business user mostly working from home, i needed to logon to citrix workspace to access my workfiles and i was expecting the hardware of the laptop to speed up productive tasks. Unfortunately not asus's fault but citrix workspace is incompatible with amd video cards and there's currently no software fix by either company, my mouse cursor kept vanishing into excel spreadsheets, and pink and green squares would randomly appear. I tried a regedit fix to sort the cursor issue which worked the cursor did not dissapear but my citrix workspace vdi was very stuttery anyway before the fix and not loading basic apps like outlook, excel and microsoft teams quickly which was frustrating prior to business meetings. I also had an issue where the realtek microphone would not work on teams , no one could hear me on calls, very odd the standard microphone array using realtek drivers would not work and i did check the realtek app and checked it was unmuted but still did not work. i did a clean install of win 11 hoping this would fix it but still did not but after installing armory crate on ms teams settings I could see an option to change to asus noise cancelling and then the microphone array worked. All the above virtual desktop issues I have never experienced before using an Nvidia GPU like the triton 500 latop with an RTX 2060 im writing this review from.If you want just a gaming machine to take around with you and also be be used as a portable desktop this is a great choice . but if you want to also be productive and are mostly a casual user then i would stay away from this machine despite its physical advantages and choose something that has a better keyboard layout, with an nvidia graphics card and plenty of io sockets.

I loved the Asus build quality, gaming performance, portability and sound quality. However the battery fell from 5 hours to 2 hours on web browsing use. This is my second bad experience with Asus battery life. Come on.....

Who is this laptop designed for? In my opinion, it's built for people who travel. I travel very frequently due to my work and this laptop has been exactly what I was looking for. I was hesitant at first, with the 14inch screen and a lot of complaints about temperatures but I straight away took to the display size, probably because of the 16:10 aspect ratio. This device shines with its power efficiency. It's not a power hungry beast and it shouldn't be treated as such. Turn the wattage down and see how much performance you can still have. I've played God of War at 1200p original graphics with FSR set to quality mode and 40w limit on the GPU and was easily getting 60fps. That is outstanding. Temps were amazingly low as well - around mid 70s. I only ever use this laptop on manual mode when gaming, and silent mode when not. Silent mode cuts the CPU voltage in half, and brings idle temps down to low 40s. There is absolutely nothing to worry about with this device. 10/10.

A quite system, good enough performance. Though running heavy modded minecraft client (4GB ram) + server (4GB ram) isn't comfortable, or even unplayable.