ASUS Zephyrus G14 (2021) Assessment: The M1 MacBook Professional killer: Digital Pictures Assessment

The ASUS Zephyrus G14 is a brand new breed of {powerful}, transportable laptop computer made doable by the most recent AMD Ryzen CPUs.

All product images by DL Cade.

Relating to light-weight laptops for creatives, Apple just about cornered the market with the discharge of the M1 MacBook Air and M1 MacBook Professional. The value-to-performance of those laptops is best than something we have seen from Cupertino in a very long time, and the Apple Silicon M1 punches well above its weight given its ‘entry-level’ designation.

However what in case you’re not a Mac fan? What if 16GB of unified reminiscence is not sufficient? And what if you’d like extra graphics energy than the maxed out 8-core GPU variant of the Apple Silicon M1 can ship? Is there a PC on the market that gives all of these items with out sacrificing the portability and effectivity of laptops just like the MacBook Air and MacBook Professional?

There may be, and that PC is the ASUS Zephyrus G14: a small, light-weight ‘gaming laptop computer’ that contains a powerful-but-efficient AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS, 32GB of RAM, a WQHD/2K show with 100% DCI-P3 protection and an NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU with 6GB of VRAM. All of it packed within a 14-inch laptop computer chassis that is solely a tiny bit thicker, and no bigger, than your typical 13-inch MacBook Professional.

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Design, build and usability | Performance benchmarks | Performance takeaways | Conclusion

Key specs:

The 2021 ASUS Zephyrus G14 that we’re testing is the dearer of the 2 most important variants obtainable within the US. Each choices include the identical AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS processor and NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU (60W, 80W increase), however our mannequin is supplied with 32GB of RAM and a WQHD show that claims 100% protection of the DCI-P3 coloration gamut, whereas the extra inexpensive mannequin comes with solely 16GB of RAM and a Full HD show that may solely handle 100% of sRGB.

Word that the RAM within the Full HD model is user-upgradable, however for creatives, we might nonetheless advocate the dearer choice merely due to the color-accurate show. The additional pixels aren’t completely essential at this display screen dimension, however we have discovered that many high-refresh-rate shows utilized in gaming laptops barely under-perform their spec sheet in terms of gamut protection, so it is at all times good to have some cushion above and past 100% sRGB.

If you are going to be doing inventive work, the additional $550 for the top-tier mannequin is well worth the further RAM, decision and coloration accuracy.

Design, construct and usefulness

For photograph and video editors, the ASUS Zephyrus G14’s WQHD show delivers as much as 100% protection of the DCI-P3 coloration gamut.

The Zephyrus G14’s design is gamer-y, however not excessive. There is not any ostentatious RGB accents or glowing logos, and whereas the general form of the laptop computer options a couple of sharp angles, there is not even an RGB backlight on the keyboard – simply a normal white gentle. The chassis is obtainable in a ‘Moonlight White’ or ‘Eclipse Grey’ and, when closed, the one trace that that is an ASUS pc comes from the Republic of Avid gamers (ROG) emblem stamped on a pearlescent steel plate that is embedded within the lid.

Talking of the lid, essentially the most ostentatious and distinctive design component of the ASUS G14 is the so-called ‘AniMe Matrix’ lighting impact that covers somewhat greater than half of the laptop computer’s lid on a diagonal.

The Zephyrus G14’s design is gamer-y, however not excessive.

Made up of mini-LEDs hidden behind a matrix of little dots, the matrix might be personalized in ASUS’ Armoury Crate software program to point out any variety of preset animations, show a static picture, or loop via a customized set of pictures or GIFs that you just add your self. For this evaluate, I clearly could not resist popping the DPR emblem onto the again.

The so-called ‘AniMe Matrix’ on the G14’s lid might be personalized to show a personalized picture or animation.

Sadly, that little little bit of displaying off is about all it is good for. After taking the image above, I turned it off and saved it off to keep away from any further battery drain, and the one function the little dots served from that time onward was the gathering of mud and different particles which can be virtually unattainable to take away as soon as they’ve develop into embedded.

It’s, for my part, the one factor on this laptop computer that’s 100% gimmick and 0% operate, and I sort of want ASUS had left it off. Even the cheaper mannequin, which will not will let you customise the AniMe Matrix, nonetheless comes with these little holes, they’re simply set to show a static ‘holographic’ impact.

Transferring again to the entrance of the pc, each the keyboard and trackpad qualify as good-but-not-great in my guide. The keyboard options somewhat bit extra journey and ‘mush’ than I am used to from most low-profile laptop computer keyboards lately, however your preferences could fluctuate, whereas the trackpad is sufficiently easy and responsive, however somewhat bit undersized.

The Zephyrus G14’s trackpad is easy and responsive, however smaller than most opponents.

Examine this to the large glass-topped trackpads favored by Apple, Microsoft, Dell and Razer, and you may see what I imply. By pushing the keyboard right down to make room for the audio controls, ROG button and energy button/fingerprint reader, the trackpad has been squeezed to simply 2.5 inches tall and 4.5 inches extensive.

It is exact, with a pleasant springboard click on that is usable from about midway down the trackpad, however I want it have been somewhat bit taller.

By way of ports, the Zephyrus G14 comes geared up with an HDMI, two USB Sort-C ports, two USB Sort-A ports, a headphone jack and normal barrel connector for energy. A kind of USB Sort-C ports may also carry a DisplayPort 1.4 sign and cost your gadget in case you go away the included 180W energy brick at dwelling, and each can switch knowledge at USB 3.1 Gen 2 speeds (10Gbps), however neither helps Thunderbolt’s sooner 40Gbps switch fee due to the AMD processor.

The trackpad is exact, with a pleasant springboard click on that is usable from about midway down the trackpad, however I want it have been somewhat bit taller.

By way of ports, the Zephyrus G14 comes geared up with an HDMI, two USB Sort-C ports, two USB Sort-A ports, a headphone jack and normal barrel connector for energy.

Thunderbolt is an Intel creation, and till it totally merges with the CPU-agnostic USB 4.0 normal and AMD releases Ryzen 6000 someday in 2022, you will not discover any AMD Ryzen laptops that additionally characteristic Thunderbolt assist.

All the pieces up to now makes this a great gaming PC however not significantly particular for photograph and video work. That is the place the show is available in.

Following a pattern we have seen from different gaming laptops, ASUS provides the Zephyrus G14 (and the larger G15) with a few completely different show choices. There’s an ultra-fast 144Hz Full HD show that may solely hit 100% sRGB or a barely slower 120Hz WQHD choice that’s ‘Pantone validated’ and claims 100% protection of DCI-P3.

In my testing, it did not fairly dwell as much as that declare, managing solely 95.3% protection of DCI-P3 and 80.0% of AdobeRGB, however it did so at a good Delta E 2000 of lower than 2. Other reviewers have profiled this show at as much as 98% DCI-P3, however to my information, no one has seen it hit the marketed 100%.

In different phrases: the show is correct sufficient for correct photograph and video enhancing on the go, however I’d not depend on it as my solely display screen. When it is time for severe coloration grading, use the USB-C/DisplayPort to attach a bigger, color-accurate 4K monitor, particularly in case you’re planning to print your work.

Lastly, there are two extra issues left to say – one optimistic and one adverse.

The optimistic is battery life, which is superb. AMD’s Zen 3 processors are already very energy environment friendly, and ASUS is taking full benefit of that reality by placing a big 76Wh battery within the G14. For regular writing, analysis, and video consumption in ‘Silent’ mode, I might simply get 8+ hours of use out of this laptop computer. In ‘Efficiency’ mode whereas doing severe photograph or video enhancing on battery, that drops to about 2 hours, however that is to be anticipated given the NVIDIA 3060 GPU is pulling 60W all by itself.

The Zephyrus G14’s QHD show is color-accurate sufficient for correct photograph and video enhancing on the go, however I’d not depend on it as my solely display screen.

The adverse is the whole lack of webcam on this pc. Whereas the Zephyrus G14 does have a built-in microphone array embedded within the prime bezel, it does not have a webcam. None in any respect. Not even the crappy 720p choice that is included in most laptops at present.

With so many photograph and video professionals speaking with their shoppers over Zoom as a lot (if no more) than in-person, this can be a enormous miss. I suppose the thought is that avid gamers who stream will use a nicer digital camera anyway, and those that do not will not care a few webcam, however it’s a obvious omission that has the potential to essentially annoy you day-in and day-out.

Tehre is not any webcam on the ASUS Zephyrus G14 – a irritating omission given the elevated reputation of video conferencing.

Total, I fairly just like the design and construct high quality of the Zephyrus G14. Positive, I are inclined to choose the inflexible CNC-milled aluminum unibody designs favored by corporations like Razer and Apple, however I by no means felt like I used to be coping with a flimsy laptop computer and the design aesthetic is clear sufficient to make use of for each enterprise and enjoyable… assuming you flip off the AniMe Matrix.

For inventive professionals, you may go in figuring out that the I/O is stable, the trackpad is sweet (if somewhat bit small), and the display screen is sufficiently coloration correct as a way to get your work achieved on the go. When you can dwell with out Thunderbolt and a webcam, the G14 checks nearly each different ‘ultra-portable’ field, with out sacrificing efficiency.

Talking of which…

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Efficiency benchmarks

Regardless of its small dimension, the Zephyrus G14 is without doubt one of the quickest photograph and video enhancing laptops in the marketplace.

What actually makes the ASUS Zephyrus G14 particular is simply how {powerful} it’s given its dimension and weight. That is right down to the magic of the AMD Ryzen processor inside, which is constructed on AMD’s Zen 3 structure and virtually sips wattage in comparison with most of Intel’s chips.

For this reason ASUS selected AMD for this 14-inch laptop computer, why Razer selected AMD for their 14-inch Blade, and why we count on to see Ryzen PCs and M1 Macs virtually take over the ‘powerful-but-portable’ class for no less than the following 12 months or two. Intel’s newest Eleventh-geneneration H-series laptop computer CPUs are extra environment friendly than Tenth-gen, however they nonetheless absorb much more wattage to generate these outcomes.

For this spherical of efficiency benchmarks, we examined the M1 Mac mini, an Intel-based 13-inch MacBook Professional, the AMD Ryzen-based Razer Blade 14 and the ASUS Zephyrus G14. Full specs beneath:

Sadly we didn’t have an M1 MacBook Professional readily available to do a side-by-side comparability, however the internals of the M1 Mac mini and the internals of the M1 MacBook Professional are equivalent, so the outcomes needs to be interchangeable. As traditional, we examined Adobe Lightroom Traditional, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Professional, and Seize One 21 utilizing the suite of exams described here.

All exams have been run a minimal of 3 times in a row, with the laptops plugged in, totally charged, and set to their most Turbo/Efficiency settings.

Lightroom Traditional

Import and preview technology in Lightroom Traditional is predicated completely on CPU efficiency, RAM quantity and RAM velocity. Every of those machines has a distinct mixture of those elements, and the ASUS Zephyrus G14 and M1 Mac mini find yourself buying and selling blows on the prime of the import desk due to the stellar efficiency of their respective CPUs and the Mac’s quick unified memory architecture.

Regardless of having an ever-so-slightly extra {powerful} CPU than the ASUS, the Razer Blade 14 falls to final place due to its 16GB RAM limitation, whereas the Intel-based MacBook Professional sits someplace in the midst of the pack.

It is a related story after we strive exporting closely edited 100% JPEGs, however now that there are extra pixels to maneuver round, the ASUS G14 wins each single class.

As decision will increase and file sizes get bigger, the Blade 14 and M1 Mac mini fall manner behind the remainder of the pack, held again by the utmost 16GB of RAM obtainable to them. By the point we get to the 100MP Fuji GFX 100 recordsdata, the ASUS G14 is greater than quarter-hour sooner than each the M1 Mac mini and the Blade 14, however solely about 3 minutes sooner than the two-year-old MacBook Professional.

These outcomes present you simply how RAM dependent Lightroom Traditional exporting actually is. The extra RAM, and the sooner your RAM, the higher your efficiency… even in case you’re working an older processor and no discrete GPU:

Seize One 21

Seize One 21 is an entire completely different animal. As we confirmed in our recent head-to-head comparison between Seize One and Lightroom Traditional, C1 is much less depending on RAM velocity and higher optimized to make the most of {powerful} GPUs via {hardware} acceleration.

At import, CPU efficiency remains to be an important issue, and the ASUS G14, Blade 14, and M1 Mac mini are inside spitting distance of one another, whereas the MacBook Professional and its weaker Tenth-gen Intel processor falls additional and additional behind as file sizes improve.

At export, the Zephyrus G14 makes use of its mixture of a quick CPU, quick GPU, and 32GB of RAM to (as soon as once more) sweep each single class. Not one of the different computer systems might sustain.

The Razer Blade 14 solely fell somewhat bit behind the ASUS, however by the point we get to the biggest recordsdata the M1 Mac mini is greater than 10 minutes slower than the Zephyrus G14, and the Intel-based MacBook Professional was one other 10 minutes slower than that – a full 20 minutes and 45 seconds slower than the ASUS G14.

When you personal an Intel-based 13-inch MacBook Professional (as I do) this isn’t a reasonably graph.

Photoshop

Once we ran the Pugetbench benchmark for Photoshop, the ASUS G14 got here extremely near beating the spectacular general rating put up by the M1 Mac mini, and did handle to beat the Mac in each the GPU and Filter classes.

Nonetheless, this end result requires a little bit of context.

Presumably as a consequence of their ultra-fast unified reminiscence, M1 Macs are in a position to merge panoramas a lot sooner than any PC we have examined (no less than in Photoshop), however the excessive general rating is disproportionately affected by that one issue. It is like an Olympian successful the decathlon by coming in the midst of the pack in 9 occasions, after which pole vaulting twice as excessive as anyone else.

In a lot of the particular person duties that the benchmark performs, the ASUS G14 is as quick or sooner than the Mac, which is mirrored within the excessive Common, GPU, and Filter rating. I solely actually loses the ‘general’ battle due to its decrease PhotoMerge rating.

Premiere Professional

Our ultimate exams contain Adobe Premiere Professional. Not like most different Adobe CC apps, Premiere is effectively optimized to make the most of the NVIDIA GPUs in each the Razer Blade 14 and the ASUS Zephyrus G14 via ‘CUDA’ {hardware} acceleration. It is also in a position to make the most of ‘Metallic’ {hardware} acceleration on the M1 Mac mini.

This reality alone places these three computer systems in a league of their very own, and leaves my poor little Intel-based MacBook Professional trailing manner behind the remainder of the pack in each video encoding job we tried.

The Zephyrus G14 steals the present right here, placing up the quickest instances in all however one class regardless of stiff competitors from each the Razer Blade 14 and M1 Mac mini. Utilizing our Sony a1 test video, the G14 rendered and exported the complete Premier Professional venture 1 to 2 minutes sooner than both the Blade or the Mac mini, and a whopping 18 to twenty minutes sooner than the MacBook Professional.

This end result, greater than any others, reveals the potential of GPU {hardware} acceleration. Correctly carried out, it will probably produce large efficiency good points.

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Takeaways

Usually, that is the a part of the evaluate the place I’d checklist a couple of attention-grabbing takeaways primarily based on the strengths and weaknesses that I seen whereas working our benchmarks. However the ASUS does so effectively throughout the board that I do not actually have a lot to say apart from: wow.

The ASUS Zephyrus G14 is an especially succesful photograph and video enhancing machine – much more succesful than you’ll guess given its small dimension. Thanks largely to the power-efficient AMD CPU, ASUS has created somewhat monster that packs extra punch than every other ‘ultra-portable’ PC laptop computer in the marketplace, together with the equally specced Razer Blade 14 and, presumably, the M1 MacBook Professional (primarily based on our M1 Mac mini outcomes).

ASUS has created somewhat monster that packs extra punch than every other ‘ultra-portable’ PC laptop computer in the marketplace.

From a efficiency standpoint, ASUS principally did not have to chop any corners; because of this, we get a $2,000 14-inch laptop computer that simply outperforms $3,000+ Intel-based PCs from lower than a 12 months in the past and offers the Apple Silicon M1 some sincere to goodness competitors on this dimension and value bracket.

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Conclusion

It is exhausting to seek out fault with the 2021 ASUS Zephyrus G14. It already provides most of what ‘creators’ are hoping to see from the rumored 14-inch MacBook Professional: it is a small, transportable, environment friendly laptop computer that delivers professional-grade efficiency in inventive functions, together with GPU accelerated duties.

All of this for an especially cheap value and with out a number of the Apple-specific downsides that we have gotten used to: the dearth of user-upgradable storage, the dearth of ports, and occasional compatibility points (particularly with ARM-based M1 Macs).

The 2021 ASUS Zephyrus G14 a small, transportable, environment friendly laptop computer that delivers professional-grade efficiency in inventive functions.

The one actual draw back for creatives is the dearth of Thunderbolt assist – a should for some specialised gear – and the pc’s give attention to sure gaming-specific specs and design parts. Personally, I might slightly have a extra power-efficient WQHD show that is restricted to 60Hz or a extra inexpensive Full HD choice that covers 100% DCI-P3, and the ‘AniMe Matrix’ characteristic is nothing greater than a celebration trick that sucks up battery in case you overlook to show it off.

Positive, this little gaming laptop computer cannot match the top-shelf construct high quality and clear design of manufacturers like Apple, Razer, Microsoft, and even Dell – which is principally the one motive I am unable to give the pc a full 5 stars – however in case you’re on the lookout for the last word ultra-portable PC laptop computer with the fewest trade-offs and the very best efficiency, the ASUS Zephyrus G14 is the best way to go.

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