Asus somehow squeezed an Nvidia RTX 5080 into this tiny 14-inch gaming laptop, and that's a problem

The 2024 version of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 was one of our favorite gaming laptops of last year, with this portable machine striking an ideal balance between sleek, compact design and fast performance. With the latest Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000 graphics and AMD Ryzen AI CPUs, the new Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 2025 edition looks to be every bit as desirable. However, with even more powerful specs and an even higher price, Asus might have taken this latest model too far.

As the best thin and light gaming laptop for gaming that you could buy last year, we wouldn’t have hesitated to recommend the Asus G14 model from 2024. However, the new model’s status as one of the best gaming laptops overall right now will very much depend on the spec you choose.

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Specs

The big upgrade with the 2025 edition of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 is the inclusion of Nvidia’s latest RTX 5000 series GPUs, topped by the laptop version of the RTX 5080. That word “laptop” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here as it’s considerably slower than the desktop graphics card version, but it’s still one of the most powerful laptop GPUs available right now, second only to the RTX 5090.

This move to an RTX 5080 is not just a generational shift but a step up in the class of GPU compared to the options available in the G14 2024. That model topped out at an RTX 4070, rather than an RTX 4080, so you’re getting a significant jump in raw GPU power with this top-spec version that we’re reviewing.

Putting that into numbers, the laptop RTX 5080 has 7,680 CUDA cores for conventional number crunching, 240 Tensor cores for AI workloads, and 60 RT cores for ray tracing. That compares to 4,608 CUDA cores, 144 Tensor cores, and 48 RT cores for the RTX 4070 mobile. Meanwhile, for reference, the desktop RTX 5080 has 10,752 CUDA cores, 336 Tensor cores, and 112 RT cores.

In other words, in theory, this newest iteration of the G14 can be configured with a GPU that’s 67% faster than the old version. However, you do pay for that extra speed, with the RTX 5080 version of this laptop demanding a massive $3,199, compared to just $1,999 for the top-spec option from last year. The RTX 5070 configuration of this machine, meanwhile, costs $2,099.

For further comparison, the Razer Blade 16, which is a larger machine, costs $3,499 for an RTX 5080 version and $2,799 for an RTX 5070 version, so the Asus still offers relatively good value, despite the price increase.

Another change from last year’s model is an upgrade to the CPU. Last year’s systems used an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS, which contains eight cores running at up to 5.2GHz. The new laptops, though, come with either an AMD Ryzen 9 270 (eight cores at 5.2GHz) or a newer AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with 12 cores running at up to 5.1GHz, as used here.

As we’ll see in the Performance section of this review, the combination of this faster CPU and GPU puts a bit of a strain on the cooling system, but it certainly makes for an impressive amount of firepower for a laptop of this size.

Another point of note is that the CPU used here includes a reasonably powerful integrated GPU that can be used for most tasks outside of gaming. You can configure which GPU is used for which apps to tailor performance to your needs, although there is a slightly disruptive switch where the screen can flicker and the touchpad becomes unresponsive as you change between GPUs.

Elsewhere, it’s good to see all configurations come with a plentiful supply of 32GB of LPDDR5X 7,500MT/s RAM. The memory isn’t upgradable, but we don’t expect 32GB to be a limitation for everyday gaming and computing performance for a long time to come, unless you’re into using local large AI models.

Meanwhile, storage comes on either a 1TB or 2TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD, which is upgradable, meaning you can drop one of the best SSD options into this machine for a speed and capacity upgrade. Note, though, that we wouldn’t recommend using an ultra-fast PCIe 5.0 drive here, as these SSDs generally need more cooling capacity than you can get from a compact laptop chassis such as this one.

Features

Outside of its raw internal specs, the Asus G14 2025 has plenty of other features to note, with its keyboard being among the first. It features full per-key RGB backlighting and a generally quality feel, plus it includes four extra shortcut keys at the top. These provide volume and mute control along with a shortcut to Asus’ Armoury Crate software, which is the control center for many of the laptop’s functions.

A slight downside is the rather silly-looking “gamer” font on the keys, which cheapens the look, and it’s not that practical either, with the unfamiliar font not being as easy to read at a glance as a more conventional one. It’s far from a deal breaker, but it’s a needless negative note.

A huge trackpad is also included, and it stretches right to the very limits of the space below the keyboard and above the front edge of the laptop’s body. Its top is made from etched glass for a smooth yet tough surface that feels great under your fingers.

Flanking the keyboard are a pair of perforated panels that form the outlet for the two tweeters of the speaker system. Asus doesn’t give a power rating for the system, but notes it uses two woofer drivers – situated under the front edge – and two tweeters. Crucially, the combination sounds great. For such a small laptop, the amount of depth and volume is very impressive, and the clarity is good too.

Next, we come to the screen. It’s the same gorgeous 14-inch OLED from last year. It has a resolution of 2,880 x 1,800 pixels, which is a little taller than your standard 16:9 aspect ratio gaming monitor. This is useful for making the small screen more usable for tasks such as reading documents or webpages. After all, the pixels here are so small, you’ll have to use Windows scaling to make text readable on the desktop, so your effective desktop working area is only 1,920 x 1,200 or lower (depending on the scaling you choose), meaning you’d quickly run out of vertical space if using a 16:9 aspect ratio.

As well as offering stunning image quality, with dazzling colors and effectively infinite contrast, this panel can also run at a refresh rate of up to 120Hz for decently fast gaming performance. Crucially, it can also dynamically reduce its refresh rate in order to save battery life. With a maximum brightness that I measured at 395cd/m², it’s not breaking any records, but it’s bright enough to ensure I could still use the screen, even in sunny spots.

Design

The Asus Zephyrus G14 is every bit the premium laptop when it comes to both look and feel. Its build is all aluminum and provides a reassuring cold and solid feel, at least until it has been running for a few minutes. This choice of material feels just right in terms of giving off a premium impression – the feel, the look, the rigidity.

That sense of quality extends to the screen’s glass front and sleekly integrated, slim bezels, along with the quality glass-topped touchpad. You also get precision-drilled holes for the speakers and ventilation on the underside.

All this, and the G14 remains slim, at just 18mm, and astonishingly light, at just 3.46lb (1.57kg). For sheer portable power, this laptop is very impressively small and light, although the 6 x 3 x 1-inch power brick means you’ll need more than just a laptop sleeve to get the most from this laptop on the move.

There is one baby elephant and one big elephant in this room, though. The tiny trumpeter is the fact that Asus has adorned the screen/lid with an LED pattern. It’s far from an eyesore – and you may in fact really like the look – but the line of many programmable white LEDs is unnecessary and can flash irritatingly when the laptop is plugged in, unless you turn the lighting off via Armoury Crate. Plus, along with the keyboard font, it’s a needless last gasp of gamer styling on what is otherwise a sleek, business-like machine.

The final and perhaps biggest problem with this laptop’s design, though, is its inability to handle the heat from the components inside it. Asus provides three main performance modes for the laptop via its Armoury Crate software (plus the option to manually adjust settings), letting you run in Silent mode, Performance mode, or Turbo mode. The former severely restricts the peak speed of the components inside, while the Turbo mode cranks them up to their peak, with Performance being the default.

The trouble is, with the RTX 5080 and Ryzen AI 9 370 chip in this laptop, even the performance mode struggles to keep control of both temperature and noise. Even during light desktop duties, the fans are nearly constantly spinning and will ramp up regularly when little spikes of activity require a little more performance. Just loading an ad on a website or watching a YouTube video is enough to ensure the fans seldom shut up.

Meanwhile, when under load, this machine gets roasting hot and irritatingly loud. Running the opening section of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle for a few minutes, I measured the CPU temperature to be hitting 89°C while the GPU temperature was 80.9°C, which may not seem too bad but this is with the fans belting out 50dB of noise (measured from 20cm above the spacebar).

That equally may not seem all that loud compared to other general life noises, but it’s cacophonous compared to a typical gaming PC in 2025. For comparison, the larger Asus ROG Strix Scar 16 that I’ve also got in for review hits 47dB under the same conditions. That’s still not quiet, but the in-person difference is very noticeable. What’s more, opt for the very slightly faster Turbo mode and the noise jumps further to 52dB.

Crucially, not only do you get all this noise, but you feel the heat too. Thanks to its aluminum body, this laptop draws heat from the chips inside to the surface of the machine, which in theory is quite a useful feature for helping cooling. However, the net result is that the whole laptop feels worryingly hot when gaming and annoyingly toasty even when used for far lighter duties.

The whole keyboard area and underside of the laptop gets close to too hot to touch, with the area just above the keyboard registering at 54°C / 129°F under load and as high as 47°C / 117°F with general desktop use (for reference, the ambient temperature during testing was 27°C / 80°F), which are high enough temps to burn you with just a couple of minutes of contact.

In comparison, the Strix Scar 16 gets hot, but its plastic exterior shields you from the worst of the heat, with the keyboard area remaining reasonably cool and the area above it hitting a more reasonable 46°C while under load. That’s despite the exhaust air out the back vents hitting a temperature of 67°C.

I also tested this laptop with a Razer Laptop Cooling Pad to see how much difference it makes if you force a little extra air onto and through the laptop. Unsurprisingly, this laptop’s internal temperatures were greatly improved, with its CPU and GPU dropping from 90°C and 83°C during a Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark run without the cooling pad to 66°C and 74°C with the pad.

This resulted in a slight bump in average frame rate from 61fps (44fps 1% low) to 62fps (45fps 1% low). It also resulted in the exterior of the laptop cooling down noticeably, though not to the point that it isn’t constantly hot to the touch, just less so. Moreover, the cooling pad was blasting out 60dB of extra fan noise.

The big caveat to this experience is that this is all while using the most powerful configuration of this laptop. Drop to an RTX 5070 and it probably copes considerably better. Without testing it, however, this is the experience we’ve had and can report back on.

Performance

I ran the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 2025 through a range of benchmarks and gaming sessions to see how it performs, and despite our concerns over the heat and noise of this machine, there’s no doubt it has the horsepower. I ran tests at three settings on this machine. Firstly, games were run at the native resolution of the screen, to see if gaming at this quite high resolution is feasible. Then, I dropped settings to 1600p (2,560 x 1,600), which is effectively one resolution down from native, then at 1080p, which provides a baseline comparison against both our graphics card reviews and our other laptop reviews.

Along with these base resolutions, I ran tests using DLSS upscaling and frame generation, to see if engaging these technologies allows this laptop to deliver playable frame rates at higher effective resolutions.

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is still a tough challenge for any graphics card, especially when you crank up its ray tracing options. However, thanks to support for all the latest upscaling and frame generation technologies, it makes for a great showcase of how you can tweak settings to get the most from your hardware.

I ran the game at 1800p, 1600p, and 1080p, starting with a quick test at 1800p without ray tracing, then jumping into tests with ray tracing enabled. At 1800p with no ray tracing, this laptop delivered a just-about-playable 39fps average, but engaging ray tracing saw it struggle at all our test resolutions, managing only 44fps average even at 1080p.

However, with the help of DLSS upscaling set to quality mode, this laptop hit a just-about-playable 45fps average at 1600p. Meanwhile, engaging 2x frame gen and DLSS upscaling at 1800p netted us a 68fps average for a reasonably playable experience. Notably, engaging 4x multi-frame gen actually made for a worse experience, as the starting frame rate is low enough that movement feels really odd when the game is generating three whole extra frames with AI.

All told, you can’t quite get away with running Cyberpunk 2077 at maxed out settings on this laptop at its native resolution, but you can crank up most settings and get a still fantastic-looking experience with a smooth enough frame rate. I’d realistically actually play through the game without ray tracing for a really solid high frame rate, but I was also reasonably happy playing with ray tracing at 1800p with DLSS upscaling set to balanced and using 2x frame gen. That’s not bad for an 18mm-thick, 14-inch laptop.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Our next gaming benchmark is Bethesda’s new Indiana Jones adventure, which forces you to use ray tracing at every setting. This makes it a good gauge of how future AAA games are going to perform on current hardware, with more and more titles requiring ray tracing. It also has a very challenging path tracing mode that, for instance, in our RTX 5070 review, we found resulted in that GPU effectively failing to run the game thanks to its limit of 12GB VRAM. Despite these daunting demands, the ROG Zephyrus G14 2025 copes well with this game, thanks in part to this GPU having 16GB of VRAM.

Starting off at the native resolution of the screen with detail settings set to Ultra, this game runs at a just about playable frame rate of 51fps. That’s enough for you to play the game with a controller, as the designers intended, though for playing with a mouse, we’d prefer to get at least above 60fps.

That’s something that can be achieved simply by engaging DLSS upscaling at quality or dropping to 1600p. You can also get an even smoother experience by engaging frame gen, but like with Cyberpunk 2077, the experience isn’t amazing. Single frame gen gets a nice bump in smoothness without affecting the feel of the game too much, but 4x frame gen feels odd, despite the reasonably high base frame rate of 70fps without frame gen and impressively high 156fps average final frame rate with frame gen.

I also tested the path tracing mode and found this laptop fell well short of achieving a playable frame rate even at 1080p, with an average of 28fps. Engaging DLSS Balanced upscaling and 4x frame gen pushed this figure up to 124fps, but again this level of frame gen results in very weird-feeling motion. Moreover, the game looks bad upscaling from such a low resolution. It’s impressive that this size of laptop can even cope with the game in this mode at all, but it’s not one we’d use to actually play it.

F1 24

Despite being superseded by the latest F1 25, F1 24 still makes for a reasonably demanding test of PC graphics, thanks in part to including ray tracing support. I ran the game maxed out on ultra high settings using DLAA for anti-aliasing, and it struggled a little at the full native 1800p resolution, but simply engaging DLSS at quality saw a playable average frame rate of 67fps.

In a racing game such as this one, I’d definitely want a slightly higher frame rate, which can be achieved by engaging frame gen, but I’d recommend running at a higher DLSS upscaling level or lower overall resolution instead, as frame gen doesn’t cope particularly well with the fast motion in racing games.

Cinebench

Cinebench is the gold standard of general-purpose CPU benchmarking, and it provides a great indication of the overall power of this laptop’s AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 CPU. It runs both a single-core and multi-core test, and this laptop impresses in both tests.

In the single-core test, its score of 115 outperforms last year’s G14 by 10% and it comes in just shy of the larger Razer Blade 16 that uses the same CPU. In the multi-core test, we see an even bigger gap compared to last year’s G14 – as you’d expect given its 12 cores compared to eight cores – but it trails well behind the Razer laptop. The extra size and cooling capacity of the Blade 16 seemingly give the CPU much more room to crank up its clock speed and maintain peak performance.

Still, this is broadly a very capable laptop, with performance that is entirely ample for any game and plenty for some serious work too.

Battery

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 2025 battery life is reasonable in some areas but a bit disappointing in others. We started with our two standard battery tests that use the PCMark 10 battery benchmarks. The first test of these is the general office test that simulates having video calls, looking at spreadsheets, and other light tasks. The other test is a gaming test, which is much more challenging as it ramps up the usage of the laptop’s battery-draining GPU.

In that gaming test, we can see from the chart above that it actually performs comparatively well, beating all but the Razer Blade 16 2025, which is a much larger machine with a larger 90Wh battery compared to the Asus’ 73Wh unit (unchanged from last year). The net result is still well under two hours of gaming, so you’re still much better off with a gaming handheld for gaming on the move, but it’s still a better result than many competitors.

However, it’s the office test combined with our experience of using the laptop that’s disappointing. For a thin and light laptop that emphasizes portability, its result of three hours and 42 minutes is not great – it’s less than half the admittedly very impressive Razer Blade 16. This is with the screen set to 50% brightness (200cd/m²) and using the Silent power mode that significantly reduces peak performance. Forcing on the Performance mode, it delivered just 103 minutes of run time.

What’s more, this is actually the better of several runs we tried, with our initial tests netting less than three hours. We even returned the laptop to Asus and had another sent out to double-check our results, and this helped a little due to the latest driver/firmware updates, but not a lot.

Crucially, there is a reprieve for this laptop’s battery life, which is that it does last for a decent while if you’re just playing video. In the PCMark 10 video test, it lasted seven hours and 51 minutes. That’s still short of being able to last a working day or a particularly long-haul flight away from a mains socket, but it shows that this laptop can be a reliable alternative to watching videos on your phone.

Nonetheless, in more general use, our experience leaned more towards the shorter battery tests. Despite all our efforts to rein in its power consumption, this laptop just runs hot and loud, and only lasts a short period away from the mains.

Price

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 2025 price starts at $2,099 for a version with an eight-core AMD CPU and an Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU. That’s actually the version we’d recommend, as the size and cooling performance of this laptop means it struggles with the extra power of the higher-end option I’ve tested. The model reviewed with an RTX 5080 and 12-core AMD CPU is also staggeringly expensive at $3,199, though it is slightly cheaper than the equivalent Razer Blade 14 configured with the same components.

Alternatives

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 2024

Last year’s G14 laptop garnered even more praise from us than this year’s model, at least in part because the configuration we reviewed didn’t run as hot and loud as this new design. Regardless, if you love the look and core features of the new G14 but can’t stretch to a current minimum spend of $2,099.99, the older model is well worth a look. The RTX 4060-equipped version can be had for just $1,559.

Read our full Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 2024 review.

Razer Blade 16

We’re yet to review Razer’s newest 14-inch laptop – though it’s arriving at our test labs this week – so we can’t attest to its performance yet. However, the Razer Blade 16 is a fantastic choice all-round, if you don’t mind a slightly larger laptop. It’s beautifully made and looks incredible while packing serious firepower, better battery life, and better cooling than the G14 (as you’d reasonably expect for a larger laptop). It is more expensive for any given configuration, though.

Read our full Razer Blade 16 review.

Verdict

In some ways, it’s hard to fully judge the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 2025, as the unit we tested seemed to suffer both from perhaps being not yet optimized in terms of drivers and BIOS updates – though the company has had long enough at this point – and because the configuration reviewed is so overpowered and expensive for such a small, portable laptop. As tested, I simply can’t recommend this version of the G14. It runs too hot and loud, and its battery life is disappointing.

Even if you manage to find ways to get this laptop to last a little longer and not run so hot in day-to-day use, it still feels pointlessly powerful for gaming.  You can still get a great gaming experience on a screen this size with lower graphics settings – there are only so many pixels you can see well on a 14-inch screen – and the cooling on this small laptop just can’t cope well with the massive amounts of power being pushed through it. It made sense to top out the G14 last year at the RTX 4070, and it feels like it would’ve been sensible to stop at the RTX 5070 here too.

For more portable gaming ideas, check out our guide to the best laptop games, as well as our guide to the best handheld gaming PC, where we take you through all our recommendations at a range of prices.