Sometimes tech reviewing comes in fits and starts – rather than a steady dripfeed of products, there are set times in the year when it's more like being hit with a fire hose of devices. When Nvidia unveils its new slate of graphics cards, it tends to bring about a deluge of the best gaming laptops you could want to see.
After all, the new cards come in laptop versions, too, which means that every manufacturer out there that makes gaming laptops suddenly has a range of new ones to try out, and I spent much of late April and May testing these, from the likes of Razer, Acer, Medion and more. It was hugely interesting, but at the end of a queue of reviews, there was one clear winner in my mind – the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14.
This is a gaming laptop that could pass for a MacBook Pro at a glance, in the best way possible – it's sleek and slim at 14 inches. That might be smaller than many people would expect from a device in this sector, but I found it had everything it needed, not least a beautiful OLED display.
Plug it into an external monitor, hook it up to power and power up a recently-launched game, and it doesn't take long for the hardware to showcase how potent it is, either. The big feature upgraded for the 50-series Nvidia cards has been frame generation, which adds to your frame rate by inserting AI-generated frames in between the real ones.
On a 14-inch laptop like this, it's a superb option, with image quality downsides that are extremely hard to spot given the display's size. That means it can sometimes feel a bit like a magic trick, giving you extra performance for basically nothing. Don't come for me, hardware deep-divers! It's just how I've felt using the setting.
Meanwhile, being able to use the Zephyrus G14 like a regular laptop also puts it into a smaller category of impressive gaming laptops, with the likes of the Razer Blade lineup. When you're on battery power, that taxing GPU is basically disabled, and the device reverts to being a slim but powerful productivity machine. For this price, you'd hope it could do that, but you'd be surprised how many rivals don't manage it.
So, if you've got a hefty budget and fancy a gaming laptop that can do it all, this is the one I'd buy for myself. Can you get better specs elsewhere for the same money? Yes – but you won't the all-around useability that Asus offers, and that's something I value hugely.
