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日本Top 5 reasons to BUY or NOT to buy the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 GA401 (2021)
The original premise of the Zephyrus G14 was pretty groundbreaking and the laptop was plenty successful, thanks to clever engineering and design from ASUS. The sequel to this amazing machine brings the same level of quality while updating the hardware to 2021 standard, thanks to AMD Ryzen 5000H-series processors and the RTX Ampere graphics cards.
Today we are presenting you with LaptopMedia’s top 5 picks about the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 GA401 (2021).
ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 GA401 (2021): Full Specs / In-depth Review
4 reasons to BUY the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 GA401 (2021)
1. Design and build quality
The laptop retains the design from last year, which we are satisfied with. The laptop is extremely compact, especially once you consider the hardware that it comes equipped with. It measures at only 1.60 kg in terms of weight and has a profile of 19.9 mm at its thickest point. It is also entirely made out of aluminum and magnesium, which makes it very sturdy and rigid. The lid has an Anime Matrix, which allows it to display a custom image that can be selected through the ROG software. The matrix can also be turned off to save battery life.
Furthermore, the lid opens easily with one hand, which shows off the Ergolift mechanism that ASUS has in many of its devices. It acts as a lever, lifting up the rear end of the notebook, giving the fans wider access to air to breathe. Opening the lid reveals a great set of input devices. The keyboard is on the smaller side and also lacks a NumPad, but offers great key travel and clicky feedback. The touchpad has a large surface area and a matte cover, which is surprisingly smooth and very accurate.
2. Battery life
The 76Wh battery unit is about as much as you can put in a laptop with such a small footprint. Regardless, the laptop gave us great numbers in our battery life test, managing to last for 16 hours and 40 minutes of Web browsing and exactly 10 hours of video playback. Now, we conduct the battery tests with Windows Better performance setting turned on, screen brightness adjusted to 120 nits, and all other programs turned off except for the one we are testing the notebook with.
In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.
For every test like this, we use the same video in HD.
We use F1 2017’s built-in benchmark on loop in order to simulate real-life gaming.
3. Upgradeability
The laptop has adequate upgradeability, with both the RAM and storage being easily accessible. While half of the RAM is soldered onto the motherboard, the rest can be swapped via a single SODIMM slot, with the configuration maxing out at 32GB of 3200MHz DDR4 RAM, running in dual channel mode. In terms of storage, there is a single M.2 PCIe x4 slot.
Here is our detailed teardown video, which shows how to access both the RAM and SSD storage of the laptop.
4. Performance
At the store, we chose a device with the Ryzen 9 5900HS, which absolutely crushed our tests, and although there are more powerful CPUs out there, the fact that ASUS can squeeze that much out of such a small device is astonishing. In terms of graphics, we have the RTX 3060 (80W). Below are benchmark results against competitors and other laptops with the same hardware.
CPU benchmarks
Results are from the Cinebench R23 CPU test (the higher the score, the better)
Results are from our Photoshop benchmark test (the lower the score, the better)
GPU benchmarks
Results are from the 3DMark: Time Spy (Graphics) benchmark (higher the score, the better)
Results are from the 3DMark: Fire Strike (Graphics) benchmark (higher the score, the better)
Results are from the Unigine Superposition benchmark (higher the score, the better)
1 reason NOT to buy the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 GA401 (2021)
1. I/O
The laptop does miss some ports, mainly a MicroSD card reader, which would have been fantastic, as the laptop can definitely be used for professional work. Despite that, there are two USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 1) and two USB Type-C 3.2 (Gen. 2) ports, an HDMI connector, and a 3.5 mm audio jack.
