The Asus ROG Zephyrus laptop line straddles the border between content creation machines and gaming powerhouses. And that's precisely the combo the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025, Intel) (starts at $2,799.99; as tested) provides: a slim, portable laptop with a sleek design, a vivid OLED display, plenty of ports for gaming or design accessories, and enough power to handle modern PC games. In short, you won't find much that the Zephyrus G16 can't handle. The question is, can your budget handle the Zephyrus G16? This is no casual purchase at nearly three grand for the base model, and its battery life is grimly short. We'd opt for the Editors' Choice award-winning Razer Blade 14 (2025) for an even more balanced portable gamer.

Design and Configurations: Same Outside, New Inside

The Zephyrus G16 keeps the stripped-down, CNC-machined aluminum chassis from last year's model, with a light bar cutting diagonally across the cover and streamlined angles around the sides. The older, angular design was more eye-catching, but this slimmer version of the Zephyrus chassis fits more easily into your academic or professional life.

I tested the $2,799.99 starting configuration, which includes an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti discrete GPU, and a built-in Intel AI Boost NPU with 13 TOPS of AI power. This model also comes with 32GB of system memory, a 2TB SSD, and a 16-inch, 2,560-by-1,600-pixel OLED display.

You can upgrade to Asus' other Intel-based G16 configurations for a graphics boost, featuring either an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 or 5090. These beefier GPU configurations also give you a RAM upgrade to 64GB, though the CPU, SSD, and display remain the same as our test unit. Those upgraded GPUs will run you another $800 (RTX 5080) or $1,800 (RTX 5090), though, and the Zephyrus G16's starting price is already steep.

Asus also sells an AMD version of the Zephyrus G16—a much more affordable option starting at $2,099.99, as it provides a more midrange Ryzen AI 7 processor and two GPU options: the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti ($2,499.99). In other words, it’s less expensive but also possibly less powerful, and you can only get it with an IPS display and 32GB of RAM.

Let's get back to the test model. Much like last year’s version of the Zephyrus, the 2025 G16 comes in either Eclipse Gray or a bright Platinum White colorway. Slim bezels surround the 16-inch, 16:10-aspect-ratio OLED display. Add in a 1080p IR webcam, and it’s a luxurious package all around.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

As for ports, our review unit features a full spread. On the left, you'll find a USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4 port with DisplayPort and power delivery, one HDMI 2.1 port, and one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port. The Asus Slim power port and a headphone/microphone jack are also available. Moving over to the right-hand side, the Zephyrus G16 includes one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port with DisplayPort, power delivery, and G-Sync compatibility. A second USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port and one SD card reader round out the right-side offerings.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

In terms of wireless options, the Zephyrus G16 features built-in Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 technology.

Display, Audio, and Inputs: Slim Luxury, All Around

The Zephyrus G16 crams lots of gaming power into a slim design: a powerful RTX 5070 Ti discrete GPU with enough system memory and CPU power to keep up even in demanding games. You won't have to worry about falling behind on raid night.

While the Alienware 16 Area-51 has a brighter display, the Zephyrus's 16-inch, 1600p OLED panel is plenty bright enough to handle most glare and reflections. As you'd expect from an OLED screen, the Zephyrus display delivers impressively high contrast and vivid color saturation, which topped out our testing on the sRGB color gamut and came within just 4% on the Adobe RGB and DCI-P3 color spaces. It’s the kind of high-end luxury panel that helps justify the steep starting price.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Asus spared no expense with the rest of the Zephyrus, either. The laptop’s 1080p IR webcam is certainly enough to handle your average Discord call, and it's also well-suited for Windows Hello secure sign-in. This model's processor also contains a built-in neural processor (NPU), which gives the camera image better background blur effects than most, among other basic AI features. But the Zephyrus’s NPU muscle doesn’t hit Microsoft's Copilot+ threshold for advanced Windows Studio Effects like automatic framing.

The Zephyrus also packs a decent audio punch with a four-speaker, dual-force woofer sound system with Dolby Atmos tuning and Smart Amp technology. You can use the Zephyrus for your next Netflix binge night; the top-firing speakers push impactful volume and crisp audio fidelity. You also get built-in AI noise cancelling to help clear up the volume on your next Zoom call.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Asus' backlit, single-zone RGB chicklet keyboard has nice spacing between the keys, a satisfying amount of key travel, and a bouncy typing feel. The oversized touchpad has a smooth glide and subtle haptics on the click.

Performance Testing: Potent But Prevented From Max Power

Asus provides the ROG Zephyrus G16 in both Intel and AMD variants, though the two aren’t the same class of laptop. The Intel Zephyrus has the more powerful Intel Core Ultra 9 285H processor, while the newer AMD Zephyrus sticks to either the Ryzen AI 7 350 or the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. (Since we haven't yet reviewed this version, we've included the early 2025 model with an RTX 4070 inside.) The Intel version also scales from the RTX 5070 up to the RTX 5090, while the AMD version of the Zephyrus has only the two RTX 5070 variants as GPU options. So, is the Intel Zephyrus powerful enough to justify its higher price?

To see how well the 2025 Intel Zephyrus G16 holds up against an outgoing model, we compared it with the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025, AMD Ryzen AI 9) ($2,299.99 as tested) with an Nvidia RTX 4070. Then we included the HP Omen Transcend 16 (2024) ($3,009.99 as tested) with an Nvidia RTX 4070 and a 14th Gen Intel Raptor Lake Refresh processor for another past-generation look. Meanwhile, to get an idea of how the Zephyrus compares with other laptops in the RTX 50-series generation, we weighed it against the Alienware 16 Area-51 ($3,399.99 as tested) and HP Omen Max 16 ($3,509 as tested).

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput. 

Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution. 

Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025, Intel) was just a bit behind the more powerful Alienware 16 Area-51 and HP Omen Max 16 laptops on all of the productivity benchmarks, except for the PCMark 10 System Drive subtest, in which the Zephyrus overtook the Omen to land solidly in second.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We challenge all systems’ graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds.

Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects.

We turn to Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance in a synthetic environment. This benchmark works with native APIs, subjecting 3D scenes to increasingly intense ray-traced workloads at 1440p.

Our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at the system’s full HD (1080p or 1200p native) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. If the screen is capable of a higher resolution, we rerun the tests at the QHD equivalent of 1440p or 1600p. Each game runs at two sets of graphics settings per resolution for up to four runs total on each game.

We run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Minimum graphics preset—aimed at maximizing frame rates to test display refresh rates—and again at the Extreme preset. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs fully, so we run it on the Ultra graphics preset and again at the all-out Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 represents our DLSS effectiveness (or FSR on AMD systems) test, demonstrating a GPU’s capacity for frame-boosting upscaling technologies. The capacity of these frame-rate boosts changes with the version of frame generation tech available, with DLSS 2 and 3 stitching in one AI-generated frame for every originally rendered frame, and the latest DLSS 4 inserting up to three additional frames. (FSR can generate up to four new frames per original, while XeSS can only stitch in one new frame per original frame.)

On the game benchmarks—particularly DLSS and ray-tracing performance—the Zephyrus G16’s RTX 5070 Ti lagged only a bit behind the Alienware 16 Area-51’s RTX 5080 or the HP Omen Max 16’s RTX 5090. So, while the Zephyrus G16 draws a lot of power out of that RTX 5070 Ti, the Zephyrus chassis is still more thermally constrained than other, bulkier 16-inch gaming laptops. Regardless, the RTX 5070 Ti is a considerable step from the outgoing RTX 4070, which trailed the 5070 Ti by large margins in F1 24 and Cyberpunk.

Battery Life and Display Tests

We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

To gauge display performance, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Battery life isn’t the most crucial feature of a gaming laptop, but the Intel Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 turned in a pretty poor performance nonetheless: a skimpy 4 hours and 51 minutes. Meanwhile, the AMD Ryzen AI 9 version of the Zephyrus G16 got more than 12 hours of battery life on our benchmark. Even the HP Omen Transcend 16 topped the Intel Zephyrus by about 90 minutes of battery life.

The Intel Zephyrus laptop's display lives up to its OLED label, with nearly perfect color coverage across all three gamuts we tested. The panel also shines just above our expected 400 nits for OLED laptop screens, so it crosses a mark there, being the (barely) second brightest display in the running.