If I could only have one laptop for work and gaming, I’d get this one

I’ve loved the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 since it launched in 2020. I bought one for my wife after reading about how awesome it was on a little site called The Verge dot com.

Since then, the G14 has gotten some facelifts, chip bumps, an occasional special edition, a full redesign, and a 16-inch sibling — and it’s remained great. Now, in 2026, Asus has new flagship models making the switch from AMD chips to Intel Panther Lake CPUs. And it now has something I have a soft spot for on any laptop: a full-size SD card slot.

The Zephyrus G14 already had me back in 2020, when it didn’t even have a webcam, but now it feels like a laptop specifically for me: a thin-and-light OLED-equipped gaming laptop that can play anything you throw at it, handle photo and video editing with ease, and last all day performing basic tasks.

But in its pursuit of more power, and thanks to RAMageddon, the G14’s price has risen an ungodly amount. The new Intel-based models start at $3,450, and our review config is $3,600. The value proposition that first defined the Zephyrus line is sadly long gone.

The Zephyrus G14 used to start in the low $1,000 range, with higher-end configs climbing to $2,500 or so. I paid under $1,400 for my open-box G14 with Ryzen 9 5900HS, RTX 3060, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD back in 2021. How the times have changed.

Zephyrus laptops have been getting steady price increases for years, even before the ongoing global memory shortage spurred by AI data centers that’s driving up the cost of RAM and SSDs. But my review unit with the new Intel CPU is $1,000 more than a nearly identical last-gen configuration with an AMD processor. Asus is keeping last year’s AMD models around to maintain cheaper options, but we don’t know if those prices could one day rise like so many others. The new Intel-based G14 comes with a 16-core Intel Core Ultra 9 386H chip, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD. Our $3,599.99 review configuration doubles the RAM to 32GB.

The new G14 should be a little more powerful than the last-gen with a 5080, because it reaches a peak TGP of 130W instead of 120W, but that doesn’t change the fact that you now get less RAM and storage for similar prices to a last-gen G14 or larger G16 with a higher-end GPU.

Aside from these very high prices, there’s no major flaw in the G14. The webcam is grainy in low light, and the SSD is around 12 percent slower than the last-gen, but those are minor issues. The G14 looks and feels mostly the same as the redesigned model that launched in 2024, and it’s a similar size and weight to the 14-inch MacBook Pro. The 2026 G14 also has some small cosmetic refinements, like more LED segments in the animated slash lighting on the lid and circular hole vents in the bottom cover instead of rectangular slots.

Like previous generations, the G14’s keyboard and mechanical trackpad are among the best around. The keys have nice deep travel and are only surpassed in feel by the more tactile ones from the likes of Lenovo’s ThinkPads. The large trackpad doesn’t click in all four corners (like even a $600 MacBook Neo does now), but it’s solid-feeling, with a satisfyingly firm and tactile kachunk. Most people will game with a mouse anyway.

The 2880 x 1800 / 120Hz OLED display is as crisp as ever, and it looks fantastic. It’s brighter than the 2025 model in SDR (500 nits instead of 400) and much brighter at HDR peak brightness (up to 1,100 nits instead of 500). The port selection is still expansive, and it’s been slightly upgraded with Thunderbolt 4 instead of USB4 and the aforementioned full-size SD card slot. Even the speakers are impressive for a laptop of this size. Asus manages to cram six of them into this small chassis, and audio sounds rich and full with even a tiny bit of a left-to-right stereo soundstage. It’s the only Windows laptop I’ve used that I rank closely to the MacBook Pro for sound quality.

The creature comforts are important, but if you spend $3,600 on a laptop it better perform well. I’m pleased to say the G14 does. It feels fast during light and heavy tasks alike. Editing through a few hundred 50-megapixel RAW photos in Adobe Lightroom Classic felt speedy, even on battery power with the fans barely running and not much heat being generated. Culling and rating images in Lightroom was a similar experience to a MacBook Pro, with 100 percent previews loading promptly. The heavier processing is where things sometimes get a little slower, especially once I started making lots of edits and pasting them from one photo to a bunch of others. But it managed to hang in there and keep me flowing through my edit, even when I used it long enough to dip into Energy Saver mode.

Like all Windows laptops, the G14 performs best when plugged in, but its Panther Lake chip has only a small dropoff in multicore and GPU performance when on battery power. This has been a big win for Intel’s new chips, allowing laptops like the G14 to feel just about as speedy while away from a wall outlet. Panther Lake’s other big advantage is its power efficiency, and overall battery life on the G14 is great, especially for a gaming laptop. In our battery rundown test, the new Zephyrus lasted over 17 hours compared to the last-gen AMD model’s 8.5 hours. That’s of course not directly indicative of real-world use, but it shows how much more efficient Intel’s Panther Lake chip can be in mixed browsing and video playback.

In actual use I could get through an entire workday on the G14, managing a little over 10 hours of mixed usage (dozens of Chrome tabs open across two or three desktops, lots of Slack, and a few hours of music streaming). And that was all while the screen was at 80 percent brightness, so it can run longer if you dim it a bit or run Energy Saver all day. If you lean on the discrete graphics you can tank the 73Wh battery much faster. I got about five to six total hours on battery after spending over an hour of it doing my heavy edits in Lightroom. That’s still not bad.

But I bet you know what I’m going to say next. As good as the G14 is for creative work, a much cheaper 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro still outperforms it or comes close in CPU-dependent tasks, with better battery life. And a baseline 14-inch M5 Max model for the same $3,600 will destroy it.

What makes the Zephyrus special compared to a MacBook is that it also plays any game you want. In Battlefield 6, I got 65 to 70fps at native resolution in the High preset without any need for DLSS. Helldivers 2, which doesn’t support DLSS at all, yielded an even higher 80 to 90fps in similar settings. And Marathon was comfortably in the 70fps range at High settings with DLSS set to Quality. The bottom of the G14 gets fairly hot while playing all these games, but thankfully the keyboard deck remains tolerable — just a slight warming of the left palm rest while I work the WASD keys.

This was all while using the Performance profile in Asus’ Armoury Crate, which is the default mode when the G14 is plugged into wall power. Switching to Turbo mode, which overclocks the GPU by 50MHz and increases the G14’s TGP by up to 20W with dynamic boost, can improve performance by as much as 10fps — though the fans get just loud enough to warrant headphones.

The Zephyrus G14’s game performance is of course easily bested by much bigger gaming laptops. Asus’ own Strix Scar 16, which costs $3,300, has a larger 240Hz Mini LED screen, and crushes the G14 with higher frame rates at the same high settings. But you lose all the portability and battery longevity with a behemoth of a laptop like that. The G14 is all about getting a bit of everything in one compact and versatile package.

If you prefer to not put all your eggs in one basket, for the price of our review unit you could easily buy an entry-level M5 14-inch MacBook Pro and a second device for your gaming needs (a PlayStation 5 Pro, Steam Deck, or even a whole other budget gaming laptop) and still have money left over. But if you do want one device for everything, the new Intel G14 is very good. It’s almost everything I’ve wanted in one laptop. It’s just a shame that it costs so much, especially when you consider its direct predecessor with a 12-core AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and the same GPU, RAM, and storage costs nearly $1,000 less. I love the new G14’s marathon battery life and SD card slot, but I don’t $1,000 love them.

This is likely to be the status quo for the foreseeable future: Excellent Windows laptops will come out at prices ranging from high to astronomical. As great as this new Zephyrus G14 is, it’s hard to justify its $1,000 premium over the last-gen AMD version for better battery life, a brighter screen, an SD card slot, and a Thunderbolt 4 port. Even last year’s entry-level model, with an RTX 5060, that you can still get for under $2,000 on sale is great to this day.

You’ve always had to pay more to get more, but Windows laptops these days are getting more and more expensive, just when most people have less and less spending power. The G14 was always an exceptional everyday gaming laptop, but it used to also offer good performance for the money. Now it’s another expensive luxury.

Photogaphy by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge