Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I’m Sorry, Slower is… Better??”.
As Sue sponsored, this video for me to tell you guys that wait that can’t be right, it is the new zephrus G14 is slower than the old one and they sponsored us to say that exactly yes, obviously I’m missing something here. Well, it does make a lot of sense when you start comparing it to the old one. Oh I see, last year’s G14 was available with up to an RTX 4090 mobile GPU, but what Asus has realized is that the vast majority of their customers in this segment? Don’T want to pay a king’s ransom for a 490, preferring the configs with a 4070 or lower and what they and everyone else also didn’t realize was that the RTX 470 mobile can suck back up to 140 Watts, but you get diminishing returns after about 90. So, by locking into a 4070, they were able to make the new model 4 mm, thinner and drop 200 g of mass, which makes a lot of sense.
For years. Brands have been saying that they’ve made the thin and light gaming laptop, but it’s hard to find examples where they stuck the landing on both the size and the design like this, especially with them open. We don’t need that giant vent space under it anymore and there’s a number of factors that contribute to that perceived niess, starting with the CNC m aluminum chassis, even though we’re just looking at the keyboard, trackpad and palm rest cover thing.
Look at that I’ve seen entire laptops with this much Flex. The trackpad is glass, topped not to mention absolutely flipping huge for a gaming laptop man. These look awesome. Oh man.
I wish they left it like this. Here’S the old model for comparison and speaking of the old model. They have killed the fingerprint reader on the new one. They are all in on infrared facial recognition now, which must have been a blow to the engineer who was extremely proud of their triangular fingerprint reader.
But guys I’ve been daily driving facial recognition lately and there’s no comparison. This is so much more convenient and, as someone who does most of my gaming on my desktop at home, rather than on my laptop, I would say the same thing about the reduction in weight here: let’s go ahead and put the old one on here: 1.72 kilos, New one 1.4, 48, oh wow, you guys undersold it it’s even more than they said, but lonus. You might say. I want animations on the back panel of my machine and I want an RTX 49d in my compact gaming laptop.
So my number is higher than my friends: well have no fear they are going to continue selling the old G14 for a bit we’ll have it linked down below. But if you want more performance, the way Asus thinks you should probably go. Is the brand new zephrus g16 we’re going to talk about how much much faster it is in a little bit, but first this is actually my first time touching this. That is a Sleek machine. Both of these new models have OLED panels, a 3K 120 HZ on the G14 and a QHD plus 240 HZ on the g16, which I think you guys will probably know which one I prefer that’s like right in the sweet spot. But even that is not what’s special about these.
Everyone in their dog has OLED laptops these days, but these are the First with variable refresh rate Tech, but why did that take so long? I mean we have variable refresh rate on TVs, monitors and even phones and variable refresh rate has obvious advantages for gamers, like smoother animations and reduced screen tearing well. The reason is that it turns out getting variable refresh rate to work on an OLED laptop is uniquely difficult, see with a normal IPS panel, where the backl is always on on and then you’re just updating the image in front of it. Changing the refresh rate doesn’t affect image brightness, but on a self emissive display that all goes out.
The window you see OLED brightness is determined partially by how bright each pixel is, but also by how often each pixel fires and for how long they don’t just shine. Continuously so if you’ve got a game, that’s running at 100 frames per second and then that drop to 80 FPS and you’re using variable refresh rate. Your screen refreshes go from 100 times a second to 80 times, a second, which means you’re going to end up with 80 % of the brightness.
Then, as your frame rate fluctuates up and down, the image is going to turn into a flickery mess, but then coming back to the TVs and the monitors again, how do they do it? It’S actually really cool. They achieve variable refresh rate by recalculating the brightness of every pixel for every displayed frame – that’s great, but it’s very computationally expensive. So it’s not an ideal solution for a mobile device where you’re going to want your battery life and your power budget going towards driving more gaming performance rather than driving panel overhead and the even bigger problem is that in a lot of cases, these OLED TVs still Have problems with flickering when there are big swings in frame rate, so how do then well instead of recalculating the brightness of each pixel Asus locked the emission rate of the sub pixels at a Bonkers 960 HZ for the g16 and 480 HZ for the G14? That means that, when running at their full refresh rate, that same frame is going to be displayed four times in a row and then, as the frame rate drops well, the pixels just keep on firing at that same blazing fast rate as many times as they need To so they just flash more times, displaying that same frame for longer, but at the same brightness now as part of our investigation into asus’s claims, we looked into well um, how about phones, how are they handling variable, refresh rate and, as it turns out, it’s kind Of a hack I mean it works and it is variable, but only between a handful of refresh rates that have the emission timing pre calculated.
This might also explain valve’s kg answer when I asked them why the steam deck OLED doesn’t have vrr, it’s really hard, which is super cool, but not cheap. So on the g16, if you want to save a buck or you really want a matte display, there’s also a QHD plus 240 HZ IPS panel. However, having a beautiful high refresh rate panel variable refresh rate, all that good stuff is only as good as the frames that are displayed on it. So let’s try them out now. We can’t show you guys any FPS counters, because thanks Intel and AMD Nas, but we are allowed to game on them and nobody told me I can’t guess and, as you guys have probably seen in the past, I’m usually pretty good at it.
So uh. While we got our Forza files validated on the AMD machine, let’s check out wow uh we’re going to have a problem here when I said I’m usually pretty good at this, I meant I can tell the difference between 40 FPS and 50 and 90 when it’s running At what appears to be well in excess of 100 frames per second, it is very, very difficult to tell, and this is cranked with TAA yeah, and this is that native res I mean it must be it’s so sharp holy. Does this ever look? Good HDR is enabled to and Holy balls turning our attention to the AMD side of things: 240 HZ, that’s really smooth, but uh. It’S always 120 HZ.
It’S really clear that there’s a point of diminishing returns here I can tell performance – is a little bit lower, but look at this, it’s not the kind of thing that you would feel in gameplay at all. It’S also not even that. Oh, this one’s running at a higher res too yeah. Oh right, just cuz the panels higher R. It’S not even that loud like you, you can hear it, but like kind of kind of like this machine, it’s not even that much thicker than my framework. Is it a touchcreen, no touchcreen, all right? Well, that’s one thing: 550 n Peak brightness, though dang on an OLED, that’s a lot of brightness. You got that perfect black. To achieve this kind of performance, the G14 is running up to a ryzen 98945 HS. So that’s amd’s new hawkpoint CPUs, which are very similar to their 7,000 series CPUs, but with some AI bolted on. Because I don’t know, rabbits are old news and it’s now the year of the AI uh, it can have up to an RTX 470 and down to an RTX 4050, with a total of 100 watts of system power.
So that’s 35 watts to the CPU 65 watts to the GPU and then 25 watts of dynamic boost to the GPU. So wow, that’s up to 90 Watts on the GPU freaking awesome. The ram is soldered runs it up to 6,400 megatrans per second.
The battery is 73 Wat hours, which hilariously is also smaller than last gen. I have good news, though. The m.2 slot is not soldered, so you can put in any drive you want, and neither is the Wi-Fi slot which, if you’ve ever used the uh mediatech Wi-Fi chipsets that ship with some am laptops.
You might want to actually replace with an Intel one. But it’s a whole thing with Intel, Wi-Fi and Intel laptops AMD Wi-Fi AMD laptops. Anyway. The point is on the g16: you get up to an Intel Core Ultra 9 185h, which is you want to hold up the g16 for that where’ it go. Oh excuse me. The g16, which can be equipped with up to a core ultr 185h, which is something apparently a good one, up to an RTX 4090, all the way down to an RTX 4050. It should be noted. The config is a little different, depending on what kind of GPU you put in it.
A 4050 or 4070 is going to get a heat, pipe cooler and then the 4080 and 4090 get a vapor chamber that increases the system Power by 20 watts. Giving you up to 125 watts to the GPU in manual mode now, Asus, wasn’t shy about saying: look: you’re not going to be getting the most out of a 490 with 125 watts available to it, and it will be faster than a 4080, but the performance jump Will be pretty questionable for gamers for the increase in price? So then our question was okay. Well, why do you offer that solution at all? And the answer is that not everyone uses these for games and for professional workloads. The extra vram and the Kuda cor of the 490 could be well worth the increased price of admission. It’S just down to your workload, benefiting everyone is the super fast 7457 megat transfer per second ddr5 memory. That has everything to do with how close it is to the CPU andus works together on that it’s got two SSD slots, one and uh two and same battery 73, W hours, 90s, 90 wat hours. Oh nice, coming back to the outside of the machines on the right side, we’ve got either a Micro SD card reader or SD card reader, USB type, A as well as a USB type c that is connected directly to the dedicated GPU through a MX and then On the left side, we’ve got a headphone microphone, combo Jack, another usba USB 4 on the G14 Thunderbolt 4 on the g16 cuz that Intel sauce, HDMI 2.1 and asus’s slim power, jack TM. Now some of you, including me, might be confused as to why Asus bothered to create a whole whole new power plug I mean the G14 only has a 180 W power, brick and theoretically, USBC can deliver up to 240 Watts. So why didn’t they just? Why didn’t you just use that from their own internal testing, Asus found that USBC, it’s pretty good up to around 150 watts, but unless you change something the pins in here were never designed to handle this kind of power, and they can only handle a Max current Of around 5 amps, meaning that to 240 W you’ve got to run it at 48 volt and if you increase the voltage of your power brake up to 48 volts and then step it back down to the 20 volts that most laptop motherboards run on that results. In 24, watts of waste that is just going to heat whenever you’re plugged in and you have to add the circuitry to deal with 48 volts in both the laptop and the power adapter and the whole thing gets rather expensive rather quickly.
Hence the Asus slim powerjack TM. Do, I really have to say the TM. I think it’s funny. It runs at the 20 volts that the main board needs and has large enough pins to throw more current into the device making the whole solution cheaper and Asus claims.
They can deliver up to 330 Watts with 99 % efficiency and it’s reversible similar to how the ratchet on the LTT retro screwdriver is reversible. Ltt store.com, of course, as interesting as all of that is what we really care about, is the power of the speaker system. It’S got six speakers total two tweeters plus four Force cancelling woofers, and you guys are claiming what is this. This will be the best sounding Windows laptop.
That is extremely bold. Considering that other manufacturers have made similar claims about their new CES 2024 laptops, the tweeters are apparently not tuned correctly. Yet then wo hi um, but we still want to give it a quick sniff test with crab Brave, to see how we’re feeling about these very bold claims crank it huh.
Well, no, I wanted to hear it not distorted first TBD, but I’m not going to say BS, yet sound, pretty good, the extension actually pretty impressive yeah did you say impressive? No, I didn’t say anything. Probably the coolest thing about it is that, for the G14, pricing should be similar to the old model spec for spec, with availability at the end of February and for the g16 pricing should be similar to the old M16 model, with availability in late January. Thanks to Seuss again for sponsoring this video and being cool about having realistic, talking points, it’s legitimately helpful to get these behind.
The curtains looks at the reasoning behind decisions that, on the surface, might seem kind of weird, like it’s slower, but after you spend some time learning about. It makes a lot of sense just like it would make sense to go check out uh. What would be another cool video for them to watch? Oh, the one where we recently water cooled in isus, strick, scar, 16, that was cool .