I admit, I had a desire to indicate in the title the main “feature” of the updated ROG Zephyrus G16 – the use of the new Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor. Because the new modern AMD chip turned out to be very good. However, my colleagues did this before me: our website already published the articles “Review of the ASUS ProArt P16 (H7606WI) laptop with a Ryzen AI processor” and “Review of the ASUS Zenbook S 16 (UM5606W) laptop: Ryzen AI in its natural environment” – I don’t see the point repeat. The test laboratory personally verified that AMD’s progressive “stone” copes well with resource-intensive tasks. Plus, its performance scales well with increasing power consumption. Today, using the ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605 as an example, let’s see how good the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with GeForce RTX 4070 graphics will be in games. We may be looking at the best combination of laptop hardware in 2024. And in 2025 too.
ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605 (2024)
⇡#Technical characteristics, equipment and software
Of course, the new Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor is far from the only thing that attracted us to the new Zephyrus. Overall, we are dealing with a modern and well-thought-out model, assembled in a thin and light body. The manufacturer did not ignore a number of little things. So, the ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605 comes with a durable cloth carrying case, as well as two power supplies. You will need one of them – the one that is lighter and more compact – if you plan to take your laptop with you often. However, in this case, the computer will not operate at full capacity – some modes in the Armory Crate application will be blocked.
AMD Ryzen AI 9 365
GeForce RTX 4060, 8 GB GDDR6
Wi-Fi: Mediatek Wi-Fi 7 MT7925 (802.11b/g/n/ac/ax/be)
1 × USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C (Data, DisplayPort, Power Delivery)
1 × Thunderbolt 4 (data, DisplayPort, Power Delivery)
1 × HDMI 2.1
1 × 3.5mm mini jack
No OS
We received a version of the ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605 in the maximum configuration, but without a pre-installed operating system. For a model with Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, GeForce RTX 4070, 32 GB of RAM, 1 TB SSD and Windows 11 Home in Moscow chain stores at the time of writing, they asked for about 275,000 rubles.
⇡#Appearance and input devices
It is important to note that in the summer we already tested the updated ROG Zephyrus G16 – we are talking about the GU605 model, which uses the Intel Core Ultra platform. Then a dark gray laptop arrived at our test lab. Most of the ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605 are assembled in a white metal case. Both series, based on AMD processors and those based on Intel, are very similar. As a matter of fact, ASUS engineers decided not to reinvent the wheel, but to use time-tested materials and technologies.
In particular, the body of Zephyrus is made entirely of metal. Its parts are manufactured on a high-precision CNC machine, and the aluminum alloy goes through 12 processing steps, including grinding, polishing and anodizing. The manufacturer claims that the locations for installing the keyboard, touchpad and speakers are cut out on a machine with perfect precision. There can be no error in the assembly. And the metal parts turned out to be very practical: dust and fingerprints are invisible on them.
Attention to detail is commendable – especially when it comes to the elite series of mobile computers. ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605 looks strict, but damn attractive. The fact that we are dealing with a gaming system is indicated by the discreet inscriptions “Republic of Gamers” on the display lid and “Zephyrus” on the end of the case. Really, it looks stylish. By the way, there are also light indicators, which, however, are convenient to use only if the laptop is closed.
I’m sure you couldn’t help but notice the Slash Lighting. The LED strip supports 15 animation presets. Slash Lighting also notifies the user of new messages and shows the battery charge level.
I had no questions about the build quality of the laptop. Yes, the laptop is thin and light by the standards of its class, but the computer keyboard does not flex even under very heavy hands. The display cover is thin, but seems durable. In any case, careful handling of equipment is the key to its longevity. The laptop lid opens approximately 140 degrees. The panel can be easily opened with one hand.
The screen frames are not the thinnest (8 mm on top, 5 mm on the sides and 18 mm on the bottom). At the same time, the usable screen area exceeds 90%. The top-mounted webcam supports 1080p resolution.
On the right side, Zephyrus only has an SD card reader (SD Express 7.0 standard with a bandwidth of up to 870 MB/s is supported) and USB 3.2 Gen2 A- and C-type. The latter port is compatible with DisplayPort 1.4 video output and supports Power Delivery 3.0 technology. On the left are a proprietary power supply port, HDMI 2.1 video output, 3.5 mm headset jack, Thunderbolt 4 combined with DisplayPort 2.1 and Power Delivery 3.0, and USB 3.2 Gen2 A-type.
In my opinion, the functionality of the ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605 is excellent. The laptop can be used as a workstation by connecting several external monitors to it. And if someone in the workplace does not have enough ports, then the presence of modern interfaces, such as Thunderbolt 4, will significantly expand their set – with the help of additional peripherals.
Let’s talk about the keyboard and touchpad. The manufacturer claims that the button housings are 12% larger. As you can see, ASUS laptops with a diagonal of 16 inches and smaller have not used a digital keypad for a long time. Those new to the ROG Zephyrus series will definitely have to get used to the small, thin arrow keys and F1-F12. Plus, the layout lacks such useful keys as Insert and Print Screen. Otherwise, using the keyboard of the hero of today’s testing is very convenient. Thus, the main buttons (Ctrl, Shift, Backspace and, to a lesser extent, Enter) are large and convenient. The travel of each key is 1.7 mm, but actuation occurs at half the travel. The manufacturer declares support for combinations of any number of keys and a resource of more than 20 million keystrokes. The model is also equipped with RGB lighting with one zone.
There are five buttons separated from the rest of the keys. Everything is clear with the power button. The four keys on the left perform the following commands: adjust the speaker volume, turn the microphone on/off, launch the Armory Crate application. The button labeled “AURA” switches the operating mode of the Slash Lighting. The key with the image of a fan activates different profiles of the cooling system.
The touchpad dimensions are 15 × 10 cm – it is large and comfortable. As you can see, its aspect ratio tends to be 16:10, that is, it almost matches the proportions of the display, which makes it easier to control.
⇡#Internal design and upgrade options
The bottom panel of the laptop can be easily removed – just remember to unscrew the hidden screws hidden under the rubber plugs. You will need a torx screwdriver.
Versions of ROG Zephyrus based on the Intel platform and with the mobile version of the GeForce RTX 4090 are equipped with an evaporation chamber. All other modifications, including the GA605, are equipped with a rather unusual cooler consisting of three fans, two radiators and four heat pipes.
The cooling system blows out heated air in only one place – at the rear. Moreover, it leaves the case through two holes: at the bottom of the case, under the rubber feet, and under the screen hinge – so that the hot stream does not reach the display (OLED matrices do not like high temperatures). There is also an additional fan that blows directly onto the heat sinks of the CPU and GPU, and most importantly, the VRM zone of both chips. Finally, liquid metal from the most famous company among overclockers, Thermal Grizzly, is used as a thermal interface.
RAM is soldered directly to the motherboard. My advice to you: if you decide to take the ROG Zephyrus G16, don’t skimp on the model with 32 GB of RAM. But installing a second SSD into the assembly is not a problem at all. For some reason, even the top configurations of Zephyrus are equipped with a drive with a capacity of only 1 TB.
⇡#Display
As already mentioned, the new ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605 is interesting not only for its hardware. The ATNA60DL04-0 OLED matrix serves as a kind of cherry on the improvised cake. I write about this fact without noticeable aspiration only because ASUS has already accustomed us to mobile PCs with cool modern displays. Speaking dryly and only to the point, the ATNA60DL04-0 supports a resolution of 2560 × 1600 pixels (marketing 2.5K) at a vertical scan frequency of 240 Hz. The system is compatible with NVIDIA G-Sync technology, the panel response time is only 0.2 ms. Its brightness reaches 400 nits in normal mode and 500 nits in HDR. The color gamut of the matrix is 100% compliant with sRGB and DCI-P3 standards. Declared support for Dolby Vision, Pantone and VESA HDR True Black 500.
Simply put, the ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605 is perfect for both those who work on a laptop and those who use the computer primarily for entertainment. There is nothing to complain about here. Even with PWM, flickering is present at all brightness levels, but its frequency is high enough and will not affect the user’s well-being.
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⇡#Testing methodology
When measuring the performance of gaming laptops, we traditionally focus on computer games. Testing is carried out in Full HD and WQHD resolution (if supported) for laptops with 16:9 displays and WUXGA and WQXGA for laptops with 16:10 displays. Frame rate measurements were carried out in the following games:
For a visual comparison of different laptop models, we introduced a performance index, in which the test results of the reference system – a desktop, which includes a Core i7-14700KF central processor, 32 GB of DDR5-6000 RAM (32-38-38-46) are taken as 100%. ) and a GeForce RTX 4070 12 GB video card. Points are calculated as a percentage of the performance of the reference gaming system, multiplied by 10. The test bench used the Windows 11 operating system with all updates installed (summer 2024), as well as NVIDIA graphics driver version 555.99.
Most gaming laptops are equipped with matrices with a high frame rate. To check the feasibility of using such displays, we tested the laptop in the following popular online projects:
Gaming performance was determined using the well-known CapFrameX program. It allows you to get the rendering time of each frame. The use of the 1st percentile instead of the minimum number of frames per second indicators is due to the desire to clear the results from random performance fluctuations that were caused by reasons not directly related to the operation of the main components of the platform.
The following resource-intensive applications were used:
And also comprehensive benchmarks:
And browser tests (Firefox Portable 117.0.1):
Testing of the laptop in games, resource-intensive applications and complex benchmarks was carried out with the activation of the fastest mode suitable for these tasks.
Display testing is performed using the X-Rite i1Display Pro colorimeter and DisplayCAL 3 application.
The battery life of the laptop was tested in two modes. The first load option – web surfing – involves alternately opening and closing tabs on the sites 3DNews.ru, Computeruniverse.ru and Unsplash.com with an interval of 30 seconds. For this test, the Google Chrome browser version current at the time of testing is used. In the second mode, video in .mkv format and Full HD resolution is played in the built-in Windows OS player with the repeat function activated. In all cases, the display brightness was set to the same 200 cd/m2, and the keyboard backlight (if any) and sound were turned off. The wireless communication module worked constantly.
⇡#Games
The review hero offers several operating modes – they are switched by a keyboard shortcut and in the Armory Crate application. Three presets are available to the user: “Quiet”, “Efficiency” and “Turbo”. We tested the ROG Zephyrus G16 in all of them.
Test results
Heating of the laptop case (games, “Turbo” operating mode)
When you’re designing a laptop that’s thin and light, but also equipped with modern, powerful components, you have to make compromises. In my understanding, such a device either must operate with sky-high noise levels or have strict restrictions on power consumption. We see that in games the ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605 cooling system has to dissipate 120-150 W of thermal energy. With this calculation, the laptop is equipped with a GeForce RTX 4070, whose peak GPU power does not exceed 105 W in Dynamic Boost mode. In all three modes, overheating of the GPU and CPU is not observed. With the “Turbo” setting, the hero of the review works quite noisily, but this year we have tested many laptops that cause even greater acoustic discomfort to the user. At the same time, the heating indicators of the main chips remain below 80 degrees Celsius, which is good news. I conclude that the Zephyrus cooler does its job well.
In the “Efficiency” mode, the laptop is quieter – and the noise produced is comfortably tolerated. When the Quiet preset is enabled, the ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605 is truly quiet—not silent, but quiet. It is important that in all three modes the laptop provides sufficient performance for most modern games. Therefore, depending on the AAA project and the graphics quality settings selected for it, we can adjust the operation of the laptop so that it heats up and makes less noise.
The laptop body does not get very hot where the user’s hands are located. The hottest point, of course, is the place where the heated air leaves the enclosure. Flows do not reach the surface of the OLED display. In general, the keyboard does not overheat and the computer is comfortable to use.
Fast Matrix
Conventional wisdom has it that a gaming PC requires a display with a high vertical scan frequency and low response time. The question is debatable; it has been raised several times in our articles, including in comments to laptop reviews. The reality is that even inexpensive gaming laptops are equipped with matrices with a frequency of 120 Hz and higher. But does this make sense?
The fact is that achieving a frame rate that matches the scanning frequency of a laptop display turns out to be quite difficult. Even the most powerful AMD and NVIDIA laptop graphics will not provide high FPS in applications with high system requirements when using high quality graphics and higher. Including after enabling various methods of scaling and image generation. In popular online games – projects whose gameplay relies on smooth images and no delays – the frame rate is usually limited by the speed of the laptop’s CPU-RAM subsystem. This is clearly shown by laptop tests in the three most popular games in the Steam client: Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2 and PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS.
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A fast, high-quality OLED matrix with a frequency of 240 Hz and a response of 0.2 ms is the best that gamers can now find on the laptop market. There are also no less expensive, but rarer models with mini-LED displays on sale – they have a stated frequency of 250 Hz. However, unlike desktops, gaming laptops cannot offer a truly fast processor-RAM combination. You can’t fool physics. It turns out that achieving average 200+ FPS in multiplayer games even with graphics quality settings turned to minimum is not so easy. Don’t be surprised when you see how, for example, a mobile system with a GeForce RTX 4050 is not inferior in “Dota”, “Contra”, “Tanks”, etc. to computers with a laptop GeForce RTX 4070 – with such settings the graphics chip will never will be loaded at 100%. And the performance of popular online games “jumps” from patch to patch. Therefore, the results presented should be regarded as indicative only.
In the case of the ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605, we see that the coveted average 240+ FPS was only achieved in Counter-Strike 2. Previously, we found out that the power consumption of the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in games is not very high. It is also true that in all three programs the frame rate is still very high.
Games with high system requirements
The following set of games is selected to maximize the load on the laptop’s graphics, even without the use of ray tracing and high resolutions. Exceptions from the list are perhaps GTA V and Baldur’s Gate 3 – the performance of these games is highly dependent on the central processor and RAM. However, if the laptop provides comfortable FPS in them, it means that the system’s gaming potential will be fine in the near future.
* Points are calculated as a percentage of the performance of the reference gaming system, multiplied by 10.
In general, the performance of the GeForce RTX 4070, soldered on the ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605 board, can be described as standard – this is clearly shown by our performance rating of laptops tested by the 3DNews laboratory. Still, the use of Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in a number of games makes image rendering smoother. It is impossible not to notice this fact.
⇡#Resource-intensive applications
A fast gaming laptop is usually a fast workstation. Manufacturers of such laptops configure the operation of their products so that in resource-intensive projects the central processors go beyond generally accepted power limits. Essentially, we are dealing with factory overclocking of the CPU.
Test results
The power consumption of the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in Turbo mode remains at 79 W. We observed a similar operating mode in the recently tested ASUS ProArt P16 (H7606WI). And it turns out very quickly. In all tests without exception, the 12-core AMD is ahead of the Core Ultra 9 185H, which is installed in the ROG Zephyrus G16 GU605, is equipped with the same LPDDR5X memory and operates at similar power.
In Turbo mode, the laptop is noisy – noticeably louder than in games. But, as we found out, the system provides a high level of performance in tasks that rely on the resources of the central processor. I think ASUS engineers could have squeezed more out of the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, but we just hit the CPU heating limit. In Efficiency mode, the laptop runs noticeably quieter and cooler on average. At the same time, the drop in performance is insignificant – 3% in the CINEBENCH R23 application. So it is absolutely not necessary to use the “Turbo” mode everywhere and always.
Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 works according to the 4x Zen 5 + 8x Zen 5c scheme. It is incorrect to compare the “red” cores of Zen 5 and Zen 5c with the “blue” P- and E-cores. AMD’s hybrid approach, which it embodied in the Phoenix 2 design, has little in common with Intel’s concept. The powerful and efficient Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor cores feature identical architecture and available L2 cache. They have the same performance at the same frequency. The only difference is the area occupied by Zen 5 and Zen 5c, the latter are physically smaller due to the increased density of transistors. The process technology is the same: 4 nm, but when designing Zen 5c silicon, libraries with a higher concentration are used. As a result, we see that the Zen 5 cores in the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 operate at a frequency of 4.4-4.5 GHz at maximum load, while the Zen 5c operates only at 2.7-2.8 GHz. But twice as many of the latter are etched onto the silicon crystal.
⇡#Daily tasks
Gaming aside, most users don’t always need high performance from a laptop. The average person who spends time on a laptop surfs the web, watches videos and listens to music, communicates via instant messengers, conducts video conferences and sometimes uses office application packages. As a rule, to perform such tasks, high performance with 1-2 CPU cores, sufficient RAM and a fast storage are required. The following tests show how well gaming laptops handle everyday user tasks.
* Points are calculated as a percentage of the performance of the reference gaming system, multiplied by 10.
⇡#Offline work
All versions of the ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605 are equipped with a 90 Wh battery. We tested the laptop in Quiet + Eco mode – that is, the GeForce RTX 4070 graphics were disabled. Also, the display refresh rate has been reduced from 240 to 60 Hz, and the keyboard backlight and Slash Lighting have been turned off. As a result, the laptop lasted more than seven hours while surfing the web and fourteen and a half hours when watching videos! In the second case, not all modern gaming systems can boast such autonomy. So, running Zephyrus on battery power is a plus for the device.
The test model supports Power Delivery 3.0 technology, as well as the fast charging function: the laptop battery is charged from 0 to 50% in 30 minutes.
⇡#Conclusions
Today you got acquainted with, first of all, a high-quality laptop. Yes, the tested model belongs to the Republic of Gamers series, but the ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605 can be safely recommended to those who are looking for a mobile workstation. The laptop is well designed – I have no questions at all about the assembly and chassis. The system has high performance – including in resource-intensive work tasks. In games, the performance of the GeForce RTX 4070 is enough to run modern AAA projects with maximum graphics quality in native resolution, but without using ray tracing. “Zephyrus” will also handle ray tracing, but in this case you will have to use AI scaling.
The computer is equipped with an excellent OLED matrix and a comfortable keyboard and touchpad. The Zephyrus cooling system does not give up in games, and in work applications it squeezes the maximum out of the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. Finally, I have no complaints about the laptop’s battery life, much less its functionality. Perhaps, in the case of the ROG Zephyrus G16 GA605, it is surprising to see only one thing: why does an expensive premium system use a far from the most productive SSD and only 1 TB? Fortunately, installing a second SSD into the system is not difficult for the user.
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