 This is the best gaming laptop in existence. And all that money, nothing will top it in 2022. There are great gaming laptops and there are great laptops, period. The Asus Zephyrus G14 hopes to be both, but have they done enough to justify the sphincter titling price tag? And can I justify using the word sphincter in my segue to our sponsor? Thank you, True Coders, for sponsoring this video. With their coding bootcamp, you can go from flipping burgers to flipping bits in nine short weeks. Join the other True Coders graduates who have started their new career in the lucrative and stimulating field of programming at truecoders.io slash LTT. Inside the 2022 Zephyrus G14, we get an AMD Ryzen 9 6900 HS, 32 gigabytes of RAM, a terabyte of storage, and most interestingly, an AMD Radeon RX 6800S. Compared to the outgoing G14, the 2022 model just shreds it, not even fair. In fact, I'm stopping the graphs right now because you don't need to see any more of this beat down. The new one is faster, big whoop. But to really show off what an excellent job Asus has done with this whole package, we need to compare it to a laptop that is faster. This right here is the Alienware X15 and it is an engineering marvel. It is just 15.9 millimeters thin, but it's able to cool an RTX 3080 and an Intel i7. Even rocking a last gen processor, the X15 was able to consistently beat the G14. In gaming benchmarks, the X15 took enough of a lead for you to notice the difference, not just by the numbers, but in gameplay too. How was Alienware able to achieve this thermodynamic wizardry? One moment. The whole laptop is designed around the cooling solution. So it has a small motherboard to make room for these four fans. The keyboard was lowered so that we could have these fin stacks up here. And they even went so far as to design their own special liquid metal called Element 31. We've showed that that significantly outperforms another liquid metal and too bad using it sucks. Like, look, they lowered the keyboard and now my hand falls off the edge. I can't game on this comfortably for more than like three minutes. It's sharp. Stupid. Yes, in any design there will be trade-offs, but the G14 balances them all perfectly. Instead of making it wide to accommodate intakes, they just lifted up the chassis. The hot air does blow directly into the screen, but I'm not concerned about the temps it reaches. It's clear the keyboard, trackpad, and screen were the priorities here, AKA the bits that matter most when you use a laptop. In fact, the screen is just a great example of the G14 targeting what you actually want. Sure, the Alienware has three times the refresh rate, but most of us aren't professional head clickers. With the G14, we get a 2560 by 1600p screen that's fast enough for most gamers while being bright and color accurate enough for video or photo editors. I can do my job writing scripts on it and not wish I was using a professional laptop instead. Oh, and on the top they even added a webcam with Windows Hello facial recognition. Very glad you finally yielded to me yelling about not having webcam basis. It's actually not half bad. The user inputs on the G14 are exceptional. This trackpad, just look at it. It's just big, accurate, and it feels great. In my opinion, this is the best trackpad on a gaming laptop and an easy A. I barely wished I had a mouse when I was doing non-gaming tasks. The keyboard is also a standout. With key travel that's soft and doesn't require too much force, so great for gaming, but it still retains enough of a tactile bump to be functional for very quick typing. Awesome. There's almost no deck flex thanks to magnesium chassis. In fact, the whole laptop is just super well built. The keycaps have this sparkly color shift you can only see at certain angles. The Animatrix on the back got comments from everyone that passed by my desk and it is white. Wow, that was actually really anticlimactic. I was expecting the Cheeto desk to stick, but you could like, oh my God, it's so stupid, Mark. Why did we do this? It's just gone. That's really gross. Anyway, audio test. Okay, here we go. Sound test versus the king of Windows laptop audio, XPS 15. It's kind of lacking in bass. Let's see here. Yeah, the Dell's better, but at the same time, this right here is pretty impressive. It's not as loud, not as much bass, but it's clear and I don't hate it. Great laptops also need great IO. And on this, while you won't be in dongle hell, it isn't perfect either. On the left, we get a headphone microphone combo jack, USB-C type four and HDMI 2.0B. On the right, we get micro SD, another type C and two really good reasons to get a wireless mouse because this is terrible. One thing I was really curious about is if the USB four ports would work with Thunderbolt devices. Thunderbolt four is essentially the same thing as USB four, but with all of the optional boxes checked off. This Thunderbolt dock right here from Dell. Plug it in. Okay, awesome. Everything's working. Great. Come over here. We have got this 10 gig network adapter and no such luck. Basically, if you get this message right here, you're screwed. In my testing, it's a coin toss if Thunderbolt devices work or not. So if you've got a couple already around, best of luck. In my review of the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS, the battery life results of the G14 were a huge improvement over last gen, nearly doubling from five hours 42 minutes to 11 hours 11 minutes. Other reviewers though, didn't see as much of a jump. And it turns out that's because AMD has new AV1 decoders. These basically allow the integrated GPU to play back supported videos using hardware making the whole process way more efficient. Office tasks don't see quite as big of an improvement. So depending on your use case, 11 hours isn't reasonable to expect. But like eight hours from a gaming laptop is still super impressive. One thing that intrigued me though, is the sheer power of the integrated GPU in this laptop. Party in a two. Being from Nova Scotia, it takes eight hours to fly home and it would be really nice to be able to game on the plane. If I could use the APU on this, is it able to game for multiple hours? To test this, I disabled the dedicated GPU, set a frame limit to 60 FPS, have the refresh rate and turn down the brightness. How long can it run F1 2021 at 1080p on low settings? Surely longer than the old model with RTX 3060 enabled, right? No, the old Zephyrus won the battle with a staggering battery lifetime of 59 minutes. I'm disappointed, but at least you could buy a 60 watt type C charger to trickle charge on the plane. Stock power bricks, they use too much power and just shuts off. Keeping up the disappointment train, pricing. The 2022 G14 starts at $1,650. $50 more than the top of the line 2021 version. And the one we've been testing right here, $2,500 US dollars. Oh, Asus has a number of good reasons the new model is more expensive and the bump in GPU performance is pretty extreme, but damn, and it's so expensive to get more than 16 gigabytes of RAM. With that in mind, how easy is it to upgrade or repair yourself? I don't normally do this, but I'm actually gonna put on an anti-static wristband today. There's been a cold snap and I have been shocking just everything I touch and it would really suck to kill this. Strike number one are these little rubber things that you have to take out to get at the screws. That sucks, cause these never go back in properly. Oh wow, that vapor chamber is so sick. No, this is all vapor chamber. Yeah, like from here all the way over. This thing's so cool. Here's our 76 watt hour battery. I haven't having issues with it just turning on for no reason. I'm sure that'll get fixed soon, but I am just gonna remove that before we go any deeper. Right here we have our sodium slot. So this right here is a 16 gigabyte stick. The other half of your memory is soldered to the board. That means that if you get the 16 gigabyte version, you get 24 gigabytes of RAM, not 32. Here's our one terabyte SSD. It looks pretty generic, but it does have a Fizing controller on it. So it is pretty good, I think. Along with the RAM and the SSD, it looks like your wifi module, battery, speakers, and fans all can be pretty easily replaced with minimal invasion to the laptop. Let's go a little bit deeper though and see what we can find. Getting this vapor chamber off is not particularly easy. Although because it does come with liquid metal from the factory, I don't really know why you would ever need to. What an absolute chonker of a vapor chamber. What we also see here is that they use thermal paste on all of the VRMs, which means that you don't have to worry about like thermal pad thickness. I'm surprised they can cool this much with these small little fins. Like vapor chamber, very impressive, but there isn't a whole lot of heat sinking. Oh, liquid metal job's kinda gross. You can see if they have it taped off all around the die so that the liquid metal can't spill. But if they didn't have that, this would be dead because there's liquid metal just all over the place around it. There's the battery out. What I'm curious to see is if the keyboard and track pad are replaceable. Those are two things where like if you have a child, they can pretty easily ruin your day by spilling a drink or something on there. One thing I really wish Asus would steal from Alienware is that Alienware has been putting little markings just beside all of the screws inside of their laptop. So you can very easily find the screw that you need and put it in and know for sure that it's the right one and you're not going to accidentally like put a screw through your keyboard or something. Okay. There's the main board out. Not looking good for repairability after that. So track pad. Oh. Can we? Ha ha. Okay, the track pad comes out. I don't know how easy it will be to get these, but if you can, it is possible to replace it. Awesome. It looks like that the keyboard is able to be removed. So you could theoretically just replace the whole thing. This is actually quite a repairable little laptop. As long as there's parts available, you can replace most of the bits and not have to throw the whole thing out, which is awesome to see. A couple more interesting things while we're in here. On this laptop, they actually included dust filters right beside the fans. Apparently they work pretty well. Asus has this whole hilarious picture of a laptop just caked in dust. They did two tests with and without the dust filters and they do actually work. The fans also have this really funky sort of dual pitch wave design. Apparently it helps a lot with the turbulence of the air coming out and makes the heat sinks more effective. So the new G14 then. On one hand, I'm kind of sad that Asus upped the price by so much. Like I know AMD aren't our friends and it was only a matter of time until they started charging more for really high quality mobile processors, but it still does sting. On the other hand, if you have the cash, it's also just a great laptop. It's portable, awesome to use, has a strong battery life and I just plain like it. Easy recommendation. Just like it's easy to recommend this segue to our sponsor, FreshBooks. Thanks to FreshBooks for sponsoring today's video. FreshBooks is an easy to use accounting software that helps you do your business, impress clients with professional looking invoices that detail the work you've done and use automated payment reminders if invoices get passed due. It allows you to easily track expenses and use their time tracker to log every minute of billable hours so you don't have to think about it later. Keep everyone on the same page with their projects feature, which makes it easy for clients, team and contractors to collaborate, share files and comment. FreshBooks also has your back at tax time too. With tons of reports to choose from, you'll know exactly where your business stands and you can easily hand the keys over your accountant so they can take over when it's time to reconcile everything for the year. Choose a plan that's right for you and start a free trial of FreshBooks for 30 days today. No credit card required at freshbooks.com slash Linus. Huge thanks for watching. Hit like, get subscribed. You're looking for something else to watch. Maybe check out the video that we did recently where we were looking at Lenovo locking down their CPUs to their own motherboards for security.