 I only got a day's notice that the Asus Zephyrus G14 would be arriving with AMD's new Ryzen 9 4900 HS, an 8-core processor for thin and light gaming laptops that consumes just 35 watts. Now, that wouldn't be a problem, except that the only comparable 8-core Intel laptop that I had on hand uses the Core i9-9880HK, their flagship mobile processor that draws 45 watts, boosts to 5 GHz, and only exists in much thicker, not to mention heavier, designs. For funsies, though, I decided, you know what? Let's fire up Cinebench R20 on both of them anyway and see what happens. I was fully expecting the AMD processor to get destroyed and our video to be delayed until we had a fair comparison, except that that's not how things went down. The Ryzen 9 4900 HS killed the i9-9880HK, delivering nearly a quarter more performance. Now, I was worried maybe Windows Update or something was running in the background on the Intel machine, so I ran the tests a couple more times, but the results stayed the same. AMD just choke slammed the fastest mobile processor on the market. Of course, though, there's more to life than just Cinebench, and I need to see if it can dominate elsewhere. Thermal Grizzly's Conductonaut Liquid Metal Thermal Interface Material offers maximum cooling performance. Check it out and keep things cool at the link below. Thing is, the ZenBook Pro Duo is a powerful machine, but it was designed more for creative professionals. So our next sanity check, then, was to grab a different 8-core laptop. Meet the Acer Helios 700, the epitome of mobile excess. Now, it technically uses the same core i9-9880HK, but this is on a different level. Like, check this out. When you were ready to game, you actually move the entire keyboard down and press the turbo button, revealing these two huge fans that can suck in enough air to allow the processor to draw up to 120 watts. Surely, the puny Zephyrus will be absolutely crushed by this no-compromises gaming beast, right? Let me put it this way. If I'm working at Intel, I'm gonna probably need a new pair of boxers in a sec. LTTStore.com, by the way. Because, dang, to Acer's credit, at least the 4900HS had to kind of work for it this time. And besides, we're all getting kind of tired of watching AMD kick ass at multi-threaded applications. Let's talk about single-thread... Ooh. Ooh. Even with Acer's overclock locking the i9-9880HK at a ripping 5 GHz, which is unsustainable in basically any other design, and barely even a laptop at this point, from test to test, it was a toss-up whether the R9 or the i9 would win. And for the rest of our testing, the results remained about the same. The Zephyrus G14 crushed the ZenBook Pro and matched or edged ahead of the Helio 700. And guys, the emphasis here needs to be on how crazy it is that this small laptop was able to hang with this one. Bear in mind, of course, this has more powerful graphics for games. Now, during our Blender BMW CPU render, the Ryzen 9 4900HS in the Zephyrus G14 reached a maximum temperature of 91.8 degrees, which is toasty, but not throttling. And it drew a reported average of about 50 watts. By comparison, our 9880HK and the Helio 700 hit 96 degrees and reported drawing about 90 watts. Think about that, the Intel chip needed 40 more watts of power and the winds of Aureus just to match AMD in performance. Bringing us to an interesting question though, how on earth is the Ryzen 9 4900HS, which I never saw break 4.4 GHz, matching or even beating a 5 GHz Intel chip? Well, we've talked about this before, but Ryzen 4000 series uses AMD's Zen 2 architecture, which boasts about a 15% increase in IPC or instructions per cycle over last gen. More IPC basically means that more work can be done at a given clock speed. So with some simple napkin math, oh, wow, that's a fancy napkin. 4.4 times 1.15 gives us 5.06. The excellent single threaded performance means then that the Zephyrus G14 not only kicks ass for productivity, but it also tears through games. Ours is equipped with an Nvidia RTX 2060 Max-Q and guys, all I can say is, who says green and red don't go well together? This combo made short work of the full power RTX 2060 in the ZenBook Pro Duo. Now that, my kind of Christmas. But there's always a catch, right? One of my favorite lines to repeat in gaming laptop videos is, with great power comes great power consumption. At which point, we all have a good laugh about the two to three hours of battery life in gaming machines or less than an hour if you have the audacity to actually game on them. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, stop. Not with the Zephyrus G14. Now, given the 76 watt hour battery, eight core processor, and 120 hertz display, I would have wagered something like five hours of battery life if I was feeling optimistic, but it got ten. Now that is just for light office work with the brightness turned down and the keyboard backlight off, but to put it in perspective, the freaking Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 got half an hour less than that, running the same test. This all means then that AMD has gifted the world a processor as powerful as Intel's Core i9-9880HK, but that can be integrated in a design that's just 20 millimeters thick and sips power like a 25 watt quad core when you're just browsing the web. Which brings us to AMD's largest mobile hurdle so far, OEM support. A powerful and efficient processor is nothing if it gets relegated to B-tier designs. So let's change gears and focus on the Zephyrus G14 itself for a little bit. The build quality is excellent. Not quite up there with a Razer Blade 15 or Alienware M15 with a bit more visible plastic and some of the most uneven keyboard backlighting that I've seen in quite a while, but it avoids any egregious gamer styling. It's not super flexy and I'd give it easily an A-. The I.O. is also solid with my only complaint being that the type A ports are in a pretty rough spot if you want to plug a mouse in. Aside from the light piping, the keyboard is excellent though, which is kind of funny because a stiff top of the stroke with a long travel sounds like it's gonna end up mushy, but ends up feeling more like, uh, like stealthy. It's really quiet and the standard layout and great key feel makes it almost immediately blend into the background while my work or my game can take center stage. The trackpad is then more of the same. Besides being slightly on the small side, it just does its job so you can do your job. That is, as long as your job doesn't involve working from home. Now we had no way of knowing that the COVID-19 pandemic was coming or that it would have this kind of an impact, but we still get to say, I told you so, Asus, stop stripping webcams off your laptops. Something is still better than no-thing when I need to jump on a video call with someone at the last second and I'm scrambling. And no webcam also means no Windows Hello facial recognition. Grrrr. Now the power button is a fingerprint reader that caches your authentication temporarily, then logs you in once the Windows lock screen comes up. So at least you don't have to touch it twice, which is okay, or at least it would be if it worked more consistently. We got about 15% success on it, so some driver improvements needed there. Rounding out the experience, the display is another strong area, though, with both a fast 120Hz refresh rate and factory calibrated colors. And the final nice touch is an Intel Wi-Fi 6 card. That's great to see because that's definitely one area of mobile computing where Team Blue still gets a big fat W. The version with the RTX 2060 Max-Q starts at $1449.99, and at that price, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Zephyrus G14 as a do-it-all laptop. Gaming, school, work, I don't remember a device like this as a whole package that represented so few compromises for so few people in quite some time. I think it's fair to say that this, not this laptop specifically, but this processor, this mobile launch, could be AMD's most important launch, if not ever, then at least in the last 10 years. Now, I get that our audience, guys, you guys are super into DIY PCs, but laptop sales are more than double desktop sales. Like, think about it. At shows like CES, manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo individually have a bigger presence than all of AMD. And until now, nearly every single laptop they've sold has contained an Intel processor. That is finally about to change, which is going to put yet another big revenue boost into AMD's coffers to keep R&D up and keep the pressure on Intel. We can't pronounce AMD the king of the mobile CPU market yet. Word on the street is that Intel isn't going to just take this lying down, but what we can say is that as it did in desktops, workstations, and servers, Zen 2 has brought competition back to mobile. Was there ever competition in high-end mobile? No, not really. Oh. Um... How about, has there ever been a segue to our sponsor? Not a good one. Private Internet Access. It won't protect your credit cards or passwords or identity. It's just a tool that masks your IP and encrypts traffic on your devices. You can combine it with private browsing tools to make even savvy websites think that you are somewhere else and someone else. They offer reliable service with over 3,000 servers in 32 countries and no bandwidth caps. They offer configurable encryption as well as an internet kill switch to prevent data from leaking should you be involuntarily disconnected. And their MACE feature blocks requests to known malware and tracking domains all together. 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