Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 review: the best gaming laptop of 2025?

Asus' most impressive slimline gaming laptop might not have quite the same level of exposure that the Razer Blade lineup attracts, but it's still carved out a nice slice of the market over recent years. If you want a laptop that can do a job over the part of a day's work, then plug in for some proper gaming in the evenings, the ROG Zephyrus G14 is a great option nowadays.

I got hold of its 2025 revision, sporting an Nvidia RTX GeForce 5070 Ti Laptop GPU, then put it through its paces over the course of a week of testing, and it left me hugely impressed. This is a laptop that can change its guise easily, with one of Asus ROG's least obviously gamer-ish designs and great power. And I think it's truly great.

Price & Availability

The Zephyrus G14 comes in a fair few different specs, including the models that launched in 2024 with 40-series cards in them. You can order a 2025 model freely now, though, starting at £2,699.99 in the UK for the version I tested, sporting a 5070 Ti, or $2,399.99 in the US.

You can spec it more aggressively, but the price spikes up quite harshly if you do, and can range up to £3,749 or $3,169.99 if you want a 5080. It won't take much attention to notice that the US prices seem advantageous compared to their UK counterparts.

Design

It hasn't changed much at all from the 5-star 2024 model that we enjoyed hugely, but that doesn't mean the ROG Zephyrus G14 puts a foot wrong on the design front. This is a gaming laptop that doesn't just pass for an ultrabook – it basically is one.

You can get the G14 in either silver or dark grey, depending on stock, and the silver version I tested looks for all the world like a MacBook Pro from a distance. The main difference is that it has a strong diagonal slash across the back of its display, which lights up thanks to a line of thin LED strips through it.

This lighting can be controlled using Asus' lighting software or disabled entirely. It's a distinctive touch, but far from the sort of gamer-ish excess that can plague other laptops in this part of the market.

The bottom of the laptop, meanwhile, hides two rubber rails for stability and a huge amount of ventilation. The exact kind of design a powerful gaming laptop needs, then.

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Ports are present in abundance, too. On the left side of the laptop, there's a charging port, which pairs with the chunky but not outrageously big charger. There's also an HDMI 2.1 port, a DisplayPort-capable USB-C port, a USB-A port, and a headphone jack. The right-hand side offers another USB-C port for accessories, along with another USB-A, and a slot for a microSD card if you need more storage.

This does mean there's no Ethernet for wired internet, but my strong suspicion is that anyone using this as a desktop replacement, even part of the time, will invest in a docking station to give them all the ports they need in an easier-to-access way.

Open the laptop and you're greeted by its 16:10 aspect OLED display, sporting 14-inches of 120Hz action at a native resolution of 2880 x 1800. There's a tenkeyless keyboard underneath it, including four extra keys that you can bind as you like, and a separate glass power button.

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Below that is a decent-sized trackpad with a nice, smooth finish. It has actual movement to it, too, rather than being capacitive, which means you can only click it down on its lower portions. To each side of the keyboard are speaker grates, for those wanting sound without using one of the best gaming headsets.

It's a pretty gorgeous bit of hardware given what it has under the hood, at around 1.50kg depending on your exact spec, and measuring in at just over 1.5cm thick. This all makes it genuinely stowable and easy to pack in a backpack or bag. Needless to say, most of the time that's not true even of the best gaming laptops.

Specs & Features

So, what about the situation under the hood? Well, the review unit Asus loaned me boasts that headline-grabber of a discrete 5070 Ti GPU, along with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor.

That means it has a double-edged set of specs, able to use its GPU for beefy tasks and gaming when plugged in, but with decent integrated graphics for the times when power is in shorter supply.

There's 32GB of LPDDR5X 8000 RAM to bring a boost to multitasking, while a 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD takes care of a big chunk of storage. There's also a relatively easily-accessed expansion slot if you take the back of the laptop off with a security screwdriver, which is always nice.

The 1080p webcam over the display is nothing special, but it does enable Windows Hello face detection for quickly unlocking your machine. Along those lines, this is also a CoPilot+ PC, of course, so all of Microsoft's new features are there if you want them, including a beta version of its invasive-sounding Recall feature.

In terms of wireless connectivity, the laptop boasts Wi-Fi 7 along with Bluetooth 5.4, so you're unlikely to be left behind on that front for years and years. Battery capacity does show the compromise of the design Asus has gone for, though, at 73Whr – substantially smaller than beefier (and fatter) 16 and 18-inch laptops manage (and below the maximum 99.9Whr that laptops are permitted to carry).

Asus bundles in quite a lot of software on the laptop, although a chunk of this is useful. This includes Nvidia's app for updating your game-ready drivers, and Asus' own Armoury Crate app. The latter is essential to set up your power profile as you like, and you can do so on a per-game or per-app basis, which is great. It's clean and easy to use.

Performance

The performance of the ROG Zephyrus G14 comes down to a very different set of options depending on whether you're plugged into a power outlet or not. That's how today's most powerful processors function, requiring more watts to deliver their best – which can't be achieved on battery alone.

I'll start with how it fares on battery, since that's a little quicker. In effect, you can use the laptop like you would a MacBook or Dell portability making for great productivity. It's small, but the keyboard's great, and I found it easy to use for work tasks. Additionally, it can last around 5 hours this way, which is decent enough to be reliable in a pinch.

Moving over to gaming and the unplugged performance isn't as great. If you accept Asus' default settings then it practically disables the GPU. That means integrated graphics, and while these have come a long way, they're still well below expectations given the high price of this unit.

Take the recently released Doom: The Dark Ages, a demanding but decently optimised game that looks gorgeous on PC compared to PS5 Pro. At 720p, it could barely run and wasn't what I'd call playable.

Plug in the power, though, reenabling that GPU, and you get the true experience that Asus has packaged up. I ran The Dark Ages at 1440p with the High preset and enjoyed frame rates hovering around the 100fps mark, thanks to frame generation, which is the most impressive part of the 50-series upgrade.

While the feature has its detractors at higher resolutions in desktop rigs, I think laptops are where it can truly shine – a smaller display makes the occasional blurriness all the harder to perceive, to the point where I didn't actually see any. The boost to performance, meanwhile, can be seismic at times.

Dropping down to 1080p boosted my frame rates further, and there's plenty of tinkering to be done on this front. That tinkering gets more in-depth when it comes to enabling more unlocked battery-powered GPU use, which can be quite fiddly. If you're a power-user who wants top performance, even if it'll only last 90 minutes to 2 hours or so, you can set that up and enjoy frame rates that fall below powered play by only an acceptable margin.

More likely, though, most people buying the 2025 G14 will accept that it's designed for productivity when on battery power, and gaming when plugged in, to which end it works brilliantly.

Regardless of how you power it, you'll notice that the G14 does spin up its fans frequently, and they're pretty noticeable. This, again, puts it in an interesting place. These are far quieter fans than some full-scale gaming beasts I've tested, but they're also way louder than what you'd hear from a MacBook Pro under strain. That shouldn't be a surprise, but it's worth knowing in case you're thinking of gaming on a train, for instance.

That cooling works a treat, though, and I never found the G14 got uncomfortably hot, even on my lap. Like so many of its performance metrics, you can also tweak its curves and build per-app profiles in the software for more control.

The screen, meanwhile, remains a doozy – its OLED construction makes for nice deep blacks, and its refresh rate looks super smooth in person. It could be slightly more vivid, still – a note from previous years, too – but that's a real nitpick.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2025) review: Verdict

Sometimes the products we love and want to buy defy logic a little bit. There's no escaping that you can get better performance per pound from other laptops on the market if you're a gamer, but the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 is aiming to thread a different needle. It's genuinely great to look at and carry around, and it offers something approaching the best of both worlds.

With a 5070 Ti inside, you can enjoy genuinely impressive performance for its form factor when plugged in. Meanwhile, you also have the option to carry it around for meetings or flexible work when needed. It's priced at a proper premium level, but I think those who can afford it will find it every bit the winner. Gaming laptops don't come better than this.

Also consider

The obvious rival in the market today for Asus is Razer, as I mentioned right at the start of this review. Its 2025 revision of the Blade has a similarly sleek design and the new specs to match, but I haven't been able to test one hands-on just yet.

Alternatively, if you want more bang for your buck there's one of MSI's latest machines to consider. The MSI Stealth 18 HX AI is a far, far larger option, so it ditches the "normal laptop" vibe entirely – but therefore runs a little more reliably at top power, and has a substantially larger display to enjoy.