CES 2023 | Asus is finally dropping soldered RAM from its Zephyrus M16 series but not on the Zephyrus G14

Open up a gaming laptop to upgrade its RAM and you'll either find the modules to be soldered or removable. On the Asus Zephyrus lineup, however, most of the models sport both soldered and removeable RAM. The hybrid approach means there is usually just 1x SODIMM slot for expansion whereas most other gaming laptops have at least 2x SODIMM slots. For CES 2023, Asus has confirmed that certain Zephyrus models will use the more traditional 2x SODIMM configuration.

The recently announced Zephyrus M16 will replace the older 2022 models with brand new chassis designs and motherboards to accompany the 13th gen Intel CPUs and mobile Nvidia Ada Lovelace GPUs. The revised motherboards have given Asus the opportunity to rethink its RAM approach for the better as any RAM upgrades will no longer be bottlenecked by potentially slower soldered RAM modules. This was unfortunately the case in 2021 where certain Zephyrus SKUs were shipping with slow 8 GB soldered DIMMs due to supply constraints.

The smaller 2023 Zephyrus G14, however, will continue to use the hybrid soldered and unsoldered RAM approach for now. Size constraints likely played a factor here as even the competing Razer Blade 14 relies solely on soldered RAM with no end-user upgradeability.

The 2023 Zephyrus G14 and M16 will begin shipping later this quarter alongside a handful of other models including the latest VivoBook 16X and ROG Strix.