A slim gaming laptop now with an RTX 5090 and 64 GB of RAM - Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 2025 review

The ROG Zephyrus G16's 2025 update offers several upgrades. Its overall performance has also increased thanks to the Arrow Lake processor and the new GeForce RTX 5090 laptop GPU. However, it's still important to know that it uses a relatively slow version of the GPU. Other improvements include Wi-Fi 7, 64 GB of RAM, and longer battery life. The input devices and speakers remain very good.

The weak points remain the display lid (which produced minimal creaking noises on our review model) and the hinges, which fail to prevent significant rocking. We would have liked to have seen an improvement here for the 2025 model. Asus should also revisit the slightly pulsating fan noise when running idle. The OLED panel is still a great choice for gaming, but the maximum HDR brightness is still quite low.

Priced at $4,600, our high-end review model is very expensive, even managing to exceed the Razer Blade 16, which is also its main competitor. We'll compare the two devices in more detail in a separate article, but generally speaking, the ROG Zephyrus G16 is more of a high-end multimedia or all-rounder. The Blade 16, on the other hand, focuses on delivering the highest possible gaming performance in a compact chassis with both devices possessing their own strengths and weaknesses.

At the time of our review, the new ROG Zephyrus G16 is unavailable in online stores such as Amazon or Best Buy.

For 2025, Asus has updated its ROG Zephyrus G16 gaming notebooks with Nvidia's new RTX 5000 laptop GPUs. There are still two base models: one with AMD processors, conventional cooling, and laptop GPUs going up to the RTX 5070. On top of this, there are models with Intel CPUs and vapour chamber cooling, which go up to the GeForce RTX 5090 laptop GPU and have a TGP of 120 watts.

Asus has retained the unchanged dark gray metal chassis for its 2025 model year, and this is why the ROG Zephyrus G16 continues to be a slim and, above all, comparatively light 16-inch gaming laptop. Razer Blade 16 2025 It's just as thin but about 200 grams heavier.

Both the case quality and stability are excellent, but the lid remains a weakness, and audible minimal creaking noises are present. Even the hinges still aren't able to prevent noticeable wobble. Inside, there have been only minimal changes to the layout of the vapor chamber, but the maintenance options haven't changed. Two M.2 2280 slots are available, and the Wi-Fi module and battery can be replaced if necessary.

The Wi-Fi module (Intel BE201) now supports the Wi-Fi 7 standard, and transfer speeds are good, but Thunderbolt 5 or PCIe 5.0 are missing. Due to the weak Arrow Lake NPU, this isn't a Copilot+ laptop, but Studio effects for the webcam and live subtitles are supported.

Asus continues to use Samsung's familiar 240 Hz OLED panel, which is why you would be best served by taking a look at the facts and figures from our 2024 review. The display has G-Sync support, which is very suitable for gaming, but the maximum HDR brightness is comparatively low (something which is also the case for the Razer Blade 16). Asus provides accurate color profiles for P3 and sRGB out of the box, and there is a software solution for dimming without entering the potentially problematic PWM range.

Asus now combines the new RTX 5000 laptop GPUs with the Arrow Lake generation's Intel Core Ultra 9 285H. The RAM continues to be soldered, but a maximum of 64 GB of RAM (LPDDR5x-7467) is now available instead of 32 GB.

Asus provides its users with three familiar power profiles: Quiet, Performance, and Turbo, which are also linked to Windows settings. We performed the following benchmarks and measurements using the Turbo profile. The manual profile theoretically increases the GPU's TGP by another 10 watts, but in our tests, GPU performance was actually slightly lower.

The processor used in every Intel variant is the Core Ultra 9 285H from the Arrow Lake generation. In the G16, the chip is allowed to consume 100 watts for a short period and 80 watts during sustained load. In the single-core tests, the performance is very good, but at 80 watts in the multi-core tests, the Ryen AI 9 HX 370 found in the Blade 16 is slightly faster. The advantage over the old G16 with the Core Ultra 9 185H sits at an average of 16 %. Under sustained load, multi-core performance doesn't remain completely stable, but at ~9%, the deficit is quite small. Using battery power, multi-core performance is about 22% lower.

The review device performed very well in the synthetic benchmarks, and our subjective performance observations confirm this. Only when activating the dedicated graphics card via Advanced Optimus (e.g., when launching a game) does there appear to be a slight lag, but this is normal.

The review unit is equipped with a WD 2 TB SSD and has 1.74 TB available to the user after the initial startup. The PCIe 4.0 SSD's performance is very good and remains stable even under continuous load. Thanks to the second M.2 2280 slot, the storage capacity can be expanded very easily and cost-effectively.