We retest the Asus Zephyrus G14 battery life and now it's over two times longer than before

In our review of the Asus Zephyrus G14 a few months ago, we noted its poor battery life as one of the main drawbacks of the system. Our original WLAN battery life test, for example, would last only 4 hours before automatic shutdown. Readers noted the unusually short results and Asus have sent us another identical unit to rerun these tests. Our revised results are shown below.

Apparently, second time's a charm as runtimes are significantly better than before. The system is able to last for over 9 hours on a full charge compared to just 4 hours on our first go around. Power consumption when idling on desktop is also down significantly to just 5 W to 16 W compared to 30 W to 37 W in our original test.

So, what was responsible for our numbers being so off on our original review unit? We can't say for sure, but it was likely due to unforeseen background activity that we hadn't accounted for. Or, perhaps Asus did some behind-the-scenes tweaking to our second test unit. System performance is still intimately tied to the pre-installed Asus Armoury Crate application which can be unnecessarily confusing to use. The software, for example, can allow for both Turbo mode and Power Saver mode simultaneously. Whatever the case, keep in mind that we always test all laptops in stock condition with OEM drivers and Windows Updates at their latest respective versions at the time of publishing.

Regardless, the revised numbers are a boon for the system as users can enjoy the insane multi-thread processing power of the Ryzen 9 4900HS while still having respectable battery life especially for a small 14-inch gaming laptop.