With Intel really pushing the envelope for its Panther Lake lineup, ASUS is reciprocating that love by refreshing its ROG Zephyrus G14 and G16 laptops with the chipmaker’s CPUs, and making them this year’s frontrunners.
The Zephyrus G14, for starters, will ship out with the Core Ultra 9 386H CPU. That’s a 16-core CPU with a boost clock of up to 4.9GHz, and an NPU capable of 50 TOPS. As for the GPU, this starts from an RTX 5060 and goes all the way up to an RTX 5080. However, if and when the laptop makes it way to our shores, we wouldn’t be surprised if ASUS doesn’t bring in the SKUs with RTX 5080.
Other specs include up to 64GB LPDDR5X-8533 RAM, along with 2TB of PCIE 4.0 storage by default. The display will be a 14-inch ROG Nebula HDR display, which sports 3K (2,880 x 1,800) OLED panel, along with a 120Hz refresh rate and is NVIDIA G-Sync ready. For ports, the Zephyrus G14 is fitted with one 3.5mm combo audio jack, an HDMI 2.1 FRL port, two USB-A 3.2 Gen2 ports, one USB4 port, and a Thunderbolt 4 port. Powering it all is a 73Wh, 4-cell battery.
Just to be clear, ASUS is still making a Zephyrus G14 with AMD’s Ryzen AI 400 Series CPU, but because Intel’s Panther Lake is the key focus, the only model it’s making is with the Ryzen AI 9 465 with an RTX 5060 and just 32GB of LPDDR5X-7500 RAM.
Moving up to the new Zephyrus G16, all SKUs are also rocking the Core Ultra 9 386H as the G14, but this model can be fitted with up to an RTX 5090. The main differentiator here is its 16-inch ROG Nebula HDR OLED display, which also has a maximum resolution of 2.5K (2,560 x 1,600) and a maximum refresh rate of 240Hz. Oh, and a bigger 90Wh battery.
Beyond that, the Zephyrus G16 also comes with up to 64GB LPDDR5X-8533 RAM, 2TB of PCIe 4.0 storage, the same number of ports, plus an SD Card reader.
ASUS still hasn’t provided any release dates for the new ROG Zephyrus G14 and G16 lineup, but given market trends, we’ll likely see them sometime during the second quarter of this year.
