ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 review: A gaming laptop with impressive visuals and power in one

National Post

06-05-2025

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After a couple weeks of use, I was a bit concerned with the battery. It's got 90Wh capacity, but I would charge it up, watch an hour or so of Netflix before bed, close the lid, and I'd wake up to the battery below 10%. I was a little worried. After a bit of digging, I realized that I had kept the laptop in 'Ultimate' GPU mode in Armoury Crate, and I'd changed the Performance Mode from 'Windows' to 'Performance' or other options depending on my use via the fan button (FN+F5). Without knowing, I'd bypassed the Windows power and sleep settings, and was now idling my GPU far higher than it needed to for just watching movies or other casual tasks.
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Once I'd sorted that out I was seeing completely reasonable battery usage, and the laptop would lose maybe a percent or two while asleep overnight. While gaming though, with full CPU, GPU and cooling engaged and game settings cranked, that 90Wh capacity gets chewed up in 2-3 hours depending on the game.
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The A/C adapter is a beefy 240W brick with a proprietary connection. Both of these I grew to live with since they grant 50% charge in 30 mins with fast charging. It turns out Thunderbolt 4 can handle up to 100w, so there's actually an option for you if you've got another charging brick and quality USB C cable. I repurposed another 60w laptop charger I had with a USB C connection, a cable I got off Amazon, and I was able to get pretty solid charging out of it. Probably about half speed, and no fast charging obviously. I don't know what effect that may have on the battery long term, but I'd assume it's minimal given it's charging slower than with the stock charger.
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Armoury crate
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With powerful hardware comes a desire for control, and that's where Armoury Crate (AC) comes in. It's not just a way to monitor performance and make little tweaks, it's like performance tuning software for a race car. There's honestly too much to get into, but this is where you can manage everything from Aura lighting to cooling and GPU performance via discrete modes. 'Ultimate' mode even engages the MUX switch which bypasses the CPU for graphics processing to push frames right from the dedicated GPU directly to the display to boost frame rates and reduce latency.
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AC also lets you remap the 4 customizable hotkeys above the keyboard, though frustratingly, there isn't an option to map any to enable/disable the Slash Lighting on the lid. A gripe shared by a number of folks online who eventually turned to GHelper, a popular 3rd party alternative billing itself as a lighter weight option; though there's sure to be some tweaking to manage both hardware and windows compatibility.
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There's a lot to be discovered and tinkered with in AC, and that's part of its value, but it's also part of its downfall. The user experience is not ideal, and it took me hours to actually find the GPU modes and slash lighting settings because they were buried in sub menus or only revealed after clicking a 'System Settings' button which is a totally different UX than the rest of the menus on the left of the screen.
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I tested a few AAA games with the ROG Zephyrus G16, as well as an old favourite just to see how it might change solely based on hardware, and each time I was blown away.
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Black Myth: Wukong
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This was the first game I tried, and right out of the gate in the first battle where you're introduced to Wukong and face-off against some towering gods up in the clouds, the particle physics and the lighting actually made me pause the game and restart just to play the intro again. The lighting and effects were staggering.
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Cyberpunk has the benefit of being one of the ~700 titles that can take full advantage of all the new features in the NVIDIA RTX 50 series GPUs. There's full support for frame generation, and other DLSS features I've been talking about earlier. It was clear even in the games' internal graphics benchmark that they were able to shine.
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Both the light and dark scenes popped and looked super realistic. Reflections too were stunning and mirrored the landscape nicely as you moved through a scene. The contrast and textures on offer in the gritty dystopian setting of this game were particularly striking on the OLED display.
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Perhaps because I am such a fan of the game, but also since I've been playing it since launch day in 2016 on PS4, PS5, and then PS5 Pro, I was particularly floored with the look and feel of No Man's Sky when I tried it on the Zephyrus G16. I was surprised to see that the game supported DLSS, frame generation, up to 240 fps in certain situations like the galactic map, and just generally looked drop dead gorgeous. Details I never knew existed were suddenly rendered before my eyes, and it's brought new life to the game.