Asus’ Zephyrus G14 is one of the nicest gaming laptop designs I’ve ever tested, and now this high-end RTX 4070 and Ryzen 9 7940HS equipped model is $450 off at Best Buy in the US. This spec also includes 16GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD, making for a powerful machine that is still portable thanks to its 14-inch frame with a 2560×1600 165Hz IPS display.
I personally never buy high-end laptops when they first come out – it feels like a massive waste of money when you can get last-gen models, even the fully upgraded versions with all the bells and whistles, for significantly less money once they go on sale. You don’t even lose that much performance compared to a next-gen model in most cases, especially in this case as we’ve yet to see RTX 40-series cards be replaced by their eventual 50-series successors – so, at worst, you’d be putting this up against an RTX 4070 Ti or 4070 Ti Super model that delivers ballpark similar performance yet costs way more.
For example, the last laptop I bought – and the one I’m writing this post on now – is an M1 Pro MacBook Pro 16. This cost £2399 when it debuted in 2021, yet two years later I was able to pick up the exact same spec for £1299 when it was discounted at CostCo for Black Friday. A 2023-era MacBook Pro 16 with an M3 Pro (currently £2599) is still faster than my machine for sure – but it’s not twice as fast, so I feel like I’ve come out ahead!
Back to the Zephyrus G14 – this is a really nice little machine, as you can run it in a cool and quiet mode that delivers decent performance while being barely audible, or you can stick some headphones on and crank up the performance at the expense of fan noise to tackle more demanding AAA games. Thicker laptops with more robust cooling solutions will perform better – even with the same core specs – but I’m sure many people will want that balance between power and portability that the Zephyrus G14 provides.
