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The G15 is reasonably modest as gaming laptops go – it doesn’t feel huge or bulky and there’s a thankful minimum of SuPeR 31337 bling.
Jim Salter
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Here is such an important image on the keyboard. We know better than to predict readers’ reactions at this time – but the absence of a PrtScr key annoyed us.
Jim Salter
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The back panel of the laptop is the most blinged-out part of it, with a slightly rainbow-dot pattern. We didn’t like it, but we didn’t find it overwhelmingly disgusting either.
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Left side: DC cylinder, full size HDMI, full size RJ-45 (yes!), USB-A, 2x USB-C, 3.5 mm audio.
Jim Salter
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Right side: USB-A, micro-SD, Kensington lock slot (to the right of the cooling holes).
Jim Salter
Recently, we managed to get our hands on an Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 laptop. We had to do it just like everyone else, finding one and buying it at retail. This is remarkable because this laptop combines the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS processor with an Nvidia RTX 3070 mobile GPU, a combination that means this device sells extremely fast.
Make no mistake, this year’s AMD-powered Zephyrus RTX 3070 is a distinct step. Last year, if you wanted an RTX 3000 series GPU in a laptop, you had to settle for an Intel processor to go with it.
General presentation
| Specifications at a glance: Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 GA503, as tested | |
|---|---|
| YOU | Windows 10 Home |
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS with 3.0 GHz cores (4.5 GHz boost) |
| Ram | 16GiB DDR4-3200 |
| GPU | AMD Radeon 8 core / Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 MaxQ |
| SSD | SK Hynix M.2 NVMe PCIe3.0 1 TB |
| Battery | ASUStek 90Wh |
| Display | 1440p WQHD, non-dazzling, 165Hz, adaptive sync |
| Connectivity |
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| Tested price | $ 1,800 at Best Buy |
This year, the Ryzen-powered Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 is almost everything we’d want in a gaming laptop. Beastly CPU? Check it out. Beastly GPU? Check it out. Full-size cable LAN port? Check it out. Powerful speakers? Absolute. 1440p display with high refresh? Yes. Even the storage space on this laptop – a model of SK Hynix NVMe SSD that I’ve never seen before – gets blistered quickly.
Unfortunately, this year’s Zephyrus G15 shares the same Achilles’ heel as last year’s Ryzen-powered G14: no webcam.
This puzzling omission feels almost like someone from Asus lost a bet. Not only do game streams frequently want a bit of a view, it’s been a year and we’re turning into a global pandemic with an almost universal need for daily teleconferencing. So why Asus … Why?
Apart from that, this is an excellent general purpose laptop as well as a game specific beast. Even his fans performed much better than last year’s G14, and this configuration remained almost inaudible in all but Time Spy testing.
Internal and upgrades
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With the back panel removed, everything you might want to upgrade to the G15 is immediately visible. Note the single DIMM slot, populated with M.2 on the left above it and empty M.2 on the right.
Jim Salter
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There are three more screws hidden under these small rubber caps.
Jim Salter
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After carefully removing the rubber caps with a small, sharp knife or similar tool, you are ready to pull the last three screws and remove the back panel.
Jim Salter
Getting into the Zephyrus G15 is relatively easy. There are no individual partition panels; the entire back plate is lifted after removing 10 visible and three hidden screws. (The screws in the center of the panel are the “hidden” ones, hidden under sticky rubber covers for some reason.)
Keep in mind that the screw on the bottom right is a captive design – although you can force it, it should not actually come out of the back plate. The idea is that after completely removing the first 12 screws, you can use the thirteenth unscrewed, but still inserted, as a lever to open the panel in that corner. However, we recommend a spudger and some patience if you want to remove the panel without damage, whether or not you use the captive screw to get started.
Once you’ve entered the G15, everything is easy to find and work on – there’s nothing like this “take out the keyboard to access the Wi-Fi business” nonsense. You will find the unique DIMM slot (initially populated with a Samsung 8GiB DIMM, on our system) just to the left of the center. The C: drive, a SK Hynix 1TB M.2 NVMe drive, is just above and to the left of the DIMM slot. A second unpopulated M.2 NVMe slot is stopped to the right of the first M.2, and the Intel AX201 Wi-Fi is connected just below it.
The only somewhat sour note is that the unique 8GiB DIMM slot in the laptop’s 16GiB base is glued to the board. This limits how much RAM you can upgrade. The manual says that it only works at 24GiB, but I reached 40GiB without any problems using a 32GiB HyperX DIMM. However, you are actually locked into single channel mode for 24GiB, as it is not possible to upgrade both banks equally.
Performance – multi-threaded CPU
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Ryzen 9 5900HS surpasses last year’s R9 4900HS and completely surpasses anything else.
Jim Salter
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Passmark has a massive advantage for this year’s Ryzen 9 5900HS, which the Cinebench R20 did not.
Jim Salter
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The Tiger Lake i7 slightly outperformed last year’s Ryzen 9 4900HS in the multi-threaded Geekbench 5 – but it can’t be hung from this year’s 5900HS.
Jim Salter
Ryzen 9 5900HS in the Zephyrus G15 – to everyone’s surprise – clears the floor with every competitor in multi-threaded tests, including Geekbench 5, unusually friendly to Intel.
In the Cinebench R20 – generally our favorite single-processor test – the 5900HS only improves on last year’s 4900HS (found in the 2020 ROG Zephyrus G14) slightly, but both offer about twice the performance of its closest competitors.
Passmark shows a huge boost for the 5900HS, which did not appear in the Cinebench R20. In the end, the 5900HS gets a modest but visible victory over the Tiger Like i7-1185G7, our previous Geekbench 5 champion in laptop space.
Performance – single threaded CPU
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i7-1185G7 still has the performance crown of the laptop in the Cinebench R20 with a single wire, but with a much smaller margin.
Jim Salter
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The ROG G15’s Ryzen 9 5900HS takes the crown of the Passmark laptop away from the Intel Tiger Lake i7-1185G7, albeit by a very narrow margin.
Jim Salter
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The I7-1185G7 still holds top honors in single-threaded Geekbench 5 laptops, though – again – with a much narrower margin than before.
Jim Salter
Performance testing with a single thread is rather a mixed bag. The fight here is entirely between the Ryzen 9 5900HS in the ROG G15 and the Tiger Lake i7-1185G7 running at 28W TDP.
In the Cinebench R20, the Tiger Lake i7 and Ryzen 9 5900HS are neck and neck, with a very narrow victory that will go to Tiger Lake. Passmark shows us the same situation, but with Ryzen 9, the one that barely wins. Geekbench 5 gives Lake Tiger i7 a more visible victory.
As usual, we warn readers not to be too excited about single-threaded numbers – the margins here are much narrower than multi-threaded testing, and the tests themselves shape a rather unusual workflow.
It is much more common to lock a single thread in a multi-threaded workload than to have a truly single-threaded workload running independently. Also, these numbers do not demonstrate “performance per thread in a multi-threaded task;” test true single threaded performance with all other cores idle or very nearly idle.
Performance – storage
Jim Salter
We weren’t sure what to expect from the SK Hynix NVMe SSD in the G15 – this is not a name you often see in the consumer SSD space, and the specific model seems to be new for the Zephyrus G15 as well.
CrystalDiskMark testing definitely puts our minds at ease; SK Hynix has surpassed not only the Kingston Design-in drive from the Minisforum U850, but also the WD Black 2TB and WD SN730 512GB (not shown) from this spring’s Ars System Guide.
This is a seriously fast SSD, which strongly contributes to the overall impression that the ROG G15 laptop gives to a new user. It’s not just a concentrated FPS monster, but feels extremely fast and in cases of general use.