GoKawiilis a reviewer covering laptops and the occasional gadget. He spent over 15 years in the photography industry before joining The Verge as a deals writer in 2021.
I’ve loved the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 since it launched in 2020. I bought one for my wife after reading about how awesome it was on a little site called The Verge dot com.
Since then, the G14 has gotten some facelifts, chip bumps, an occasional special edition, a full redesign, and a 16-inch sibling — and it’s remained great. Now, in 2026, Asus has new flagship models making the switch from AMD chips to Intel Panther Lake CPUs. And it now has something I have a soft spot for on any laptop: a full-size SD card slot.
The Zephyrus G14 already had me back in 2020, when it didn’t even have a webcam, but now it feels like a laptop specifically for me: a thin-and-light OLED-equipped gaming laptop that can play anything you throw at it, handle photo and video editing with ease, and last all day performing basic tasks.
But in its pursuit of more power, and thanks to RAMageddon, the G14’s price has risen an ungodly amount. The new Intel-based models start at $3,450, and our review config is $3,600. The value proposition that first defined the Zephyrus line is sadly long gone.
The Zephyrus G14 used to start in the low $1,000 range, with higher-end configs climbing to $2,500 or so. I paid under $1,400 for my open-box G14 with Ryzen 9 5900HS, RTX 3060, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD back in 2021. How the times have changed.
Component report card Screen: A
Webcam: C
Keyboard: A
Trackpad: B
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