Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025)

Introduction

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) is more of an iterative upgrade over its predecessor which, on paper, doesn’t seem too exciting.

Then again, the 2024 model impressed us a lot, so why change near-perfection?

This 2025 iteration follows a similar formula, with a svelte, MacBook Pro-inspired look complete with good port selection, a beefy core of an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H and RTX 5080, a large, responsive 16-inch QHD+ 240Hz OLED screen, and a large 90Whr battery.

In theory, this seems like more of the same from Asus, with a properly premium laptop that straddles the line between pro-grade gaming monster and a stylish, professional choice. That comes with an eye-watering £3399.99/$3599.99, making it nearly as expensive as the RTX 5090-powered Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate.

I’ve been using the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) for the last couple of weeks to see if it can keep the crown for the best gaming laptop we’ve tested.

Design and Keyboard

• MacBook Pro-inspired look and feel
• Fantastic port selection
• Responsive keyboard and huge trackpad

As has been typical with previous iterations of this laptop, the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) walks the line between a full-blown gaming behemoth and a more stylish, professional laptop in the vein of its ProArt-branded siblings.

I’d argue this 2025 iteration leans more towards the latter. It carries a refined aesthetic similar to a modern MacBook Pro, with an industrial, grey aluminium alloy frame and similar rounded corners. In addition, there is also the same LED lighting on the lid as the previous generation. For a large-screen gaming laptop, the 1.95kg weight is also quite unobtrusive and makes it surprisingly portable.

While being quite slender for a gaming laptop at just 17.5mm or so, the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) manages to pack in a great set of inputs. The left side features a DC port for charging, as well as a full-size HDMI, a USB-C, USB-A and a headphone jack, while the right side has a second USB-C and USB-A and a full-size SD card reader.

In spite of the larger frame, this Asus laptop features a smaller layout keyboard that draws another similarity to what you’d see on a MacBook Pro, with the deck housing a 75 percent-style layout with arrow keys and a function row. You don’t get a number pad. The keyboard itself is tactile and responsive with a good travel, while also coming with some excellent RGB backlighting for a splash of colour.

Another cue taken from Apple’s laptops is the huge trackpad that the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) features, giving your fingers oodles of real estate, complete with an accurate and responsive feel.

Display and Sound

• Gorgeous, large OLED screen
• Deep blacks and excellent contrast
• Genuinely good speakers

In properly premium laptop fashion, Asus has bundled the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) with a gorgeous OLED panel. To be specific, it’s a 16-inch 2560×1600 resolution option with a 240Hz refresh rate. This means good detail across a larger panel and excellent motion handling for general zippiness and responsive, crisp motion in games.

This means you’re getting a sublime blend of deep, inky blacks and lovely contrast for excellent dynamic range. This was also reflected in my colorimeter’s results of 0.03 for black level and 14690:1 for the screen’s contrast ratio.

Being an OLED means colour accuracy is also virtually perfect, with the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025)’s panel netting 100% of both sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts, and an exceedingly good 95% Adobe RGB coverage. This helps to signal the panel’s near-perfect suitability for both productivity and colour-sensitive workloads.

A peak SDR brightness of 405.5 nits is also respectable, meaning bright and punchy images are possible, while this panel also supports DisplayHDR True Black 500 for heightened vibrancy in supported content.

Audio-wise, the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025)’s speaker setup impresses with rich, full-bodied audio with good clarity and depth that make it one of the stronger instances available on a laptop of any kind in 2025.

Performance

• Core Ultra 9 285H is a beefy processor
• RTX 5080 isn’t as powerful as in rival laptops
• Capacious SSD with mediocre speeds

The performance of the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) is a tale of two halves, in spite of it coming with what’d be expectedly quite a beefy spec sheet on paper. The sample I have comes with Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285H chip, the flagship of the Arrow Lake-H lineup we’ve previously seen in the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025), complete with 16 cores and 16 threads.

The core arrangement is split between six Performance cores, eight Efficiency Cores and two Low-Power Efficiency cores. There is also a boost clock of up 5.4GHz, making this quite the brisk chip for any laptop, let alone a gaming one.

The chip is designed as more of an efficient alternative to the beefier HX chips you’d expect to see in a top-tier gaming laptop that costs as much as this one, but is arguably indicative of Asus positioning the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) as a laptop for both hardcore gamers and creative professionals.

With this in mind, the results in the Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 benchmark tests are strong and competitive against the Ryzen AI HX 370 chip inside the ProArt P16 (2025) and comparable to the Prestige 16 AI Evo in both single and multi-threaded loads. In multi-threaded tasks though, the Core Ultra 9 275HX you’ll find in rivals such as the Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate is better, given the eight extra cores and threads it provides.

The presence of an RTX 5080 laptop GPU should offer some fantastic gaming performance, and the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) does a solid job, with decent results of 102.22fps and 92fps in Cyberpunk 2077 and Returnal respectively at 1080p. Rainbow Six Extraction’s 131fps result at 1080p also proves competitive esports titles will be no trouble.

However, it’s from here that things get confusing, as the 1440p results in both Rainbow Six Extraction (142fps) and Returnal (92fps) either increase or stay the same. Only Cyberpunk 2077, with a 70.71fps average, decreased. 

It seems as if the slimmer chassis of the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) might be causing some thermal throttling, or potentially the fact that the Core Ultra 9 285H CPU isn’t as fast as the 275HX chip inside competitor laptops is contributing to much lower frame rates than key rivals. It is also a lower TGP variant of the 5080, with it being 125W against the 150W one inside Medion’s laptop, for instance.

The results here without any form of ray-tracing or upscaling applied were also a long way off the Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate’s results, being a full 30% or so behind in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p and 66% ahead in Returnal. In Rainbow Six Extraction, Medion’s laptop was almost twice as quick.

Adding in DLSS and the new Transformer model in Cyberpunk 2077 pushed frame rates up to 72.82fps at 1080p, and to 63.40fps at the 2560×1600 resolution of the display without any ray-tracing.

Ray-tracing certainly seemed to cause the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) some problems, with a sub-30fps average at native resolution, while a 1080p result of 47.12fps isn’t too inspiring. Bringing the DLSS upscaler into the mix did at least push them up to 53.30fps and 65.93fps respectively for much more playable rates.

Being a 50-series laptop also means this Asus laptop benefits from Nvidia’s clever Multi-Frame-Gen tech that adds in up to three ‘fake frames’ for every traditionally generated one thanks to AI for a perceivably smoother experience. The addition of these frames is reliant upon a base FPS figure that is high enough to mean the displayed image with Multi Frame Gen isn’t choppy or laggy.

With this, it’s able to mean you can take advantage of high refresh rate displays with smooth and responsive output without much of a penalty in latency. With the maximum 4x applied, it was able to take ray-traced Cyberpunk 2077 and push it to 218.8fps at 1080p, virtually maximising the 240Hz screen on this laptop. At full 2560×1600, it resulted in a solid 164.46fps.

You also get 32GB of RAM and a capacious 2TB SSD for the privilege, which provides respectable, if unremarkable speeds for a premium gaming laptop – 6364.09MB/s for reads and 5881.83MB/s for writes.

Software

• Clean Windows 11
• Useful pre-installed Asus apps
• Copilot+ PC powers are here

Software-wise, Asus hasn’t splurged too much of its own stuff on the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025), with this laptop coming with quite a clean Windows 11 install. There is MyAsus, the brand’s catch-all system app for controlling things such as different power modes, or audio settings, and Armoury Crate, Asus’ software for controlling more advanced items such as the LED lid lighting and how powerful the GPU is.

This laptop does also seemingly have enough AI horsepower to be termed as a Copilot+ PC, giving you the benefits of that which Microsoft includes, such as generative AI in the Paint and Photos apps, as well as the clever Windows Studio effects for the laptop’s built-in webcam for background blur, auto framing and more.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 2 hours 25 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for half a working day

It’s on the front of endurance where the ROG Zephyrus G16 (2025) is arguably the biggest disappointment of all. Asus quotes this laptop, with a capacious 90Whr cell, to last for up to 12 hours on a charge, which in theory would make it one of the longest-running gaming laptops.

However, the reality is quite different, as this Asus candidate barely managed two and a half hours of use in the PCMark 10 test with the brightness at the requisite 150 nits.

This is quite far off the six or so hours from last year’s model, and pales in insignificance against the near seven hours afforded by the RTX 5080 variant of the Medion Erazer Beast 16 X1 Ultimate. You’ll need to do some serious hypermiling to get it to last for a working day.

With the 420W DC charger, though, you won’t be plugged in for too long. A charge from zero to 50% took just 27 minutes, while a full charge to 100% took 67 minutes, making this one of the brisker laptops out there.

Should you buy it?

FAQs