ASUS – ROG Zephyrus 15.6″ WQHD 165Hz Gaming Laptop-AMD Ryzen 9-16GB DDR5 Memory-NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060-512GB PCIe 4.0 SSD – Eclipse Gray

Overall
I really like the laptop in it of itself, the process to get here was a bit of trouble however. Pulling it out of the box, I can’t say I was 100% happy with the laptop. Truth be told, if I purchased this unit I would of been back at the customer service counter on the second day returning it. It’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong with the hardware itself. And I’d like to believe it’s limited to early batch models. But something is inherently wrong with some of the Asus pre-loaded software as they always arrive to the same state. Setup to arrive here consists of setup through Windows Assistant, apply all Windows Updates, reboot, apply additional Windows Updates, reboot, start and allow Asus software to collect information and update, and finally reboot. Once it comes back the issues begin to propagate. Going through the Windows recovery, either reinstalling Windows and keeping your data or wiping and installing a new Windows. Once you go through all updates and use Asus software, you’re back to where you started. It’s my assumption that the Asus software that came preinstalled was of some kind of alpha build that wasn’t quite stable. Installing the Asus software from the Asus website works as intended. Even if you deviate from my outlined steps such as add your favorite browser, grab favorite Windows Store apps, or grab your favorite game launcher in between my mentioned steps. You’ll eventually have the Asus .exe errors (more details on this below). Before applying a fix to this machine I attempted to run a number of games, since this is referred to a gaming laptop, from various platforms-Steam, Epic, and Xbox.
Steam Working
Tales of Berseria
Ghostrunner
Tokyo Xanadu EX+
Apex Legends
Tomb Raider Anniversary
CS:GO
Guilty Gear XX Accent Core
Raise of the Tomb Raider
The Witcher 3
Homeworld Remastered Collection
Star Wars Empire at War Gold Pack
Valkyria Chronicles
Sakura MMO #3
Not Working
Ashes of the Singularity
Bright Memory Infinite
Gundam Evolution Playtest
Halo Infinite (Multiplayer)
Yoku’s Island Express
Bright Memory
Xbox Gamepass Working
Halo Infinite
Edge of Eternity
Gears Tactics
Age of Empires IV
Sea of Thieves
Doom Eternal
Destiny
Epic Working
Among Us
Batman Arkham Knight
Fortnite
Others Working
Genshin Impact
Guild Wars 2
Most of these worked, others just spat out error messages or said launched and would immediately close. At no point did those actually show a window of any kind and just closed out the process before a window did come up. Everything listed here worked flawlessly after applying fix.
Construction
This thing is solid! Everything feels quite sturdy. The panel feels well made and the keyboard is quite spacious without feeling unnecessarily large. My only real concern in this area is the chiseled rear edge exposing the exhaust grill that blows all of its hot air directly onto the screen. The base panel gets very hot during gaming sessions so I’m a little concerned if this could cause premature failure of the display. Along the base of the laptop over on the left hand side you got your standard aud port, 2x USB Type-C, 1x 3.1 USB Type-A, LAN Jack, HDMI Port, and C Power Jack. On the right you got a 2nd 3.1 USB Type-A, Micro SD Slot, and your security latch. Then along left right and rear you have your intake/exhaust grills.
Performance
This is where it shines, although I’m not sure I like that it runs very hot. On boot, it idles around 62 degree Celsius. On boot, under load as it’s working its hardest, it can go to about 71 degrees Celsius. After testing out several games on it I gave some of the in-game bench marking tools a try, which I’ve attached to this. I also ran Cinebench, PassMark, and CrystalDisk. At its most intensive task I recorded 95 degrees Celsius and a 160w power draw on the outlet using a killawatt. At idle, I saw as low as 90w.
During gaming session, depending on the intensity of the workload on the laptop, I seen a range of 80-96 degrees Celsius. With games running anywhere between 1440p to 2160p under normal/medium and ultra presets.
Issues/Solution
The best working fix I found for this thing was an entire wipe of the SSD drive and a reinstall of everything in segments. Trying to remove individual components nor skipping any previously mentioned steps never seemed to solve the issues. They would eventually surface or wouldn’t allow certain types of programs to run. In total, this little process had me dedicating about 3 additional hours of time.
Conclusion
I really like this machine! The aesthetics are great and the overall layout is nice. Having quick access to frequently used ports is great. I just can’t fully get behind the choice of angling the hot exhaust at the screen. But I guess only time will tell if this is as big of an issue as I believe it is.

The Asus Rog Zephyrus G15! Out of the box, you get the laptop, charging brick, and some manuals that could be tossed aside! Packaging was good, and the laptop arrived intact!
There are two big differences from this year’s model and last years. First off, we now have a MUX switch for better gaming performance and the second being that we now have a webcam, so no more need for an external webcam to do conference calls!
Specs:
— Ryzen 9 6900hs
— RTX 3060
— 165hz QHD panel
— 16GB of RAM
—- half soldered, upgraded mine to 40gb by replacing the 8GB stick with a 32gb 4800mhz DDR5 SODIMM
— 512GB NVME SSD
—- not soldered, upgraded mine to 4TB, two 2TB XPG Gammix S70 sticks since there are two M.2 slots
— Wi-Fi 6e
—- not soldered, so upgradeable at a later point should Wi-Fi standards change
— 90WH battery
Right off the bat, I replaced the 512GB SSD and added an additional one. Was very happy to see that there were two PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots. I also maxed out the RAM to 40gb. Was a shame that half the RAM was soldered on, and only one slot was available to upgrade. I think that was a big miss from Asus, but it was to be expected since this model follows the previous year’s build architecture. What this means is that the first 8GB of my 32GB stick will run in dual channel with the soldered 8GB and the remaining 24GB of my 32gb stick will run as single channel when it’s being accessed.
Ports:
— barrel connector (power)
— HDMI 2.0
— RJ45 Ethernet (gigabit)
— 2x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 (10GBs)
— 2x USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (10GBps)
— 3.5mm audio/mic combo jack
— microSD card slot
— Kensington lock
Another big miss that I noticed was that the two USB-C ports are only USB 3.2 Gen 2 which is limited to 10GBs. Would have loved to see These ports be Thunderbolt 4 / USB 4 since Ryzen 6000 series CPUs support it…
Moving onto performance, this thing can and will game. It is an entry to mid-tier gaming laptop, but top tier work horse. Playing games at medium settings will yield very good frame rates and the panel is no slouch. Did not notice any ghosting when playing FPS games and the color accuracy is quite good as well for doing color grade work flows. As a gamer and software engineer, I was very happy with the performance this machine puts out!
Battery life is also very good. If gaming, i get 2.5+ hours (depending on the game) and if just working (e.g, coding, design work, etc.) i get 7+ hours. Please note these numbers are based off of my workflows, so your mileage may vary based on your usage.
Though there were a few misses in my mind, this still makes for a great laptop for anyone. Overall, I would highly recommend this laptop to anyone that is looking to game and get work done!

This is the most professional looking gaming laptop I’ve ever seen and handled. I love the direction that the Asus ROG team has taken with the Zephyrus line. There are no flashy LED lighting elements or any over the top gaming design cues. Instead you get a very sleek and minimalist profile. The construction and finishing is a matte grey combination of aluminum and plastic that feels very high quality. The weight of this laptop also feels perfectly balanced with an even distribution throughout the body (weighs only around 4lbs). It feels very light but still very premium at the same time. It’s the perfect laptop for a professional that is into serious gaming but also wants the versatility of taking this laptop to business meetings or public meetups without looking out of place. I also love how the laptop props up when the lid is opened to provide better thermal efficiency (it also makes typing on the keyboard much more comfortable!).
In a market flooded with various RTX3060 laptop offerings, I think this G15 Zephyrus takes the top spot. In terms of performance, the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS crushed everything I threw at it. Not surpsingly, it loaded applications and programs lightning fast. As a test, I would put it up against an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H and the 6900HS on this Zephyrus always loaded applications at least 2 to 3 seconds faster (applications tested were CPU-Z and Adobe Photoshop).This is a serious notebook not just for gamers but for those power users that are also into content creation, emulating virtual environments (e.g. engineering students), and those that simply like to have a ton of tabs open on chrome while swapping between multiple workloads. I’ve noticed some confusion as to whether this laptop comes with 8GB of RAM or 16GB. This laptop comes with 8GB of onboard RAM that is soldered onto the motherboard as well as 8GB of DDR5-3200 RAM in a DIMM slot for a total of 16GB. I was able to confirm this on the CPU-Z application. You can expand upto a total of 40GB. Hopefully that helps clear up some confusion!
The RTX 3060 performed flawlessly when playing Doom Eternal and Resident Evil Village. I typically averaged anywhere from 75 to 125 FPS on “Ultra” settings on Doom Eternal and anywhere between 80 to 130 FPS on mostly high settings on RE Village. One thing to note though, as most are already aware, the 3060 has 6GB of VRAM. This limited me on Doom Eternal from going anything above “Ultra” settings (i.e. Nightmare and Ultra nightmore modes) and I couldnt go above 2GB of texture quality (High) on RE Village due to a lot of the other settings also requiring a certain amount of VRAM. As you can see on my screenshot, the game itself will advise you when youre going over the VRAM capacity. This is of course just a limitation of the 3060’s 6GB VRAM buffer. If you’re the type of person that just needs to crank everything to maximum, the 3070 or 3080 offerings will serve you best. With that said, gaming on this ROG zephyrus with the 3060 provided an extremely high fidelity gameplay experience. Playing on a 15 inch screen on 1440p, I couldnt imagine that having the ability to turn up the graphics settings to the absolute highest tier would make that much of a visual fidelity difference. Gaming on this was an extremely fluid and smooth experience with some amazing performance. Benchmarking this laptop on 3D Mark’s “TimeSpy”, I achieved a 6870 on the standard Asus ROG “Performance” mode and a very impressive 8251 score when using the “Turbo” mode on this laptop. When using Turbo mode, I also noticed a noticeable improvement in games of around at least 10 additional FPS. I also love how easy Asus made it to turn on Turbo mode (simply hold down the Function key and press the F5 key with the fan logo). Do note that if not using headphones, the fans can get pretty loud on Turbo mode!
My absolute favorite things about this gaming laptop is the touchpad, audio experience, and keyboard. Without a doubt, I think Asus makes the best touchpad on any Windows gaming laptop. I’ve always held Apple as the gold standard for touchpads and this feels just as good. It’s extremely premium compared to the competition. I’ve handled much more expensive gaming laptops and the touchpad is something that is so often overlooked by many companies; yet it’s one of the single most important components that you frequently interact with especially when youre on the go. It is buttery smooth with just the right amount of tacticle feedback without producing an overly annoying click. The audio blew my socks off! This thing has two upward firing speakers near the keyboard and two downfiring speakers on the bottom of the laptop. They’re the best speakers I’ve heard on any laptop yet. The keyboard is a dream to type on. The layout is ergnomic with each key spaced out enough so that your hands never feel cramped. The key action feels squishy and comfy yet responsive. I also love the well thought out placement of some of the keyboard shortcuts like having the audio keys at the top of the keyboard as well as the ROG key. You can press the ROG key to launch the armoury crate software whenever you want to boost your clocks in Turbo mode, edit the lighting on your keyboard, adjust fan curves, or set the 3060 as the discrete GPU (as opposed to swapping back and forth with the integrated AMD graphics to save power) and a ton of other customization options.
The QHD 165Hz IPS display on this laptop is gorgeous. While it is not HDR and it does not offer crazy levels of peak brightness, I found the 300 nits of peak brightness on this display more than plenty. It appears as though the display is also pantone validated and has a color space rating of 100% DCI-P3. It is no wonder that this display produces some great color accuracy, deep blacks, and wonderful skin tones. Skin tones look natural and colors appear bright and vivid while not looking overly saturated like they do on a lot of displays these days. Gaming on this display is incredibly fluid. There is no backlight bleed whatsoever on my display. Uniformity seems very good on an all white background as well. Whatever Asus is doing with the QA on their displays these days is certainly apparent.
The last thing I’d like to touch on is the thermals on this laptop. We all know the difficult challenge gaming laptops have when it comes to dissipating heat produced by a high end GPU. While this laptop can get a bit warm due to the 3060, it’s one of the most thermal efficient gaming laptops I’ve ever used. As seen in my GPU temperature screenshot, when benchmarking on 3D Mark, the RTX 3060 never exceeded 77 degrees Celcius when under full load for extended periods of time. On a lot of other gaming laptops I’ve noticed that the chassis around the keyboard can get quite hot. On this ROG Zephyrus, it always felt cool to the touch. The amount of cooling vents on this laptop is very impressive. The placement was also thoughtfully considered as they don’t compromise the placement of the keyboard or input ports for peripherals.
In the RTX3060 gaming laptop segment, this ROG Zephyrus G15 is my absolute favorite so far. Asus took a lot of tasteful and thoughtful considerations with the design of this gaming laptop. All the way from the sleek and low profile design cues to one of the most premium touchpads to ever grace a gaming laptop. The immersive audio experience and the beast thermal performance were also other aspects that Asus nailed. Asus didn’t just deliver a couple of heavy hitting specs on paper, they delivered a fully thought out package for the serious gamer/power user. This is the reason I believe that this year’s Zephyrus G15 deserves a full five stars rating. Well done Asus! If you’re shopping in the RTX 3060 category of gaming laptops, this is the one to get.