If I could only have one laptop for work and gaming, I’d get this one

is 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 Port selection: A Speakers: A Number of ugly stickers to remove: 3 (one underneath) Zephyrus laptops have been getting steady price increases for years, even before the ongoing global memory shortage spurred by AI data centers that’s driving up the cost of RAM and SSDs. But my review unit with the new Intel CPU is $1,000 more than a nearly identical last-gen configuration with an AMD processor. Asus is keeping last year’s AMD models around to maintain cheaper options, but we don’t know if those prices could one day rise like so many others. The new Intel-based G14 comes with a 16-core Intel Core Ultra 9 386H chip, Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Laptop GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD. Our $3,599.99 review configuration doubles the RAM to 32GB. The new G14 should be a little more powerful than the last-gen with a 5080, because it reaches a peak TGP of 130W instead of 120W, but that doesn’t change the fact that you now get less RAM and storage for similar prices to a last-gen G14 or larger G16 with a higher-end GPU. Aside from these very high prices, there’s no major flaw in the G14. The webcam is grainy in low light, and the SSD is around 12 percent slower than the last-gen, but those are minor issues. The G14 looks and feels mostly the same as the redesigned model that launched in 2024, and it’s a similar size and weight to the 14-inch MacBook Pro. The 2026 G14 also has some small cosmetic refinements, like more LED segments in the animated slash lighting on the lid and circular hole vents in the bottom cover instead of rectangular slots. This is as subtle as ROG branding gets. Like previous generations, the G14’s keyboard and mechanical trackpad are among the best around. The keys have nice deep travel and are only surpassed in feel by the more tactile ones from the likes of Lenovo’s ThinkPads. The large trackpad doesn’t click in all four corners (like even a $600 MacBook Neo does now), but it’s solid-feeling, with a satisfyingly firm and tactile kachunk. Most people will game with a mouse anyway. The 2880 x 1800 / 120Hz OLED display is as crisp as ever, and it looks fantastic. It’s brighter than the 2025 model in SDR (500 nits instead of 400) and much brighter at HDR peak brightness (up to 1,100 nits instead of 500). The port selection is still expansive, and it’s been slightly upgraded with Thunderbolt 4 instead of USB4 and the aforementioned full-size SD card slot. Even the speakers are impressive for a laptop of this size. Asus manages to cram six of them into this small chassis, and audio sounds rich and full with even a tiny bit of a left-to-right stereo soundstage. It’s the only Windows laptop I’ve used that I rank closely to the MacBook Pro for sound quality. On the right: USB-C, USB-A, and my precious SD card slot. On the left: Asus’ proprietary reversible power connector, HDMI 2.1, USB-A, USB-C, and 3.5mm audio. The creature comforts are important, but if you spend $3,600 on a laptop it better perform well. I’m pleased to say the G14 does. It feels fast during light and heavy tasks alike. Editing through a few hundred 50-megapixel RAW photos in Adobe Lightroom Classic felt speedy, even on battery power with the fans barely running and not much heat being generated. Culling and rating images in Lightroom was a similar experience to a MacBook Pro, with 100 percent previews loading promptly. The heavier processing is where things sometimes get a little slower, especially once I start