After a certain point, the performance you get from any gaming notebook starts to climb more slowly than the price does. There's no doubt that the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 for 2026 is an excellent machine, almost across the board. The build, the spec (for this overpowered version), and the portability are all amazing. The price tag, though, is a kick in the guts. Should you settle for fewer frames and a much lower price? Certainly. Will you want to? No, probably not.
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Design
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Display
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Performance
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Battery
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Value
Stuff has seen previous versions of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16, but never anything quite like this. We had the company’s priciest version in for review, for starters. Also, when a laptop costs between R110,000 and R120,000, we’re used to seeing… well, more laptop. They tend to be thicker desktop replacements rather than anything that looks portable. That’s not the case here.
It’s also why this one commands the price it does. The bulk doesn’t signal this Zephyrus G16’s innards the way another laptop might. Somehow, Asus has crammed in enough power to blow basically everything in your way some distance down the road. It’s done so in an unassuming chassis that wouldn’t look out of place in a board meeting. The other attendees will notice if you fire up Cyberpunk 2077 at max resolution, however.
Sheep’s clothing
The fact that this ROG Zephyrus G16 is a gaming machine is very well concealed. There are some light accents, notably muted lighting in the lid and the keyboard backlights, that hint at its capabilities. The 16in 240Hz OLED panel is another clue, but you’ll have to delve into the machine’s specs to get the full picture. Otherwise, it’s almost all business premium in appearance. The chassis is extremely sturdy, and having the whole thing tuck into a padded envelope (included in the package) is just another element of the Zephyrus G16’s disguise. It doesn’t look like it’ll obliterate most games on the planet. But it will.
The layout makes it suitable for multiple functions, too. The trackpad is one of the best we’ve ever seen. Asus is doing that a lot lately. The left-hand edge hosts the power port — a proprietary job — as well as a full HDMI. USB-C and -A ports live here, as does a 3.5mm port. The right replicates the USB layout, but adds an SD card slot.
If it wasn’t for the prominent Nvidia logo on the keyboard face, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Zephyrus G16 was all about spreadsheets.
Wolf
Even mediocre Asus laptops feature excellent screens. The 16in panel in the Zephyrus G16 is one of the company’s best. But it’s only as good as the hardware cunningly concealed underneath the stealth design. The internals are more than enough to make any game perform as expected. Odds are, if you’re seriously considering one, you’re not just playing Rocket League.
Intel’s Core Ultra 9 386H, 64GB of LPDDR5x RAM, 2TB of storage, and an Nvidia RTX 5090 24GB (GDDR7) are impressive enough that Sam Altman might kick your door in looking for extra data-centre components. They’re also pricey across the board, whether they’re packed into a notebook or separate components for a desktop rig. The desktop version of the 5090 alone (with, admittedly, 32GB of GDDR7) will run you R75,000 on its own. It’s not sane, but nor is the price of this machine.
You’ll get plenty of performance for your cash. It doesn’t really matter how many benchmarks we threw at this one (Duncan was especially fond of watching the numbers go up), it all came down to more than enough frames for the most demanding games we could throw at Asus’ machine. With Nvidia’s best mobile GPU, 64GB of RAM, and Intel’s Panther Lake chipset, that was never in doubt. This G16 even, somehow, manages over an hour of this performance when disconnected from its power brick. It’s not good for anything else afterwards, but it’s an option. Whether this is worth over a hundred grand is another matter.
Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 verdict
Look, there are cheaper versions of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 available, with available storage being the major factor. We just happened to test the monster version. This performance is possible at around R75,000, if you’re trying to justify your ‘budget’. Whether you’re stuffing 2TB or 8TB of capacity inside shouldn’t change the fact that this one gobbles up games and spits out frames.
Do you need it? Absolutely not. Pretty much nobody does, unless they’re also doing regular high-end video editing or computer-assisted design. Should you want it? That’s just as easy to answer — you should. A Toyota will take you to work just as effectively as a Century. Only one of those is likely to turn the heads of folks who know what you’re travelling in. The GU606AX version of Asus’ G16 is… pretty much the same thing, without the bespoke leather seats. Whether you should be paying Asus’ listed asking price is another matter. You’ll get close-enough performance for far, far less money, and that makes it incredibly hard to justify.
