ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 GU605 (2025) Review: Expensive yet desirable

ASUS refreshed its premium 16-inch laptop for 2025 with the launch of the new ROG Zephyrus G16 (GU605), bringing internal upgrades while maintaining the sleek, minimalist design that made its predecessor a fan favourite. The laptop retains its slim and lightweight aluminium chassis, complete with the distinctive Slash Lighting LEDs on the lid. Despite its compact footprint, the G16 continues to deliver a premium look and feel, making it one of the most portable yet capable gaming and creator laptops in its class.

This year’s model marks a return to Intel, now powered by the newly launched Arrow Lake-H processors. It also receives a GPU upgrade with NVIDIA’s latest RTX 50-series mobile graphics, promising improved efficiency and frame rates across both gaming and creative workloads. As a follow-up to last year’s AMD variant, the 2025 Zephyrus G16 aims to strike a balance between power and portability, but is it still good enough?

Design and build

As mentioned in the intro, the company hasn’t introduced any changes to the design, which seems to be a wise decision. The laptop retains its CNC-machined aluminium chassis and is available in Eclipse Grey and Platinum White colour options. It feels premium in terms of aesthetics and build quality, and remains one of the most compact 16-inch gaming notebooks, weighing just under 2kg with a maximum thickness of 17.4mm. While this slim design does come at the expense of some performance, it’s a compromise that’s hard to avoid.

The laptop passes the one-handed open test, and the entire chassis feels rigid. However, the laptop makes use of the same hinge as before, meaning the panel does wobble a bit. The inner deck is nice and spacious, with the speakers flanking on either side of the keyboard. 

As for I/O, the layout is similar, including a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, and a UHS-II SD card reader.

On the other side, there’s the power connector, an HDMI 2.1 port, a USB Type-C with Thunderbolt 4 support, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port and a 3.5mm audio combo jack. The wireless module has been upgraded on the 2025 model, which now offers support for Wi-Fi 7 as well as Bluetooth 5.4.

The bottom of the laptop has long rubber feet that offer grip as well as some height to allow proper airflow. The bottom panel can be removed, although you are going to need a hex-style screwdriver. Like the previous generation models, there are two M.2 SSD slots, meaning you can add a secondary storage drive. Apart from that, you can replace the Wi-Fi module and the battery, while the memory is integrated with the CPU. Both the CPU and GPU are cooled using a vapour chamber cooler with two cooling fans.

Display

The display is yet again similar to the late 2024 iteration of the ROG Zephyrus G16. The 16-inch ROG Nebula Display incorporates a glossy OLED panel with a 2.5K (2,560 x 1,600 pixels) resolution. It offers excellent contrast and colour reproduction capabilities with ASUS claiming 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, VESA certification to support DisplayHDR True Black 500, and up to 500 nits of brightness. 

The panel is factory calibrated for colour accuracy with a ΔE of less than 1. This makes it excellent for content creation, watching movies or TV shows in HDR format, and modern AAA games with visually stunning cinematics.

Additionally, the display offers an ultra-fast 240Hz refresh rate along with 0.2ms of response time as well as support for NVIDIA’s G-Sync technology, for a buttery smooth experience. It is one of the best displays we have tested on a laptop, offering excellent dynamic range, at the same time offering an extremely snappy experience. In terms of brightness, the overall panel is well lit and is sufficient for both indoor and outdoor usage, although you may notice a drop in brightness when watching HDR content.

Keyboard and trackpad

The keyboard is also identical to the 2024 models, meaning you get a standard layout without a dedicated numpad. The arrow keys are still tiny, and the RGB lighting is once again limited to a single-zone setup. However, these compromises don’t detract from the overall typing and gaming experience. With a generous 1.7mm of key travel and well-spaced keycaps, the keyboard feels responsive and comfortable. It leans toward a quieter, softer press rather than a loud, clicky feel, making it ideal for productivity tasks without causing distraction. The inclusion of four customizable macro keys at the top left adds further utility, especially for gamers who want additional controls at their fingertips.

Similarly, the trackpad hasn’t changed but continues to offer a massive size with a glass surface that delivers a premium feel, with smooth operation and satisfying feedback on clicks. There’s no rattling or looseness, just a clean, consistent response across the surface. Precision is excellent, making it more than capable for productivity work or casual browsing.

Performance

Powering the 2025 ROG Zephyrus G16 is Intel’s latest Arrow Lake-H based Core Ultra 9 285H processor, which features six performance cores, eight efficiency cores, two low-power efficiency cores, 16 threads, and a dedicated NPU (Neural Processing Unit). The CPU is capable of clocking up to 5.4GHz with a base TDP of 45W that can be tuned to go up to 110W on this particular laptop. Like most modern laptops, the 32GB LPDDR5X memory is soldered and can operate at speeds going up to 7,467MHz.

The new chip from Intel is promising as it manages to not only outperform its older Meteor Lake counterpart, but also competes strongly with the last-gen model, which was powered by the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. If we compare synthetic benchmark scores, the Core Ultra 9 285H tends to be slightly slow in multitasking. Overall performance, on the other hand, does see an uplift, even though practical gains may not be visibly huge. 

For graphics, the laptop has been updated with the latest NVIDIA RTX 50-series mobile GPUs. While ASUS has listed the laptop with the RTX 5060 going all the way up to the RTX 5090, the Indian retail model is currently limited to the RTX 5080. The latest Blackwell architecture on the RTX 50-series is said to offer better efficiency and improved performance in gaming as well as AI-based tasks. It also introduced DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation, which is said to boost frame rates by up to 8x depending on the game and scenario. 

Now, as per NVIDIA, the laptop version of the RTX 5080 is capable of drawing up to 175W. However, for the Zephyrus G16, ASUS has tuned the GPU with up to 130W. The obvious reason for that is due to the thin chassis of the laptop. This translates to relatively slower graphics performance, even when you completely disable the iGPU using the MUX switch via Armoury Crate. 

In competitive shooters like Valorant, the laptop easily crosses 240 FPS at 1200p, ensuring ultra-smooth gameplay for esports enthusiasts. Even visually demanding titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2 perform admirably, delivering over 60 FPS and 80 FPS, respectively, which can be further improved with DLSS or frame generation.

At 1440p, the laptop continues to impress, although more graphically intense games see a noticeable drop in frame rates. Cyberpunk 2077 hovers just above 50 FPS at native 1440p, while Alan Wake 2 averages around 55 FPS, indicating that enabling DLSS or using performance presets would be ideal for smoother experiences at this resolution. On the other hand, older or well-optimised games like GTA V and Forza Horizon 5 run well above 100 FPS at 1440p, showcasing the raw GPU power of the RTX 5080. Overall, the Zephyrus G16 offers a balanced blend of portability and high-end gaming capability, especially for users who prefer 1200p or plan to use DLSS at higher resolutions.

Additionally, we tested the DLSS 4 Multi Frame Generation feature in Cyberpunk 2077 running at 1600p. The laptop delivers an impressive 197 FPS in the Quality upscaling mode, offering more than double the native performance. Even with upscaling disabled, and full ray tracing with reconstruction enabled along with MFG 4x, it maintains a highly playable 88 FPS, which speaks volumes about the RTX 5080’s capabilities and efficiency at high resolutions.

Interestingly, in another test with pure MFG 4x (no ray tracing or upscaling) at native resolution, Cyberpunk 2077 hit 126 FPS, showing how NVIDIA’s latest tech can alone drastically uplift performance without altering image quality. Alan Wake 2, another graphically intensive title with heavy ray tracing, also benefits greatly from these technologies. It reaches 84 FPS at high settings with DLSS 4 and multi-frame generation 4x enabled.

Our standard run of graphics-focused synthetic benchmarks suggests that the lower-powered RTX 5080 in the Zephyrus G16 performs worse than an RTX 4080 laptop GPU in a gaming notebook with a full 175W TDP. The Acer Predator Helios 16, which we’ve used for comparison, undercuts it by Rs 1,10,000. However, opting for the Helios means giving up the benefits of the Zephyrus G16’s slimmer and lighter chassis.

Moving on to the storage, ASUS has finally upgraded the SSD to offer full PCIe Gen 4 speeds. The 2TB pre-installed NVMe drive offers read speeds up to 7,000MBps and write speeds of up to 6,000MBps. 

Thermals have noticeably improved, which was one of the biggest complaints while testing the first-generation model. It does get hot to touch, especially the area under the display on a hot summer day, but while gaming, the GPU stayed under 80°C and the CPU went up to 89°C when stressed using benchmarks. 

Like the previous models, you get an excellent set of speakers placed at the bottom as well as on either side of the keyboard. The ones at the bottom act as woofers, enabling a deep and rich audio output. The quality is certainly one of the best on a Windows-powered notebook, and very close to the capabilities of the MacBook Pro range of laptops. Additionally, there is a 1080p webcam, which is pretty much usable for video calls, while additional sensors enable Windows Hello face recognition to quickly unlock the laptop.

Battery life

The 90Whr battery unit remains unchanged, and while we were expecting a lower runtime since the laptop is powered by an Intel CPU, the results were actually surprising. We got a little over 8 hours of usage,e which included light workloads, including web browsing, typing down some notes and a bit of YouTube videos. Mind you, all of this was done using the Silent power profile via Armory Crate. 

In PCMark 10’s video loop battery test, the new Zephyrus G16 managed to score 9 hours and 35 minutes, which is a lot better than the 8 hours and 23 minutes on the early 2024-Intel Meteor Lake-powered variant. The result is also extremely competitive to the AMD variant of the laptop, which scored 9 hours and 46 minutes, suggesting that Intel’s Arrow Lake series is surprisingly efficient. 

Apart from the included 240W adapter, the laptop supports 100W charging via USB-C, although that limits the overall performance of the laptop.

Verdict

The updated ROG Zephyrus G16 may not be the most powerful gaming notebook, yet it manages to be a desirable piece of tech. It has the capability to offer the best of both worlds, with a fairly powerful CPU and GPU combo, packed inside a thin 16-inch metal chassis that doesn’t feel like carrying a load of bricks. You also get an excellent and responsive OLED display, good battery life, powerful speakers, and even better thermals.  

However, at Rs 3,59,990, you are paying a huge premium just to have access to that perfect balance of power and portability. If money is not a concern, then you shouldn’t look elsewhere. But for those on a tighter budget, there are options out there from Lenovo, Acer and HP Omen, which offer better performance at the cost of a bulkier chassis and less impressive battery life.

Editor’s Rating: 8 / 10

Pros:

• Premium 240Hz OLED display 
• Thin and light chassis
• Respectable battery life
• Excellent speakers

Cons:

• Quite expensive
• Non-upgradeable memory
• Underpowered RTX 5080