It is sometimes hard for a piece of hardware to catch the eye at CES, but Asus tries its best at the 2020 show with the ROG Zephyrus G14, a laptop an an "AniMe Matrix" display on the lid able to show custom graphics and animations.
The "display" is of the dot matrix kind, and consists of 1215 mini LEDs embedded in the lid. The LEDs have 256 levels of brightness control, and allow users to customise the lid with different illuminated designs, such as animated GIFs, text messages, music visualisers or even simply the time. A future update will even have the lid show email notifications. The effect is striking, and provides a fun touch in a laptop with an otherwise more professional look (and in any case is an optional extra).
Moving on to the rest of the laptop, the Zephyrus G14 is 17.9mm thin and weighs 1.6kg. The 14-inch display comes at either 1920 x 1080 or 2560 x 1440 resolution, with the HD option featuring a faster 120Hz panel. Both display types support Adaptive Sync for smoother gaming graphics and offer a screen-to-body ratio of 85%. Moving on to specs, inside the machine is a choice of processors from the AMD Ryzen 4000 H-series (up to Ryzen 4800HS), together with Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU, up to 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD.
In further details, the G14 supports USB-PD charging, and can run normal workloads off a 65W USB-C adapter. Gaming sessions demanding use of the discrete GPU need a regular 180W adapter, though. Other interesting touches are an ErgoLift hinge able to lift up the keyboard at an angle, making typing more comfortable while improving cooling by raising the bottom of the laptop off the desk.
The Zephyrus G14 ships on April 2016.
