ASUS ROG Zephyrus M16

Best Buy. 2/02. Yes.

So yeah—I very much like this laptop. It may or may not fit your needs, depending on what you’re looking for, but it definitely fit mine, with some caveats as I’ve noted throughout this review. A numerical score is kinda arbitrary and pointless, especially since I haven’t tried any other gaming laptops and don’t have any comparison point, but I’d give this a solid 8.5/10 if I had to assign a score. So, there you have it.

I'm a travel nurse looking at getting into PC gaming and a laptop seems like the best combination of power and portability for me right now (I also need to replace my current macbook pro). I've gotten some suggestions and looked at a lot of youtube reviews and it seems like the ROG Zephyrus is a good way to go.

My only gripes about it are that it gets loud, has a very short battery life (about 5 hours for regular non-gaming use), and gets very hot even while not gaming. I just wish Zephyrus made the same M16 laptop with the energy efficient Ryzen platform instead since their i9 11900H processor draws A LOT of power causing the low battery life, the loudness to cool it, and making the chassis get hot. The other laptop I was considering is the G15, which uses a Ryzen platform instead.

Tiger Lake + Ampere runs way cooler than my old i7-8750h + 1060 Zephyrus - that laptop would thermal throttle all the time. My biggest concern with the M16 was going with the mid level 3060 and the new screen would result in too much screen for the 3060 to drive.

\- **Asus Zephyrus M16** RTX 3060, i9 -11900H, QHD, 16GB RAM, 1 TB SSD = ***4 min 52 seconds***: Price: $1849.99. \- **Asus Zephyrus G14** with Ryzen 9 5900HS, FHD 144hz, RTX 3060, 16GB RAM, 1 TB SSD = ***4 min 24 seconds*** Price: $1449.99. \- **Asus Zephyrus G15** with Ryzen 9 5900HS,QHD, RTX 3070, 16GB RAM, 1 TB SSD = ***3 min 37 seconds*** Price: $1799.99. \- **Razerblade 15 4K OLED** with intel i7-10750H, RTX 2070 max-q, 16 GB RAM, 512GB SSD = ***5 min 38 seconds*** Price: $1699.99.

Could have bought the M16 through BestBuy for $1850 but hesitated, tried to see what Micro Center was going to restock, nothing good. So I kind of got lucky when BestBuy listed a "Certified" Open Box M16 for $1750 and I gambled. So far it's been great, no bad backlight bleeding, no speaker popping and it really was in perfect physical condition.

Bought it. Received it.