Asus Zephyrus G15 2021 (GA503) – laptop of the year?

Last Updated on April 1, 2022 by Team Yantra

Asus Zephyrus g15 2021 has been one of the most promising laptop launch of 2021. We all want that Laptop which offers the best combination of ultra book like slim design and great gaming performance. Asus Zephyrus G15 seems that right fit.

Table of Contents

• Quick Specs
• Design and Build
• Display
• Performance (CPU/GPU/Memory) and Thermals
• Battery Life
• Price and availability
• Conclusion/ overall pros and cons

Quick Specs of Asus Zephyrus G15 2021

Now lets talk about the laptop in detail.

Design and Build.

Over all the design is minimalistic and simple. Nothing fancy or shiny like a typical gaming laptop. Laptops come in two color variants Grey and Black. It comes to personal preference with color. You can any color you like. I prefer Grey color. This type of design I prefer personally. Laptop comes in two colors Grey and white. Asus Zephyrus G15 2021 version seems like a bigger version of G14. Build quality I would say is on point. Sturdy and strong frame. The Body is made up of half poly-carbonate and half magnesium alloy making the laptop lightweight and solid at the same time. The laptop just weighs around 1.9 KG or 4.19 lbs

The back of the screen has the dotted design similar to G14, but it lacks the AniMe Matrix or LED lights. Instead, it has prismatic reflection, a kind of rainbow reflection which you can see, when moving the laptop. One thing to keep in mind is the dots at the back of the screen may collect dirt overtime. Which is logical to think. So, little care is needed overtime.

The lifting mechanism of the laptop is a bit different from usual laptops. In the sense when you open the lid of the laptop. The keyboard of the laptop gets elevated at a slight angle. Asus calls it ergo lift (also present in G14 laptop)and this type design is being adopted by more and more laptop manufacturers. This type of design helps more with the airflow and heat dissipation.

Keyboard

Coming to keyboard itself. Keyboard is I would say has a nice layout and among the top tier keyboards. With nothing to complain about. Secondly, the sound and travel of the keys is perfect to me. The click sound is not super loud or super silent. Just in the middle.

Okay, talking about the keyboard backlight. The backlight of the keyboard is white. So on the white color variant of the laptop, the contrast of the backlight and laptop color is not very good. On Grey color variant of the laptop keyboard backlight is much easily pronounced.

There’s a fingerprint sensor up top on the power button, which is separate from the main layout. Along with that there are four additional buttons given by Asus which have volume, mute and direct button to Asus application.

Trackpad is large and easy to use with great click mechanics. It has a glass surface. To something rare Asus G15 is one of the best sounding 15-inch laptop, unlike most 15-inch laptops which have mediocre sound. Thanks to 4 speakers, two at top beside keyboard and two bottom firing.

Display/Screen – Top Notch

The screen of the Asus Zephyrus G15 2021 is top-notch with excellent color, brightness and frequency. It’s a 15.6 inch, 1440p 165 hertz panel and has fast response time. I think that this is an amazing panel for the most of the stuff web browsing, video content and visual editing work. The higher resolution is nice. But if you’re someone who plays a lot of high demanding open world like cyberpunk 2077, here the higher resolution screen can be a bit of a disadvantage like you are forced to run the game at high resolution for example 1440p, as compared to normal 1080p resolution. It just puts a more strain on your hardware, but that’s just my personal opinion. For most of you It will not matter.

With that comes one of the dealbreaker in this laptop. The laptop lacks webcam. Yes, there is no webcam. If you are someone who frequently need to go to video meeting. Therefore, this can be somewhat down set for you. One easy solution can be to just purchased an external webcam, that simply attaches to top of the screen. Or just use my phone. Overall if you’re someone who’s highly dependent on video conferencing then you’re going to have to get an external for sure.

Performance of Asus Zephyrus G15 2021

Asus Zephyrus G15 2021 shines brightest in the performance area. The laptop is really powerful with its 8 Core AMD Ryzen 5 5900 HS processor and Nvidia 3070/3080 graphics (75W to 100W version). This laptop offers multi-core performance.

Similarly, in terms of the graphics the variants of the laptops have a difference of graphics. The Grey one has Nvidia 3070 Graphics and the white version offers RTX 3080. Now the thing you need to keep in mind is that both the versions are quite powerful. The grey version with Nvidia RTX 3070 is appropriately specked, and most people should be going for it. As, 3080 only a tad bit faster in compared to 3070. You should probably save money going with the cheaper 3070 version unless you absolutely you care about that 5%-10% more performance.

Difference between the two version of the Laptop?

But the one other advantage that the white model, the first one being if you like white color. It is that white has more RAM. As the ASUS Zephyrus G15 comes with RAM soldered onto it and only one RAM expansion sot. The white version has 16 GB onboard RAM which you can expand to 48 GB. The Grey version has only 8 GB onboard memory which you can expand up to 40 GB only By adding conversion has more RAM. To get the best memory performance Dual channel mode should be preferred which happens when we have same amount of RAM in both the slots like 8 GB + 8 GB / 16 GB + 16 GB. In that sense if you need 32 GB of dual channel RAM, you only can do that with white version. But I think 16 GB with grey variant is more than sufficient for most of you. Unless you have workload like video editing which can make use of more RAM. Then white is your only option.

Thermals wise both the version of Asus Zephyrus G15 2021 are running liquid metal in the CPU and not for GPU I think. As, while running benchmarks and testing the laptop. The GPU temperatures tend to be a little warmer when compared to CPU temperature, But overall the thermal performance of the Laptop seems on point. The fan noise is also okay with nothing to worry about.

Battery and IO ports

Laptop does offer quite a good battery backup. It has pretty big it’s 90 Whr battery. In general usage the laptop gives around 6.5- 7.5 hours of battery backup. There is also the battery modes given in Asus software provided like you can disable to discrete graphics and also reduce the refresh rate of the screen to 60Hz. This can result in even more battery backup of around 9- 10hrs. Kudos to Asus for the offering a great backup on a 15-inch device of this weight and size.

Asus Zephyrus G15 2021 comes with the 200 Watts ac adapter with a barrel type connector. The charging port is located at the left of the laptop. Also, additionally you can charge the laptop via USB- C as well with up to 100 Watts of power delivery. Which is not the full power and will take more time compared to ac adapter. But, hey you have options now,

The other ports of the laptop are HDMI 2.0 port, , USB .2 gen2 type A port, two USB-C (they don’t support thunderbolt 3) and a 3.5 mm audio jack. All located on the left side. In addition, The right side has another USB A port , along with a microSD card slot and a Kensington lock which I think no one uses, lol.

Pricing and availability of Asus Zephyrus G15 2021

The laptop is currently available in North American region (US and Canada) and some parts of Europe. We will be updating this laptop as when it is available in more region,

Conclusion

We whole heartily recommend buying this laptop.