Asus Strix G16 2025 Review - Watch Before Buying RTX 50 Laptop!

Up to RTX 5080 GPU, Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU, a glorious set of RGB lights and so much more. So this is the new Strix G16 2025 from Asus and it's one of the best gaming laptops I have ever used. I'm not even kidding, I was waiting so long to test the next-gen machines with NVIDIA's RTX and man, the Strix G16 did not disappoint at all. The Strix G16, however, does not come cheap. Its base model with the RTX 5060 graphics goes for 1,70,000 Indian rupees and the one I have been testing is going to cost you 2,60,000 rupees or some $2,400 in the US which comes with a more powerful RTX 5070 Ti GPU, Intel's Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU, 32GB of DDR5 memory and 1TB of Gen 4 SSD. Although if you're fine with sacrificing a little chunk of CPU performance, the Strix G16 is also available with AMD's Ryzen 9 processor for exactly 30,000 rupees less. Okay, so I'll talk about all of the things that I don't like about this laptop in just a minute but as always, I want to start with the positives and one of the most impressive things about this year's Strix G16 is actually its design. So, it's got the usual stuff like a premium build in this not-so-inspiring colorway, right? This lid here is made of aluminum while the rest of the chassis is all plastic to keep the weight down and despite the metal-plastic hybrid build, I found everything to be perfectly sturdy here. But flip this thing over and that's where the real magic is because Asus has completely redesigned the Strix G16 this year to make it the most upgrade-friendly laptop I've laid my hands on yet, easily. I don't need to worry about all those different screw heads or misplacing them since all I've got to do is slide this tab to the left and lift it open and that is literally all I need to do to access the RAM, the SSD and even the three fans of this laptop. It's so easy, it's so cool, I absolutely love it. What makes the Strix G16's design even cooler for me is that this is also the very first laptop I've used with a couple of next-gen Thunderbolt 5 ports alongside everything else. Yeah, not Thunderbolt 4 but Thunderbolt 5 with twice the data transfer speed, much better support for external monitors and up to 240W of power delivery. Alright, so just like the design, I love this display as well. Although Asus is still reserving the OLED gaming for its more expensive Zeprus and Scar lineup, this is, excuse me, a damn fine IPS display. It's sharp, it's smooth, it's bright and it's perfectly color accurate. You're looking at a giant 16-inch IPS panel with a 2.5K resolution, a buttery 240Hz refresh rate, 100% DCI-P3 colors and 500 nits of maximum brightness. Although my unit of the Strix G16 actually peaked at 555 nits at 100% brightness, so that's even more impressive. I also love this nice matte coating to get rid of light reflections around me which could have been rather distracting. So it doesn't matter if I'm gaming, doing some color sensitive work like photo or video editing or handling some casual business, the Strix G16's display works great for everything. I didn't have that many problems with its keyboard either. Maybe Asus could have added a little more contrast to the key engravings, at least for the function keys since they are quite hard to read. The right shift key is also quite smaller than I'm used to and I'm sure some of you are already upset that there is no numpad on a 16-inch laptop. But in spite of all those things, I have totally loved typing here. Coming from my MacBook's short 1mm travel keys, the Strix G16's keys have double the travel distance which means you really feel the keys register for that satisfying feel. This is also among the quietest keyboards I've used and of course it's got per-key RGB lighting that I can customize so easily from the Aura Creator app. It's not just the individual keys either. The Strix G16 even brings an RGB light bar that covers the entire bottom chassis for a glorious light show. Okay so with all that out of the way, let me now talk about its performance. So to recap, this year's ROG Strix G16 ships with Intel's latest Arrow Lake HX processor, the Core Ultra 9 275HX and compared to last year's Core i9-4900HX, it has a healthy 20% upgrade in terms of multi-core performance. Whereas your GPU options range from the budget RTX 5060 all the way to the RTX 5080, the one I have been testing has the RTX 5070 Ti and you know what, it might just be the GPU you should be considering if you really want to see that generational upgrade in the RTX 50 series GPUs or the more expensive ones if money is no object. I say so because just like on the older RTX 40 lineup, the performance on the RTX 5060 and the RTX 5070 mobile GPUs don't really scale that much beyond 100W which is totally not a problem for the 5070 Ti by the way. The Strix G16's RTX 5070 Ti has a total of 140W TGP and in all of the benchmarks I ran or the games I tested, it had no problem shipping 140W of power when needed. And unlike the lower tier RTX 50 series GPU with just 8GB of VRAM, the 5070 Ti also has 12GB of VRAM so you can easily game at a higher resolution with smooth FPS and good visual fidelity. Alright so the first game I played was Cyberpunk 2077 and with both the graphics and ray tracing set to ultra, I was getting 32 FPS on average with a 1% low of 22 FPS. Not bad but you probably already know that the RTX 50 series has a special trick called DLSS 4 to make the gameplay feel a whole lot smoother and responsive. Especially with something called multi-frame generation which uses AI to generate up to 3 additional frames for each real frame the GPU renders. Now it does not work with all games but on the games that do support DLSS 4, it can be a game changer since I went from just 32 FPS on average to 114 FPS with multi-frame generation set to 2x on Cyberpunk 2077 or a ridiculous 175 FPS at 4x option. Next up I played Marble Rivals. This one also supports multi-frame generation which means I went from just 60 FPS on average to an impressive 220 FPS with a simple click of a button. I was kind of worried about the input latency here since adding artificial frames in between the real ones can add a lot of input delay but I must say I honestly never noticed any sort of input delay. I had a couple of my colleagues try it out as well and they said they had a similar experience too. And other than these two I played Forza Horizon 5, Counter Strike 2 and GTA 5 all of which managed an easy 100 plus FPS with just pure rasterized rendering. Control was one of the only games that felt a little too much to handle for the RTX 5070 Ti at ultra settings with a near 30 FPS on average. Although after I lowered the render resolution to just 800p and then used DLSS to upscale the image, I was getting a much more playable 70 FPS on average. Besides excellent gaming results, I'm equally impressed by the Strix G16's thermals because no matter what game it was, the keyboard deck itself felt perfectly cool to touch never hitting beyond 36 to 37 degrees Celsius near the WASD and the arrow key area. And even at the max fan speed, the Strix G16 only ever got as loud as 47 decibels. I have seen gaming laptops with far louder fan noise with far worse thermals so this is just spectacular. I was also taking a close look at the CPU and GPU temperatures when I was gaming and although that Intel chip would easily climb to around 90 degrees Celsius and beyond, the GPU remained significantly cooler at around 70 degrees Celsius only. This was a trend I noticed while using creative apps as well. There was definitely no performance throttling and everything from working with 4k video projects with multiple layers on Premiere Pro to working with 3d animation on Blender went as smoothly as I expected them to. Okay so far I've talked about the Strix G16's design that I love, its display that I love, its keyboard that I love and its performance that I love even more and as you might have already guessed I am not that fond of the rest of the stuff here. Like its trackpad for example. I mean it has all the right ingredients for a great trackpad but it just does not act like one for me. It's spacious, it's glass-topped but I don't know there's like a 30% chance it accidentally decides to select text or drag something off the screen when I'm simply trying to scroll through a page. I also found that the Strix G16 pretty much has a potato of a webcam. It does support Windows Hello login but look at this, the video quality is so grainy and so lacking in detail. I would rather use my phone as a webcam in case of any important online meetings. And for a big 16 inches laptop, its speakers and battery life aren't that great either. Yes its downward firing speakers get quite loud but it sounds a little too thin with not a lot of bass for me to actually enjoy the music. Whereas I can't call 3.5 to 4 hours of battery life that great either. I know that's pretty much in line with what you get with most gaming laptops with an Intel CPU but yeah. Alright I guess I better wrap it up now. So despite all its minor flaws, I think Asus has absolutely nailed it with this year's ROG Strix G16. The flashy redesign paired with fiercely powerful new chips means that there are just so many things to love about this guy. So if you're looking for a powerful gaming slash content creation laptop that will age gracefully over the years, the Strix G16 definitely looks like one of your top choices at around 2.5 lakhs Indian rupees. And like I said at the very beginning, if you can compromise a little in terms of CPU performance, its Ryzen variant is an even better value. I've also seen a couple of other similarly specced laptops in the Indian market like the HP Omen Max 16 2025 or MSI's Vector 16 HX AI but compared to both of them, the Strix G16 2025 wins with its superior build quality, better display, slightly better cooling and also nicer RGB lights. Lenovo's Legion Pro 7 also looks like a solid gaming laptop at this price with a similar set of specs and I can't wait to test that one out. So make sure you're subscribed to the channel if you don't want to miss that video. Till then, I'm Pratibha Adhikari and I will see you in my next video.