Benchmarks: Vitals and Battery Life
Contrary to the ROG Zephyrus slotting into the lower half of the noise chart, we've come away pleasantly surprised by the cooling fans. They switch off at low load, remain impressively quiet during everyday use, and though the noise meter reads 47.9dB when gaming, the hum produced by the laptop is smoother than most and not all that distracting.
We use a pair of PCMark 10 benchmarks to gauge battery life; Modern Office, which intermittently uses the writing, web browsing and video conferencing workloads from the main PCMark 10 benchmark; and Gaming, which uses the common Fire Strike test to stress the GPU until the battery is drained.
In order to make the results comparable between laptops, each system is configured with a purpose-built power plan, wireless radios disabled, and screen brightness set as close to 200 nits as possible using a calibration device.
Just over six hours isn't a great runtime in this day and age, but given that we tested with both displays turned on (the secondary reduced to minimum brightness), battery life isn't as bad as we'd feared.