Perhaps one of my biggest pet peeves about gaming laptops is how over-the-top they can look and feel. I get it. Many of the best gaming laptops have tons of fans, are usually full of RGB lighting, and that flash is a badge of honor for some. But flash doesn’t make a laptop perform better, and for the multitaskers among us, the slicker and often more streamlined designs of productivity laptops have a certain appeal, especially if you plan on using your machine in public.

While I loved what Asus did with the beefier ROG Strix Scar 18, the Zephyrus G16’s much smaller and more minimalist design is a sweet spot that delivers a solid all-around experience for gaming, work, and whatever else you throw at it. It’s billed primarily as a “creator” laptop, but it handles gaming well, too. I’ve spent the last few weeks with the G16 and put it through its paces as my daily driver, and it’s one of the first Windows laptops that didn’t make me miss my MacBook Air on day one.

The G16 follows in the footsteps of this year’s smaller ROG Zephyrus G14 model, offering a solid chassis that’s thinner and lighter than the heftier Asus ROG laptops currently on the market. It comes with a gorgeous 16-inch 2560 x 1600 240Hz Nebula OLED display, or a less expensive and nearly as beautiful Nebula IPS panel with the same resolution and refresh rate.

All of this is paired nicely with a slim and light chassis, which weighs in at just 4.29 pounds – very impressive considering it’s crammed with an Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card. The trackpad and keyboard here are both solid as well, though the trackpad’s larger size took some getting used to when I first started playing with it. The keyboard’s tactile feedback feels great to type on, too, and the 1.7mm travel depth should suit most typing styles well.