Asus has launched a new ROG Zephyrus G16 model featuring Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5080 and Intel’s Core Ultra 9 386H processor priced at $4,799 in the US. Surprisingly, this model costs more than last year’s version equipped with the more powerful RTX 5090, which can currently be found for $4,599 on Amazon.
- RTX 5080 variant priced $200 higher than RTX 5090 model
- New laptop features doubled RAM at 64GB and updated CPU
- RTX 5080 offers 15% speed boost over RTX 5070 Ti but less than RTX 5090
What happened
Asus has released a refreshed version of its ROG Zephyrus G16 gaming laptop in 2026, now available with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card. This new model is powered by Intel’s latest Core Ultra 9 386H processor and comes equipped with 64GB of RAM, doubling the memory available in the previous base model that featured the RTX 5070 Ti. Notably, the RTX 5080 offers a performance uplift of approximately 15% over the 5070 Ti, aided by a higher total graphics power (TGP) of 160W compared to 140W in the previous variant.
Despite these advances, Asus has priced this new RTX 5080 Zephyrus G16 at $4,799, which exceeds the current market price of last year’s ROG Zephyrus G16 model with the RTX 5090 GPU, available for around $4,599. The RTX 5090 is Nvidia’s flagship GPU offering superior raw graphics performance compared to the 5080. This creates an unusual situation where customers face higher prices for a laptop with a technically less powerful GPU from a newer release.
Why it matters
This pricing strategy disrupts the typical expectation that newer laptop models with higher generation GPUs will cost less or at least align with previous generation flagship prices. Here, the combination of a mid-tier RTX 5080 GPU with advanced CPU architecture and doubled RAM contributes to significant specification upgrades, but the lower GPU tier relative to the RTX 5090 confuses the value proposition for gamers prioritizing raw graphics power.
For buyers, this situation demands more nuanced evaluation beyond GPU model alone. While the RTX 5080 offers improvements over the RTX 5070 Ti, including greater VRAM capacity which benefits VRAM-heavy applications and games, it still trails behind the more powerful RTX 5090 found on last year’s model. Gamers and professionals may find the older model to deliver superior gaming performance at a lower cost, especially since it includes the same 64GB memory configuration.
What to watch next
Consumers should monitor whether Asus or other manufacturers adjust prices or release configurations to better balance GPU, CPU, and RAM performance with overall cost in the competitive gaming laptop market. The pricing anomaly may prompt reconsideration of how incremental hardware improvements beyond GPU power—such as CPU generation and memory size—impact consumer willingness to pay premium prices.
Additionally, future reviews will clarify how the RTX 5080 paired with the new Intel Panther Lake architecture competes in real-world gaming and professional workloads compared to the older RTX 5090 and Arrow Lake CPU in last year’s ROG Zephyrus G16. Performance benchmarks and value analyses will be key in guiding buyers facing this unusual pricing divergence between the generations.