If ASUS could fit a mobile graphics chip into the Z13 chassis it would be amazing, but as it is it’s a bit of a compromise. The CPU is strong, and while the graphics performance is better than most iGPUs, it’s still not going to accelerate apps and games as much as a dedicated chip.
For
Strong CPU
Nice screen
Useful tablet mode
Against
iGPU better than many, but still weak
Gaming styling
Battery life drops when worked hard
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The best way to describe the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 is ‘a bit like a Surface’. But while Microsoft’s line of tabletty laptops is highly business-oriented, this has gaming written all over it. ‘For those who dare’ is ASUS’ latest motto, and we dared to run Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve on the Z13, to mixed results.
It’s an interesting experiment in whether a very powerful CPU and an integrated GPU that offers more performance than most, can be squeezed into a thin and light tablet shell. The answer is that you can, but the result is more of a compromise than many would like. However, with that form factor, the CPU power, the touchscreen and the portable tablet mode, it could be a candidate for one of the best laptops for graphic design this year...
Key specifications
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CPU:
AMD Ryzen AI Max 390
NPU:
AMD XDNA (50 TOPS)
Graphics:
AMD Radeon 8050S
Memory:
32GB LPDDR5X 8000
Storage:
1TB SSD, MicroSD slot
Screen size:
13.4in
Screen type:
IPS-level touchscreen
Resolution:
2560 x 1600
Refresh rate:
180Hz
Colour gamut (measured):
98% P3
Brightness (measured):
544 nits
Ports:
1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, 2x USB 4, 1x HDMI 2.1, 1x 3.5mm audio
Wireless connectivity:
Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
Dimensions:
30.0 x 20.4 x 1.5cm
Weight:
1.2kg
(Image credit: Future / Ian Evenden)
Design, build and display
• Thin and light • Bit gamer-y
At first glance you’d think ASUS had made a backwards laptop here. Instead of a thin lid covering a thicker keyboard section that contains the arcane runes, piles of old wire and mice running in circles that make a modern PC work, it’s the other way around, with the computing gubbins stuck to the back of the screen and the keyboard a thinner flap that opens up. And detaches - that’s the important thing. This is a gaming tablet, and comes with the aggressive ASUS ROG styling that’s all in capital letters, but in use acts rather more like a Microsoft Surface.
However, if you can look past a keyboard font that looks like it’s had too much horizontal scale applied, there's a lot to like about the ROG Flow Z13, much of which we’ll get to in the Performance section of the review.
We’ve long mourned Apple’s decision to remove the light-up logo on the back of its laptop lids, but ASUS has gone one better here, with a lit, see-through section of the casing that peeks through to the circuitry underneath. It’s amazingly cool, though might be considered showing off, and hardly adheres to the principles of minimalism, but this was designed as a gaming machine and also has the rainbow keyboard that seems to be essential in such devices, on the back of which is a rubbery fabric layer that dust just loves to stick to. There's even a 13MP camera on the back of the casing, adding more weight to its claim to be a tablet rather than a laptop.
The backwards nature of things means that you’ll be liable to try and open the machine upside down until you get used to the way it works. Its tablet nature also means that the power, volume and an extra mystery button - they’re all unlabelled - are at the edge of the screen rather than on the keyboard. Once your muscle memory has adapted, it becomes second nature to flip out the stand for the screen. If gaming, you can dispense with the keyboard and control the machine with a controller using something like Steam’s Big Picture mode, which makes it a very console-like experience.
Design score: 4/5
(Image credit: Future / Ian Evenden)
Features
• Nice port selection • Keyboard not wireless
As a tablet with a keyboard attached, the Z13 is built with lightness in mind, and therefore doesn’t come with any exceptional or unusual features. What you do get are two fast USB4 ports, a USB-A, a full-size HDMI and a dedicated charging port, so there will probably be little need for adapters and hubs in everyday use.
The Z13’s screen has a 16:10 aspect ratio, which we always feel is better for tablets, as 16:9 can feel a little narrow. It sports a 2.5K resolution and is touch-sensitive, though there's no stylus in the box. As the keyboard isn’t wireless like the one used by the Zenbook Duo, and so has to be attached to the Z13 to work, you may find yourself purchasing a stylus like the Crayon Pro and a Bluetooth keyboard if you want to use it as more than a laptop.
There's a webcam built into the top edge of the screen, which claims to be compatible with Windows Hello, but which we discovered failed to recognise us about every two times out of three.
Following its appointment with our colourimeter, the screen was shown to display 98% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, along with 100% of sRGB and 90% of Adobe RGB - an excellent result beaten only by laptops like the MacBook Air. Brightness is high too, with 544 nits showing up, slightly better than Apple’s thin ‘n’ light offering.
Feature score: 3/5
(Image credit: Future / Ian Evenden)
Benchmark scores
We test every one of our laptops using the same benchmarking software suite to give you a thorough overview of its suitability for creatives of all disciplines and levels. This includes:
• Geekbench: Tests the CPU for single-core and multi-core power, and the GPU for the system's potential for gaming, image processing, or video editing. • Cinebench: Tests the CPU and GPU's ability to run Cinema 4D and Redshift. • UL Procyon: Uses UL Solutions' Procyon software suite to test the system's ability for AI image generation in Stable Diffusion, its Microsoft Office performance and its battery life. • Topaz Video AI: We use Topaz Video AI to test the system's ability to upscale video and convert video to slow-motion. • PugetBench for Creators: We use the PugetBench for Creators benchmarking suite to test the system's ability to run several key tasks in Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve Studio, as well as its performance when encoding/transcoding video. • ON1 Resize AI: Tests the system's ability to resize 5 photos to 200% in a batch process.
The processor in the Z13 is the reason we got this gaming device in for review. It’s one of AMD’s Ryzen AI Max chips codenamed Strix Halo, and the one we’ve tested here (the Ryzen AI Max 390) comes with 12 Zen 5 cores, each capable of multithreading for 24 simultaneous software threads and a boost clock of 5GHz. It uses integrated graphics, but here you get 32 graphics compute units and up to 110 TOPS of AI performance across the package.
As a chip that’s been placed in such a small outer casing, its maximum operating temperature of 100°C seems likely to come up quite quickly, but Zen 5 cores tend to run cooler than previous revisions of the architecture, and Asus has equipped the Z13 with vapour chamber cooling, some liquid metal thermal compound and a couple of fans to keep the heat under control. The fans are quiet, but came on when we were installing software and didn’t really go off again unless the machine was completely idle. The Z13 is clearly shifting considerable heat.
There's also a Ryzen Al Max+ 395, which features 16 CPU cores (with a 5.2GHz boost clock) and 40 graphics compute units (in an iGPU called the 8060S), available in the top-end Flow Z13, but that one will cost you a little more.
In many of our tests, the Ryzen AI Max 390 is better than the M4 in the MacBook Air, but not as good as the M4 in the MacBook Pro. That’s the kind of ballpark we’re operating in, and for a chip using integrated graphics it’s a very good one. In Time Spy Extreme it can even trade blows with the GeForce RTX 4060. One test that’s missing from our usual suite is the PugetBench DaVinci Resolve benchmark - the video editing app crashed on startup every time we tried to open it. This might be a case of an app not being sufficiently optimised for the new CPU, and is quite likely to be fixed with a software update.
Outside DaVinci, the 12 cores of the Ryzen CPU make it a good fit for creative apps. In our Photoshop test, the Z13 does slightly better than the MacBook Air M4, and beats Apple’s machine in Topaz Video AI too. This is almost certainly because the Z13 has more cores in its processor, and if you spec up a MacBook Pro to the same sort of price Asus is asking for its gaming tablet, you’ll get a better score.
The battery life of just over seven hours from our looping video test is probably not indicative of the way the lap-tablet will perform in the real world. A chip like this is made to be pushed, whether it’s in gaming or creative work, and making it work harder will inevitably bring battery life down. So we fired up our Steam library and got less than two hours of endurance out of it when making it work hard. For charging, you get a large 200W brick for the dedicated charging port, so you’ll at least be able to juice it back up again quickly.
• Excellent CPU • Graphics performance still lags
Performance score: 3/5
(Image credit: Future / Ian Evenden)
Price
For the same price as the Z13 we’ve reviewed here (£2,199.99), which is the low-end model, you can get a 14in MacBook Pro with a 14-core M4 Pro and 24GB of RAM, or an ASUS ProArt PX13 with a Ryzen AI 9 and RTX 4070. The Z13 is a pretty pricey 2-in-1, but even though it can perform well, and is very portable, traditional laptops have the edge in value for money if you don’t want or need the tablet or gaming features.
Value score: 2/5
Who is it for?
• Hybrd workers
The Z13 is capable of some respectable 1080p performance in games, and its 12-core CPU whips through 2D creative tasks well. It’s small enough to fit in a bag easily, and with its tablet-mode touchscreen can be flexible enough to sketch and paint on. It’s a bit of a jack of all trades, and as such may find a place if you’re looking for a PC that can turn its hand to many things, and if you like to play games too.
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ASUS ROG Flow Z13 score card
Attributes
Notes
Rating
Design:
Looks like a gaming tablet, which is what it is.
4/5
Features:
Good port selection and a nice screen.
3/5
Performance:
It's fine. You'll just find better elsewhere.
3/5
Value:
The problem is, you can get a lot of laptop for the same money.
While it suffers from the same GPU issues - namely a lack of power and compatibility - as other Snapdragon laptops, the HP Omnibook X 14 pulls a rabbit from the hat in the form of extremely long battery life, even when compared to other ARM-based machines.
ASUS' gorgeous two-screened laptop returns for a 2025 refresh, and is as good as ever. That comes with a caveat though - there's still no discrete graphics chip in this baby - but if you can live with that then it’s a top-notch portable computing experience.
It's incredibly well built, the screen is predictably great and it's loaded with a bunch of ease-of-use features for anyone, plus the addition of Apple Intelligence adds an AI-shaped layer to the experience of having one. But 3D and moving-image processing is disappointing for such a high-end (and expensive) laptop.
The Verdict
7.2
out of 10
Asus ROG Flow Z13
If ASUS could fit a mobile graphics chip into the Z13 chassis it would be amazing, but as it is it’s a bit of a compromise. The CPU is strong, and while the graphics performance is better than most iGPUs, it’s still not going to accelerate apps and games as much as a dedicated chip.
Ian Evenden has been a journalist for over 20 years, starting in the days of QuarkXpress 4 and Photoshop 5. He now mainly works in Creative Cloud and Google Docs, but can always find a use for a powerful laptop or two. When not sweating over page layout or photo editing, you can find him peering at the stars or growing vegetables.
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