The ASUS ROG Flow Z13 has been around for several iterations. The brand fitted them with Intel chips all that time but this year, it’s trading the blue chipmaker’s silicon for Red Team’s new silicon, specifically the Ryzen AI Max lineup, otherwise known as Strix Halo.
I remember when I reviewed the first Flow Z13 back in 2022. I can’t say I’m a fan of the tablet form factor but if and when needed, I can work with it. But that’s what we’re here to talk about.
As these articles usually go, I invoke the power of reminiscence. Compared to its predecessors, the new Flow Z13 is thicker, chonkier. The reason for all that girth is, in fact, due to the new internal cooling solution for the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU. More on that in a bit.
Despite having a thicker profile, the Flow Z13 is surprisingly light. I don’t mean that you can hold it with just two fingers but it’s light enough that it won’t weigh down your bag while travelling.
The keyboard cover isn’t half bad this time round. It still feels a bit squidgy but the key travel distance is relatively deep for a keyboard of this nature. The trackpad is larger too, making scrolling a lot easier too.
The display is still the same size at 13.4-inch but instead of a FHD+ panel, ASUS bumped it up to QHD+ (2560 x 1600), and it’s also a Nebula Display. The refresh rate’s also been bumped up from 120Hz to 180Hz. It’s a luxurious combo but I do wonder the sort of battery endurance the 70Whr cell is able to sustain with it.
The star of the show here is, obviously, the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 that sits inside, along with the 128GB LPDDR5 of Unified memory. In this case, it’s a boon to be shared between the 16 Zen5 CPU cores and 40 RDNA3.5 Graphics cores. I would tell you what its performance is like but unfortunately, I didn’t manage to game on it, simply because the unit I had seemed to be devoid of games but hopefully, ASUS Malaysia will bring in a review unit for us to play with.
As an extra added bonus to the Flow Z13, ASUS also had its next generation XG Mobile eGPU module on the floor. As initially suspected, ASUS has ditched its proprietary XG MObile connector, simply going for Thunderbolt 5. Granted it’s limited to 60Gbps for the GPU transfer and not the full 80Gbps but this does also mean backwards compatibility with older Z13 models.
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