As powerful as it is compact, the Asus ROG Flow X13 (starts at $2,999; $3,299 as tested) is a 2-in-1 convertible gaming laptop that stands just 0.62 inch tall, weighs 2.9 pounds, and still manages to deliver a reasonably comfortable gaming experience at a 1080p resolution on many titles. This is an impressive (if not wholly groundbreaking) achievement, thanks mostly to the efficiency inside of the AMD Ryzen 9 CPU (one of AMD’s new Ryzen 5000 series “Zen 3” chips) and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650 GPU. But it gets even better: You can pair the ROG Flow X13 with a special, desktop-class GeForce RTX 3080 in a not-too-heavy external graphics enclosure (or eGPU, dubbed the “Asus XG Mobile”), offering an even smoother gaming experience at higher resolutions. The XG Mobile can act as a dock on your desk, and, at 2.2 pounds, is even reasonable to lug along at times. On the whole, the ROG Flow and its eGPU make for a unique one-two punch among gaming laptops.
The Design: The Flow’s a Little Dynamo
Viewed with its lid closed, the Flow X13 is an odd sight to behold. It’s got classic gaming-laptop styling, with a prominent Republic of Gamers logo and ribbed black metal on the display lid. The ribbing extends to the tapered edges of the laptop, giving it a vaguely aggressive—but not ostentatious—aesthetic. You’ll also note oversize exhaust and intake vents along the back and right edges, which evoke those on gaming rigs many times the Flow X13’s size.
And size is the most startling part of the Flow X13. It’s almost comically small. It evokes a wolf in sheep’s clothing and many other metaphors, but the most germane way to understand the ROG Flow X13’s unique form factor is to compare it with the laptop that’s arguably the grandfather of petite gaming laptops: the Razer Blade Stealth. The Blade Stealth is 0.6 by 12 by 8.3 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.1 pounds, compared with 0.62 by 11.8 by 8.8 inches and 2.9 pounds for the Flow X13. Somehow, in roughly the same-size chassis that Razer put a Core i7 designed for ultraportable machines, Asus managed to fit a Ryzen 9 with many times the power.
We’ll get into just how much more powerful the Flow X13 is below, but suffice it to say that gamers satisfied with a 1080p resolution and around 50 frames per second will find plenty to like here. That’s seldom the case with ultraportable laptops. And, of course, you can do a lot better if you pair the Flow X13 with the XG Mobile (the eGPU mentioned above), populated with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. But the laptop works just fine without it, so we’ll save a discussion of the XG Mobile for its own review.
Currently, Asus is selling the laptop and the eGPU as a bundle, which accounts for the high $3,000 price mentioned above. The company does plan to sell the ROG Flow X13 separately, but it has not yet announced pricing or availability. We expect the laptop on its own to be priced roughly the same as the Blade Stealth, which is to say, less than $2,000.
While the Ryzen 9 H-series processor in the Flow X13 is far more powerful than the 11th Generation Core i7 in the Blade Stealth, overall gaming performance is actually roughly the same, since both laptops have similar Nvidia graphics processors and their cooling systems are still limited by chassis that are approximately the same size. This means the Flow X13 isn’t a standout machine for gamers who care only about maximizing frame rates. Rather, its main performance coup is its ability to punch far above its weight on CPU-intensive tasks other than gaming, such as rendering videos or compiling code.
The Panel: Full HD or 4K Screen Options
A capable screen is essential for any gaming laptop, and the Flow X13’s display doesn’t disappoint. It measures 13.4 inches on the diagonal, giving it a 16:10 aspect ratio that’s a bit taller than the 16:9 standard of most laptops and TVs. This means that when you’re not gaming, you’ll have a bit more vertical space to display more lines of text or see more of a web page without scrolling.
Our Flow X13 review unit comes with a 4K UHD resolution (3,840 by 2,400 pixels) and a 60Hz refresh rate. It’s beautiful to look at, with crisp text, plus brilliant colors thanks to its Pantone certification and ability to display the entire sRGB color gamut. But it’s probably overkill for most gamers, who would do better to consider the full HD (1,920-by-1,200-pixel) screen option, which comes with a higher 120Hz refresh rate. Both options have touch-input support and are covered in a glossy Gorilla Glass top layer.
In a highly unusual twist, the Flow X13’s screen can be rotated 360 degrees to let you prop the notebook up like a tent on your desk, or even use it as a tablet with the keyboard folded completely underneath. I did not use it like this extensively during my time testing it, although the added flexibility could be useful if you’re used to the 2-in-1 design from other laptops. It’s atypical, to be sure—you’ll see very few 2-in-1 convertible laptops designed for gaming. (One other example, which we haven’t tested, is Acer’s Nitro 5 Spin, but it doesn’t have the eGPU option.)
Above the display, there’s a webcam with a 720p resolution. It lacks a privacy shutter or IR sensors to allow logging in with Windows Hello face recognition, but it’ll do for quick video calls sessions in well-lit rooms. Streamers will likely want to connect an external camera.
Opposite the screen, on the Flow X13’s base, is a well-designed keyboard and touchpad. I appreciate the generous 1.7mm of vertical key-travel distance, and I find that no matter how hard I strike the keys, there’s no discernable flex in the keyboard deck. The key labels do have the aggressive font you’d expect from Republic of Gamers gear. But the backlight shines only white—no per-key RGB or other lighting colors here like you’ll find on the Blade Stealth. It’s a mix of gamer aesthetic and more conservative styling.
The keyboard offers plenty of function keys. These include the usual volume and brightness controls, as well as keys that control the speed of the cooling fan and put the Flow X13 into sleep mode. You’ll also find an unusual dedicated shortcut key for taking screenshots, as well as a rudimentary keyboard-backlighting control key labeled Aura, which cycles through breathing and pulsing light effects.
The extra-wide, clickable touchpad below the keyboard is comfortable, with a well-engineered clicking mechanism. It’s easy to activate even when your fingertips are near the upper edge where the hinge is located.
Cutting-Edge Cooling Capabilities
If you’re hunting around the keyboard deck for the Flow X13’s power button, you won’t find it. It’s actually located on the right edge of the laptop. This placement is not unusual for a 2-in-1 convertible notebook—it makes it easier to power up the Flow X13 when the keyboard is folded underneath in tablet orientation. In addition to powering on the laptop, the button sports a built-in fingerprint reader, which lets you log in to your Windows account without typing a password.
Most of the rest of the Flow X13’s right edge is taken up with an air cooling grille. Airflow is incredibly important to keeping the Ryzen 9 and GTX 1650 inside the Flow X13 from overheating. Asus employs a large U-shaped vapor chamber to transfer air to and from the components and the grilles, as well as a heat sink that surrounds the components. I did hear the fan spooling up while I was running games and other resource-intensive apps, but the noise was a faint whooshing rather than the roar you can expect from beefier gaming laptops with multiple fans. Asus says its new fan design uses blades of varying thickness, which increases efficiency while reducing dust build-up and noise.
Though a grille monopolizes the right edge of the chassis, Asus found enough room for two USB ports. One is a Type-A USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, while the other is a Type-C port. On the opposite edge is an HDMI port with HDMI 2.0b support, an audio combo jack, and the proprietary connector for the XG Mobile eGPU. Part of the connector, hidden beneath a removable cover, is actually a USB-C port, which you can use on its own if you’re not using the eGPU. This effectively gives you two USB-C ports.
Wireless connectivity on the Flow X13 includes Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and Bluetooth 5.2. I tested the laptop in a challenging Wi-Fi environment, more than 200 feet from the router in a building with multiple Wi-Fi networks, and found adequate performance on the 5GHz band—more than 50MBps—even though the signal strength was poor.
Asus supports the Flow X13 with a one-year warranty.
Testing the ROG Flow X13: A Screaming-Fast Ryzen 9
In addition to the 4K screen, Ryzen 9 5980HS, and GeForce GTX 1650, our Flow X13 test model also comes with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. Asus’ lower-end configuration includes a full HD screen, half the memory and storage amounts, and a slightly less-capable Ryzen 9 5900HS CPU. The only significant difference between the two CPUs is that the upper model has a 4.8GHz maximum boost clock, while the lower has a 4.6GHz maximum. Both are members of AMD’s latest fifth-generation processor family, and both have eight cores, 16 threads, a 3GHz base clock speed, and 20MB of cache.
It’s difficult to situate the Flow X13’s performance fairly on our benchmark charts, since you just can’t find many competing gaming laptops that are this small. The Flow X13’s main alternatives are the Blade Stealth and Asus’ own Zephyrus G14, which we tested last year with a potent Ryzen 4000-series CPU. I’ve also included the Dell XPS 15 and the MSI GS66 Stealth, for a look at how comparably priced and slightly larger (but still relatively thin and light) laptops stack up. You can see all of their specs in the chart below.
Our first test is the PCMark 10 suite, which simulates different real-world productivity and content-creation workflows. We use it to assess overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet jockeying, web browsing, and videoconferencing. These are the sort of tasks on which the Flow X13 has a definitive edge, thanks to its Ryzen 9 processor. It’s slightly faster than the Zephyrus G14 and much faster than the Blade Stealth. Anything above 4,000 on this test is generally considered excellent performance, so we’re really talking about degrees of excellence here, but the differences are still significant. (See more about how we test laptops.)
On the PCMark 8 storage test, which measures the capabilities of the laptop’s storage subsystem, all of the competitors performed about the same, since they’re all equipped with speedy SSDs.
Media-content-creation workflows are where the Flow X13’s remarkable capabilities really shine. On Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads, the Flow X13 outperformed not only the Blade Stealth, but also the larger XPS 15 and GS66. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
Cinebench is often a good predictor of our Handbrake video-editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video to a 1080p MP4 file. The Flow X13’s advantage here is unmistakable.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image-editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image. We time each operation and, at the end, add up the total execution time. As with Handbrake, lower times are better here. The Photoshop test stresses CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
Again, the Flow X13 far outperformed all of its competitors on this test.
Gaming Performance: A Tale of a GTX and an RTX
First and foremost: A big reason lots of folks will consider buying the Flow X13 in the first place is for the XG Mobile eGPU that can come bundled. Adding an RTX 3080 is a massive upgrade from a GeForce GTX 1650, and we’ll address how much the XG Mobile pumps up the performance of the Flow X13 in a separate review, which will post in a few days.
Using its internal graphics processor, the GTX 1650, the Flow X13 doesn’t churn out gaming graphics at the same prodigious rate as its Ryzen processor chews through content-creation tasks. On our 3DMark and Superposition synthetic gaming benchmarks, it’s roughly equal to the Blade Stealth and distinctly less capable than the Dell and the MSI. This makes sense, since gaming performance on laptops depends, to a great extent, on the GPU capabilities, and the Dell and MSI laptops simply have the room to accommodate more capable GPUs.
3DMark measures relative graphics muscle by rendering sequences of highly detailed, gaming-style 3D graphics that emphasize particles and lighting. We run two different 3DMark subtests, Sky Diver and Fire Strike, which are suited to different types of systems. Both are DirectX 11 benchmarks, but Sky Diver is more suited to laptops and midrange PCs, while Fire Strike is more demanding and made for high-end PCs to strut their stuff.
Like 3DMark, the Superposition test renders and pans through a detailed 3D scene and measures how the system copes. In this case, it’s rendered in the Unigine engine, offering a different 3D workload scenario than 3DMark, and a second opinion on the machine’s graphical prowess.
Synthetic tests are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it’s hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with built-in benchmarks that illustrate how a system handles real-world video games at various settings. These are run on both the moderate and maximum graphics quality presets (Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider) at native resolution to judge performance for a given system. The results are also provided in frames per second. Far Cry 5 is DirectX 11 based, while Rise of the Tomb Raider can be flipped to DX12, which we do for the benchmark.
The Flow X13 and the Blade Stealth hit frame rates above the 30-frame-per-second floor that we consider the bare minimum for acceptable game performance. But they’re still not comparable with the more capable GeForce RTX GPUs in the larger laptops, which offer roughly double the frame rates.
Battery Testing: Short for an Ultraportable
No one expects powerful gaming laptops with voracious energy consumption to get great battery life. But the Flow X13’s battery life is still slightly disappointing…
It managed a respectable 7 hours and 19 minutes in our battery rundown test. That’s better than the 5 hours or so we’re used to seeing from chunky gaming rigs, but not quite as good as the 10-plus hours that the Blade Stealth managed, nor the 12-plus hours of the XPS 15, which has a much larger battery.
The Flow X13’s Impressive Achievement
The ROG Flow X13 represents an impressive achievement. It offers some of the best CPU performance we’ve seen to date from any kind of laptop, thanks to its cutting-edge Ryzen 9 fifth-generation processor. The fact that it is able to pull off this level of performance in a chassis that’s smaller and lighter than some larger gaming rigs with less-competitive performance is groundbreaking.
When it comes to gaming basics, such as maximizing frame rates at a 1080p resolution, the Flow X13 is merely average if you look at the laptop by itself. It doesn’t upstage the Blade Stealth in this regard, though it gives that venerable laptop a run for its money. While the Flow X13’s accompanying eGPU does boost its gaming performance, technically you can boost any Thunderbolt 3-equipped laptop’s gaming chops with an eGPU. We’ll see if and how far the Flow X13’s pairing of a Ryzen 9 CPU and an ostensibly speedier, proprietary eGPU interface sets it above the pack when we test the eGPU.
Ultimately, the Flow X13 is best for people who want a compact, well-designed notebook that offers as much CPU power as possible while remaining perfectly adequate for 1080p gaming. The option to release the beast in the form of the XG Mobile should only sweeten the deal; we’ll update this review as soon as we test it.
