The Asus ROG Flow Z13 Gaming Tablet Is a Jack-of-All-Trades, but Master of None

First impressions

This is an ROG (Republic of Gamers) device, so naturally, the RGB glow is immediately evident here. Specifically, there's a small diagonal glass panel on the rear of the device lit with the requisite vibrant rainbow of hues, which will likely appeal to some more than others. The magnetically attachable folio keyboard follows suit, too, with a customizable range of whatever colors your heart desires. I'm not sure when, exactly, manufacturers decided that gamers must be mesmerized into buying their devices by flickering colored lights, but the implementation in the Z13 is at least slightly more tasteful than other recent examples.

Credit: Alan Bradley

The other thing that you notice right away after lifting the Z13 out of its box is the heft. For a tablet, this is a thick, chonky beast, clocking in at 2.74 lbs and 0.59 inches thick. For comparison, the Steam Deck is about 1.4 pounds. And that's before you include the folio keyboard, which brings the weight up to 3.59 pounds. If you want to carry around the proprietary charger, that's another 1.4 pounds, for a grand total that's just shy of five pounds.

For a 13.4 inch tablet, that's a lot, and not the sort of thing you'd want to hold for any duration while you sip a latte. For comparison, consider the iPad Pro, the 13-inch model of which is less than half the weight and thickness of the Z13, at 1.28 lbs and 0.20 inches thick. Handling the Z13 with both hands, I noticed I was often accidentally triggering the touchscreen just trying to keep a grip on the thing, particularly around the right and left edges.

It also sports both front- and rear-facing cameras (5MP and 13MP respectively), though taking photos with a tablet is already inconvenient enough, especially on one this heavy. The front-facing camera is suitably crisp for taking calls, however, and also means the Z13 supports Windows Hello presence-sensing, allowing you to unlock the device with your face.

So it's a gaming laptop?

Not to spoil the rest of the review, but yes, I think the Z13 is best positioned as a gaming laptop. Viewed as a laptop, that 0.59 inch thickness makes a lot more sense, making it slimmer than a modern Razer Blade 14 (at 0.71 inches) and significantly less girthy than a classic "musclebook." That said, it's still not a device you'll want to actually hold very frequently, and the included folio keyboard is almost essential for most applications.

Luckily, it's a reasonably nice keyboard, as far as detachables go. The tactile typing experience is fairly nice for chiclets, and it snaps into place and detaches almost effortlessly (though not so easily that you'll find yourself accidentally pulling it off). The kickstand on the rear of the screen is also excellent. It's stiff enough to stay in whatever orientation you leave it in, and has enough range to go from laying nearly flat to standing almost completely vertical. It's even got a handy little pull tab on the right-hand side that makes it a breeze to pull out without involving your fingernails.

That said, the entire design seems to be begging for a fully integrated keyboard. If you're the sort of person who uses a gaming tablet with the kickstand deployed and with a gamepad in hand, as opposed to using a handheld like a Steam Deck or Asus' own Ally, there's a potential use case there. Otherwise, a built-in keyboard makes significantly more sense. While the included keyboard is a decent folio, it doesn't compare to the kind of premium experience you'd expect from a device that costs $2,300. You'd sacrifice some of that thinness by going for a built-in keyboard, but for me, it'd be worth it, especially if it could fold 360 degrees to maintain the tablet experience.

Impressive, though not mind-blowing, marks for gaming

Laptop or tablet, the Z13 is built for gaming, and it performs admirably, especially when you consider that it lacks a dedicated GPU. This means that not only does it not have dedicated hardware exclusively for graphics rendering, but also that the GPU has to share system RAM with the processor. That said, the model I reviewed comes equipped with a generous 32GB of RAM, and configurations are available with allotments up to a massive 128GB.

My review unit's graphics are handled by an integrated Radeon 8060S and an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395, but there's also a slightly cheaper SKU that includes the Ryzen AI Max 390 and its less-powerful 8050S graphics component. That'll take your price down to around $2,000, compared to this models' $2,300 starting MSRP.

In the Assassin Creed: Shadows benchmark running at high settings and with the resolution dialed up to the Z13's max of 2,560 x 1,600, the machine was able to deliver an average of 41 FPS. That's a strong result at those settings in a recent triple-A title that's notoriously quite demanding, especially for an integrated GPU. In actual extended gameplay, there were a few noticeable dips in areas packed with a lot of detail or populated with a large number of characters, but the tablet never dropped below 30 FPS, which I consider the floor for acceptable gaming performance.

Credit: Alan Bradley

The Z13 shone even more in the less taxing Black Myth: Wukong benchmark. At the native resolution on High settings, the Z13 managed an average of 70 FPS, a mark the machine's 180Hz display was able to take full advantage of (more on that later). Playing Wukong for an extended session was a delight, combining a high frame rate with low latency to deliver a silky, Souls-like action experience.

Perhaps the best context for performance comes from results in Geekbench 6's GPU benchmark. Here, the Z13 delivered a score of 48,224 in OpenCL (a better gauge of general purpose graphics rendering) and 64,780 in the Vulcan test (more appropriate to measure high-performance tasks like gaming).

The Vulcan test puts the 8060S in the ballpark of discrete laptop cards like the Max-Q version of the Geforce RTX 2070 from Nvidia, or the Radeon RX 7600S on the AMD side. These are older GPUs from several generations ago: Nvidia just released the 50-series of its RTX cards, for instance.

The key takeaway is that, while it's very impressive for an integrated GPU, the Z13 still underperforms in graphics applications compared against low-end 40-series RTX cards, like Nvidia's RTX 4060 or 4070 laptop GPUs. This is critical, because those cards are still regularly found in modern gaming laptops that are often available for significantly less than the Z13. But more on that later.

A solid productivity workhorse

Some of the most impressive results I saw in testing were on the CPU side of things. In Geekbench 6, the Z13 scored 2,735 in single-core testing and a dazzling 16,680 in the multi-core benchmark. That's a great showing for the 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen AI Max+ 395, which takes advantage of AMD's Zen 5 microarchitecture and has further innovations on the interconnect side to ensure speedy communication between chiplets. In other words: this thing can do more than gaming, but there's a catch.

A score of 16,680 rivals some of the fastest processors currently incorporated into laptop builds, and the single-core score is no slouch either. But results were somewhat less impressive in Cinebench, which tests rendering capabilities, where the Z13 nabbed a multi-core score of 1,136 and a single-core score of 96.

Credit: Alan Bradley

That disparity between benchmarks is curious and somewhat distressing, given that the Z13 is designed first and foremost as a gaming machine. Geekbench is designed to simulate real-world productivity workloads, while Cinebench is geared more towards measuring graphics rendering. It may not shock you to learn that a device without discrete graphics is better at productivity than gaming, but in this case, it means the Z13 may actually be better at office work than what it's being marketed for. That's a bit of an identity crisis, but if you're a gamer who moonlights in content creation, it does add value to the device for you.

A gorgeous presentation

The Z13's display is a looker. It's a 180Hz IPS panel with a maximum resolution of 2,560 x 1,600, boasting 3ms latency and a 1500:1 contrast ratio, with up to 500 nits of brightness. A nod to its potential use as a tablet, the screen is Gorilla Glass 5, so it may survive a drop despite its weight and girth (forgive me for not testing that—this unit is borrowed).

Credit: Alan Bradley

The bezels are unobtrusive, and the screen experience overall is very pleasant. Colors pop, and while it doesn't have the vibrant color, deep blacks or blazing whites of an HDR-enabled OLED, games and video look crisp.

Battery life

The Strix Halo architecture at the heart of the Z13 isn't the best for marathon office work, but displays solid battery efficiency for gaming. In a standard productivity rundown test (balanced power setting, energy saving and screen dimming disabled, continually streaming Youtube), the 70 Wh battery lasted just a few minutes shy of 10 hours. Bear in mind that notebooks designed for efficiency can run for more than double that on a single charge.

However, in several gaming tests on balanced settings, the Strix Halo delivered an average of 84 minutes before dying. That's not an industry-leading mark, but for modern AAA games, it is very impressive. Also note that both Performance and Silent modes are available with the Z13 unplugged, though the tablet does limit the refresh rate of the screen to 60Hz when on battery.

Credit: Alan Bradley

A steep price for a narrow band of users