ASUS's New Flow Z13 Impresses with its Breakthrough AMD Strix Halo APU
February 18, 2025
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ROG Flow Z13 with AMD's Strix Halo
Summary
Today we will be reviewing the impressively updated ASUS ROG Flow Z13: a premium gaming tablet with AMD’s powerful new Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor.
Table of contents:
Summary: A Unique Device with a Breakthrough Processor
The ASUS Flow Z13 knocked all of our collective socks off. Each one of us on the team had a moment while testing or filming it when we really were wowed by it. The industrial looking chassis with cool RGB, the most comfortable tablet keyboard we've ever felt, the beautiful IPS screen, and of course its phenomenal APU. This processor not only has a more powerful CPU than most laptops, but it also includes a 40-core GPU to provide killer integrated graphics performance rivaling a 100-watt RTX 4060. The only downsides any of us could really identify were firstly, the price of around $2,300 for the configuration we have. This feels fair for what you're getting, but it is quite high. Secondly, the other downside is the fact that this is in a tablet form factor rather than a traditional laptop. Many people are not interested in this type of device as it cannot be used on your lap. Now let's get into the numbers of why the Flow is so special!
CPU Performance
Compared to similarly sized laptops in their highest performance modes, this Flow Z13 does very well in CPU benchmarks like Geekbench, which tests a variety of common performance tasks, and even better in Cinebench, which tests the processor when it's maxed out.
What's even more interesting than how well it does, however, is the fact that it pulls less wattage than many Windows competitors to do even better. Here is our scatter plot where we show Cinebench score plotted by average wattage drawn during our 10-minute test. See how the pink dots are well above AMD's previous record in the HX 370? They still don't compare with Apple's efficiency, but these results remain impressive.
The fourth dot there that seems to be on an upward curve is from the Flow's manual performance mode, that's where you can feed it more wattage to get even more performance.
Heat, Fan Noise & Power Draw
Here's a glimpse of how the different modes do regarding heat, fan noise, and power draw. In summary, the tablet keeps itself very cool and it performs very well. The "Underside" temperature here is representative of the metal on the back of the tablet. The keyboard never gets warm as it's a separate piece. Keep in mind we boosted the fans on manual mode, but they are still comparable to a standard gaming laptop's volume during high performance tasks (52-58 dB).
One thing that shocked us was that the Flow even out-performed the much larger, and much more power-hungry Strix Scar 18 also from ASUS with an Intel i9-14900HX. This is currently the most powerful laptop processor being offered in gaming devices like it. Their score difference is minimal here, but the comparative efficiency of the Max+ 395 chip is amazing.
CPU efficiency is an incredibly important factor for resulting heat and fan noise, and that is very evident with the Flow's results. One positive of this is that it feels like the tablet only ever gives you as much fan noise as you need for tasks. In light use, on Silent mode, it was quiet. In gaming, on Turbo mode, it still stayed reasonable and the fan noise was never annoying in our opinions. CPU efficiency also can have a major effect on battery life.
Battery Life
If you are planning to do performance tasks while unplugged, you won’t be able to run the Flow at its highest Turbo mode. In fact, its performance is heavily throttled. You'll see that's also the case on most Window gaming laptops, and this one still has competitive performance.
After running Cinebench on a loop for 30 minutes the Flow drained over half of its battery. This is pretty standard for high-performance laptops, the MacBooks always win out here.
In lighter tasks, like playing a Netflix movie for 4-hours over Wi-Fi, the Flow does pretty well. Only draining around 30% of its battery. This is similar to the Tuf A14, which has the same resolution display and an AMD Zen 5 processor.
When looking at a full battery run down, the Flow lasted around 12 hours. This is the simplest of our battery tests as it just plays a downloaded movie on a loop. If you're wondering where the ProArt went in this last one, its results didn't seem quite right so we're going to be retesting it after the launch of this article.
Graphics Performance
Moving on from battery life, let's look at how the beefy iGPU performs in this new APU. When we look at TimeSpy, a Direct X 12 gaming benchmark, the integrated graphics in this processor is on par with the RTX 4060 in our TUF A14. We have seen RTX 4060s in laptops perform better but that’s in much larger laptops like the TUF F16. This GPU though, isn’t quite as powerful as an RTX 4070.
Looking at Port Royal, a ray tracing benchmark, this is one of the few places where the graphics in this new Max+ processor really underwhelm. It is significantly behind an Nvidia RTX 4060 for this type of processing.
When we move over to Wildlife Extreme, which is a cross-platform benchmark and therefore compatible with MacOS, the Flow is back to doing very well. It performs around the same as the TUF A14 and the MacBook Pro 14 with the higher end M4 Pro 20 core GPU.
Gaming
In gaming benchmarks, the Flow does alright. About as well as its competition with 4060s. This is without DLSS, of course, as that is not an option on AMD hardware. If you're curious how it did in the new Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark, on Ultra settings in its Turbo mode, it gets a score of 13,512 and an average FPS of 39.88. They call this “good”, and it does about as well as our TUF A14 with an RTX 4060 did. We don't feel modern games would be super playable at these settings, so we turned them down in our real world gaming.
In real world gaming, using Turbo performance mode and medium settings, here are our results for the Flow Z13.
The flow does well in older games like Cyberpunk and Fortnite, but does poorly in newer games like Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2. We found our actual experience to be smooth without lag most of the time, but there are still some noticeably lower frame rates at higher settings.
During these gaming sessions we appreciated that the device vents hot air out the top so there’s no heat blowing on your mouse hand. The tablet form factor also was a big win while gaming. Firstly, there are no heat generating components under the keyboard, so it always felt very cool to the touch.
Creative Applications
Now I’ll talk about creative workloads, which like gaming we tested on Turbo mode. For video editing, in Puget’s Premier Pro benchmark, the Flow performed around the same as a MacBook Pro 14 with the higher end M4 Pro 20 core GPU but behind laptops with an RTX 4060 or above. Taylor did try editing one of our videos and found the experience quite positive. A big upgrade from the integrated GPUs of other Windows laptops.
In Puget’s DaVinci Resolve benchmark, it did even better. This time on par with competing RTX 4060 laptops and even beating out the Neo 14 with an RTX 4070. Resolve does tend to run very well on AMD processors.
Moving on to Puget’s Photoshop benchmark, it does fantastically. It beat out all our competing laptops with an RTX 4060 and 4070 and came close to the higher end MacBook Pro 14 with M4 Pro with the 20 core GPU. We have been informed by a Puget rep that the reason laptops with dedicated GPUs do poorly here is likely due to the way laptops allocate power between the CPU and GPU. If you feed more power to a dedicated GPU in a laptop, it may come at the expense of power to the CPU.
Rest of the Device
Look & Feel
Ok testing out of the way, let’s talk about the rest of the device. Everyone here unanimously felt that the Flow Z 13 looks really special. The metal chassis has this premium aesthetic with a fusion of industrial design cues. There is this really cool window at the back where you can see the motherboard lit up by customizable RGB. This looks as stunning as one of Jayz2cents best builds.
When it comes to size and weight, I don’t want anyone to be surprised, this is a thick and heavy gaming tablet. It weighs a little more than a MacBook Pro 14, but it’s very well built. This extends to the tablet’s kickstand, which is sturdy. It can be adjusted to a wide variety of positions. Even close to 90 degrees. You’ll definitely be able to set it at the right angle. Once you are finished using the tablet, the keyboard becomes the cover, just like most tablets.
Looking around the device. The power button is on the right side of the screen, but it is recessed, so you won’t accidentally miss press it. The volume up and down rocker and command center button though are not recessed.
Ports
In addition to the buttons, there is a USB-A port on the right side, lower down. On the left side you get 2 USB-C 4.0 ports that support power deliver up to 100 watts, an HDMI port, and ASUS’s proprietary charging port. This device comes with a 200 Watt charger. You won't be able to get its full performance using just USB-C charging. Other than this you get a micro SD card reader. It has a good variety of ports but we were disappointed with their placement. Firstly, all 3 charging capable ports are on the left side. It means you’ll have to run a cable round the back if you are plugging into something that is on the right side. Secondly, many ports are far-up the tablet. It could cause cable strain, and it just looks messy.
Display
It is very bright at 560 nits, it has a fast 180Hz refresh rate, and a wide color gamut. Its resolution of 2560 by 1600 spread across its 13.4 inch panel is perfect. It gives it a very high PPI of 225. So even small text for coders or Excel warriors looks nice and crisp. It is a touch screen with pen support, which really makes this device very versatile. Students, artists, and the like. We didn’t detect any PWM flickering when raising or lowering brightness, which is good. Backlight bleed on our production unit was very minimal. Our only minor issue is that its panel is glossy. This does make content look nice and vibrant but in a very bright environment you will probably notice some reflections.
Keyboard
The keyboard is very good for a tablet. It has a 1.7 mm of key travel, the keyboard deck is very study, and it just feels delightful to type on and look at. That’s because its keys are RGB lit.
Trackpad
The trackpad is ok. It is a mechanical one and tracking is accurate enough, but its click is loud, and it does require some pressure. I would have loved to see it come with a haptic trackpad.
Speakers & Webcam
Check out our linked YouTube video to see the subpar webcam and alright, but quiet, speakers.
Upgradeability
The SSD in the laptop is upgradeable. Easily in fact by a panel on the back. The memory is soldered though.
Linux Support
To test Linux we did booted up Fedora 41 from a USB key. It was mostly a positive story. Wi-Fi, brightness up and down, trackpad, webcam all worked. The only thing that didn’t was Bluetooth and the speakers. Hopefully with a full install and update they will, but they didn’t out of the box.
Conclusion
As we showed you, this device gives you the performance of a higher end M4 Pro 14-core CPU and an Nvidia RTX 4060 GPU. A great combination, especially since its power efficiency allows it to be placed in such a small device. Sure, if you are purely gaming, you can find a more powerful laptop for the money. But no laptop is as “do-it-all” as this device. You can play the latest games on it, you can use it as a tablet, you can edit videos or photos on it, you can code on it or do data science work. It’s compact and portable but it still very feels premium. The only major issue with the Flow Z13 is whether a tablet is right for you.