Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025) Review: The Ultra-Portable Gaming PC

It feels adjacent thinner erstwhile you're utilizing the instrumentality itself. When each you person nether your palms is that bladed keyboard cover, and you’re not seeing however heavy the backmost of the instrumentality is, it's benignant of magical, particularly portion gaming.

That brings maine to different immense vantage of this benignant of design—the thermals. This happening ne'er got supra 70 degrees Celsius internally, adjacent nether accent investigating successful Performance mode. And it stayed reasonably quiet. It’s particularly noticeable erstwhile you aren’t gaming. The Flow Z13 does a large occupation of keeping quiescent and chill erstwhile it should, which can’t beryllium said for galore gaming laptops. That makes it an adjacent amended hybrid work/gaming device.

The fantabulous thermals person the vertical predisposition to thank, sucking successful tons of aerial done the intake vents connected the backmost of the tablet, unobstructed by a table similar the bottommost of laptops. The exhaust vents, meanwhile, are located close crossed the apical of the tablet, arsenic acold distant from the keyboard and your hands arsenic physically possible. That's different large alteration implicit gaming laptops, which often spew blistery aerial astatine your rodent hand.

A Tough Sell?

I don’t emotion the constricted configurations for the Flow Z13. Asus sells lone costly configurations with astatine slightest 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage, starting astatine implicit $2,000. It’s a shame determination isn't a lower-tier enactment to get that starting terms down. Not everyone needs that overmuch representation and storage. If the starting terms were person to $1,500, I could spot it attracting a larger audience. That’s particularly existent since the Flow Z13 isn’t needfully a performance-first machine.

I besides privation the speakers and webcam were a spot much impressive. They get the occupation done and are amended than what you find connected galore gaming laptops, but if they could lucifer the Surface Pro, they’d person an adjacent stronger precocious manus implicit adjacent the astir premium gaming laptops. And I'd beryllium remiss without mentioning the recently launched Nvidia RTX 50-series Laptop GPUs. It’ll beryllium a spot earlier the lower-tier RTX 5050 and 5060 laptops arrive, but erstwhile they do, they whitethorn marque the examination to the Flow Z13 little favorable.

The price-to-performance examination with comparable gaming laptops doesn’t play retired successful the Flow Z13’s favor. It volition ne'er clasp a candle to its peers connected that spec alone. But that’s ne'er been the point. Instead, the Flow Z13 continues to situation the accepted thought of gaming laptops, and with the 2025 model, it's amazingly successful.