this can't happen at least it shouldn't how could this be faster than this but
the thing is guys the numbers don't lie this absolute Beast of a gaming laptop
running intels Flagship 8 core 5.3 GHz
Boost mobile processor is getting destroyed before our very eyes by a thin
and light I mean look at this thing I can like wave it around with two fingers
by harnessing AMD's new ryzen 5000 series mobile CPU use the ASUS flow x13
has created a whole new class of laptop
we're going to call it the the ultra Ultra
Book super book Wonder Book okay I'm not
sure but I am sure that this is a segueway to our
sponsor from the specs alone you'd assume that the flow x13 is at least 2
weeks classes higher it's got an AMD ryzen 9 59 adhs an 8 core 16 thread
Beast of a processor that pushes at 7 NM transistors to 4.6 GHz and it's got an
NVIDIA GTX 1650 graphics card to crank
out reasonable frame rates as long as you don't mind turning down some of the
eye candy I mean dedicated graphics baby
and while we've seen situations where great specs can be let down by
disappointing cooling I mean we just showed it Shred reading the MSI ge66
Raider In fairness that really isn't MSI's fault I mean they have pumped
every last wat of power that they can into that Intel processor and the GPU in
the MSI laptop will leave the flow x13 dead in the water so let's pivot then to
a more relevant comparison that's where
this comes in just a couple of months ago we lauded the XPS 15 for its
combination of power and design designating it the best Windows laptop
period but now that it looks like we might be able to get more performance
from a much more portable machine it's looking a lot more like the best Windows
laptop huge asterisk despite being the
size of an XPS 13 the flow x13 was
trading blows with Dell's much larger pride and joy in CPU benchmarks and uh
that was only until I discovered something rather fun in ASUS's Rog soft
software you can flip over to manual mode which lets you turn the CPU from a
35 wat TDP up to 45 now unsurprisingly
that's a little too much for the poor cooler in this thing to handle like look
at it but it's also a twoin one and if
you flip it around so the intake doesn't get choked against the
table look at this peaking at 95° C
we've got the co cooling for 45 Watts now which knocked a whole minute off of
our blender BMW test and allowed the flow x13 to handily shred the XPS 15 in
pretty much everything else where the flow x13 didn't do quite as well though
is GPU benchmarks the 1650 TI and the
xps15 outpaced our 1650 Max Q on the x13
pretty easily but the experience wasn't
that different we're talking 1080p medium to high details the same can't be
said of the XPS 13 which if you think
about it is a way fairer fight so yeah the flow x13 punches well above its
weight class for power particularly in the CPU department but the thing is the
power of the xps15 is only part of its
draw the people we know who bought XPS
15s did it for the overall experience
the materials the trackpad the keyboard and of course flexing on everyone that
can't afford a $3,000 laptop so is the
flow x13 able to compete in this
regard to a degree the Magnesium chassis
is fairly stiff but does flex a bit if you press on it especially up at the top
and as for Aesthetics personally I think they struck a great balance between
professionalism and gamer appeal but it's not quite as sexy as for Io at
first glance it looks exception for this class of laptop you get two USB type C's
a type A and full-sized HDMI but I was a
little disappointed when I realized it was HDMI 2.0 and when I remembered that
AMD machines don't have Thunderbolt at
first I was like ah you know at least I'll have a full-sized USB port so maybe
I can deal with this but I was kind of shocked at how many things I use on a
daily basis that require Thunderbolt our 10 gig network adapters our best
external capture card they both run Thunderbolt 3 and when it comes to
docking or running an external graphics card Thunderbolt is the only way to do
it or is it the flow x13 has yet another
really cool trick up its sleeve the XG mobile connect interface which gives us
a PCI Express gen 3x8 link straight into
this the XG mobile egpu now you get a
couple of options for the GPU that you can have crammed in here but of course
we're showing off the most powerful one an RTX 380 mobile with a 280 W power
supply built right in the RTX 380 and this compact package is able to boost up
to 1810 MHz allowing you to connect to
either a high refresh rate 1440p display or a 4K 60 display and have a pretty
darn good time especially with your uh extra connectivity got your Ethernet got
your USB SD card slot this combination was even able to slightly beat out the
zephrus g15 a ryzen 9 RTX 380 beast but
there is a problem a mobile RTX 380 is
pretty close to a desktop RTX 370 in
terms of performance and you will be paying nearly RTX 390 money for this
package I mean I get it it's currently the best egpu notebook combination on
the Market Bar None and good engineering costs good money but ASUS's kind of shot
themselves in the foot here by making the new zephrus G14 and g15 so darn good
for everyday use that it's hard to not just recommend buying one of those
instead we'll have a review of those coming by the way so make sure you're
subscribed and of course what I say and what I do are two entirely different
things and given the option personally I would choose the much lighter flow x13
largely thanks to its screen there are two options for the display we have the
4K touch option which you should absolutely not buy Because unless you
are a literal Hawk you don't need over9 million pixels in a 13.4 in form factor
but that's okay because there's also a full HD Plus model that runs at 120 Herz
we got to check it out on a pre-production unit and it is
exceptional it brings a level of fluidity that has previously simply not
been available on Ultrabooks and especially not on ones that also have a
touchcreen now it's possible that the 120 HZ SMI of it does harm battery life
but then again soda's running at unnecessarily High resolutions so I
would I would expect it to be pretty similar to the 7 and 1/2 hours we were
able to get from our machine one area ASUS could definitely improve though is
well this area above the keyboard using
this space for media Keys is fine on a big chungus 15inch gaming laptop but
here every last bit of space needs to be used efficiently and I would rather have
had a larger trackpad like it's fine but
it definitely feels very 3 years ago and cramped compared to offerings from Dell
HP and Razer the keyboard is also a bit
of a sore spot for a gaming laptop it's
well it's excellent and I can get up to full speed on it effortlessly but at
this size it's competing against the likes of the XPS 13 HP Spectre and
Lenovo ThinkPad all of which have pretty much perfected getting an incredible
typing feel out of a small laptop to be clear the flow x13 is still good but the
slight mushiness makes it more of a a minus at least compared to that group
unlike some of their other RG machines ASUS wisely included a webcam on the
flow X3 definitely grateful for that the quality is even not bad and I would
normally complain that they didn't include Windows hello facial recognition
on the thing but get this the fingerprint reader on the side has
ausa's Special Sauce fingerprint caching
so you don't actually have to touch it again after the boot sequence it just Lo
logs right in the speakers are also good but not incredible the Dual be Atmos
integration offers excellent stereo separation and good detail but the Bas
is pretty lacking compared to something like the MacBook Air or the quality of
this t-shirt from LTT Store.com totally unbiased by the way meaning that the
flow x13 isn't the perfect Ultra Book
and if you plan on doing all day typing browsing the web and even light photo
editing you'll probably be better served by an XPS 133 or a spectre 14 but if you
need performance the flow x13 is
completely in a class of its own with more grunt than an I9 10900 HK and a
reasonably powerful GPU this thing shreds when it comes to light gaming
video editing or even light cadw work also given how the prices of Ultrabooks
have ballooned the $14.99 asking price isn't even out of this world so the real
tough decision is if you value the touchcreen and the lightness enough to
choose this or over the similarly priced zephrus G14 with an RTX
3060 that is assuming of course that you can find either of them in stock anyway
I mean you can't buy ryzen 5000 you can't buy RTX 3000 and this has
literally both so is it like un obtainium squared yeah L that I've seen
like maybe March and we're going to march on to our message from our sponsor
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$25 credit if you're looking for something else to watch then maybe check
out our Roundup of this and all the other laptops that ASUS showed off at
CES along with our ShortCircuit video trying out this High refresh rate mobile
display and then a bunch of other ones as well they're really it's pretty cool