ASUS ROG did what Microsoft couldn't - Flow Z13
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2022-05-05
·
2,343 words · ~11 min read
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(gentle music) - Oh
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Fancy. ASUS has made an incredibly powerful
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and incredibly small laptop, tablet kind of thing,
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but they seem to want to overcompensate a bit 'cause the first time,
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it was inside of the mothership and this time it's an even bigger package, ROG Bounce.
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Doesn't bounce, proved them wrong. Anyway, let's get into it. This is sponsored by ASUS ROG.
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Oh, let's see what we have in here. So first of all, we have a Game Pass Ultimate subscription.
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The code's there. Editor, please blur that out. John O put it in the comments.
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Someone gets this. Yeah, we also have some headphones.
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I didn't know these were in here, so that's pretty cool. So we have got the Fusion II 500,
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apparently it has surround sound and RGB. And also in here we get the Xbox wireless controller.
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It's vinyl wrapped with an ROG little design on it.
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And how do we get at it? Where's where's the laptop.
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Okay, nevermind. ASUS ROG super overcompensated
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and this box only had the peripherals in it.
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Like, did they send us one of their GPUs, Jono? - [Jono] Guess so.
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- That's sick. This is the XG Mobile.
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And it connects to the Flow Z13 and allows you to have like a full blown Z dedicated GPU.
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Well, I think it's a mobile GPU actually in a little enclosure, but at the same time
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it is very powerful. We'll have to test this out later.
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- [Jono] What's that connecting thing though? - What's the connector thing.
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- [Jono] Yeah. - Oh, so this right here is their XG mobile connector.
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And what we have is we have, I believe this is Thunderbolt. It might just be type C
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but we also have is PCIe Gen Three 5/8 connector right here.
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So that allows us to get the full bandwidth or pretty much the full bandwidth of this GPU to the laptop.
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Whereas if you did it over Thunderbolt or something like that, you would have way more latency
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and also just lower bandwidth, which sucks.
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Bandwidth over Thunderbolt is only good for about 10/60, 10/70.
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So when you're putting a 30/80 in there it would really impact your performance.
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Anyway, moving on. Here's the star of the show, the power brick.
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- [Jono] What, why? - Because, I'm this is what Galien Knight tribe.
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Hundred watts over type C. This thing's wicked, Jono, star of the show.
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Absolute unit. No, here's the actual star of the show.
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Are we allowed to call it just a Surface Pro but good, Jono?
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Yeah, this is essentially a Surface Pro, but good.
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Microsoft has struggled a lot to cool, you know,
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two, four cores in a CPU and not turn the back of the chassis into a frying pan.
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So the first thing that's super cool about this design is see through plastics.
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Love it. I absolutely adore that that's coming back.
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It just looks cool. And it's kind of nostalgic while also just being freaking awesome.
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We also have fan intakes here and here, it looks like.
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What do we have here for call on activity? It looks like we have Thunderbolt four.
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This right here is the XG GPU port. Although I believe you can use that as a type C.
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There we go. Rubber thing, super easy to get out.
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There's our XG connect port. And if you want, there is another USB type C
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on the side of it that you can use. Right on the other side
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we have our power button, volume button, full size type A port; that's pretty impressive.
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And headphone microphone combo jack. How did they fit in so much performance
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and also completely destroy the Surface Pro's IO Jono?
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- [Jono] They actually listened. - Ooh, let's open her up though.
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- [Jono] That looks so cool. - Yeah, this does look really cool.
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I have to say I was kind of skeptical
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about this thing because like tablets, but it looked sweet.
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- [Andy And Jono] Ooh. - [Jono] It glows, whoa, RGB on the back.
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- [Andy] RGB on the back. - What are you guys seeing? Oh, that is really fancy.
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Okay, yep. Keyboards working fine. Edge is not working.
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That's great. Thank you, Microsoft for your incredible software.
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The first thing I was concerned about with this laptop is the super small track pad.
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Out of the box, I wasn't a huge fan but after disabling mouse acceleration, it's not bad.
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I'm sure you'll get used to it in a second. Also the keyboard: keyboard's great.
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Like it's the kind of thing where obviously it's not as good
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as an actual laptop. Like you can see here, Andy, probably
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there is some flex in it, but I also have seen worse in laptops.
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And if you want, you know the traditional clam shell design, they have the Flow X13.
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And so you should just buy that if you want a traditional clam shell design.
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If you do go for a traditional laptop, though what you can't do is this: remove the keyboard.
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So that allows you to, you know, not have a keyboard. You could put whatever keyboard you want right here
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use that, or just, you know, use it very simply as a tablet.
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This also would probably be awesome to have on a plane
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cuz you're always just running out of space there. This I see is kind of like the dorm room hero
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of a little laptop. This thing would be awesome to have
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with a bunch of your friends, just like plop it anywhere. Good, we can play some games.
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As I've alluded to the really impressive thing about this laptop are the specs like look at how
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thick this is, Andy, it's a tablet, but it's got 20 threads.
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What the hell? So in this we have an i9 12900H,
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that's a 45 watt processor, again in a tablet.
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We also have a NVIDIA RTX 3050Ti,
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along with 16 gigabytes of RAM at 5,200 mega transfers per second
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that has to be DDR5, one terabyte SSD,
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Intel Wi-Fi 6E, basically all of the best stuff.
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I'm guessing it's also incredibly expensive and it is very expensive.
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This unit right here is 1899. You can definitely get more power for the price
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but you know, look at it. Those are much, much bigger.
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Now, one thing I was curious about is how Xbox controllers play with this.
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I'm assuming that they have batteries in the controller
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first of all, but I would assume that they have an Xbox controller dongle integrated into this,
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which would be awesome because otherwise we need one of those big old wireless, Xbox controller
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dongles hanging out of the side whenever we want to use it. That's not very elegant.
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So I just pressed the pair button here. It immediately popped up on this that I wanted to connect
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and did it? Failed to pair, okay. That wasn't as flawless as I was hoping.
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So wait, does that mean that you can just pair Xbox series controllers
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over Bluetooth to your laptops? - [Jono] Guess so. - That is sick.
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Ha ha. Controller's ready to go. Wow, it's amazing how things just work
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once you've updated everything. Okay, do we get to game on it?
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I think we finally get to game on it. Heck yeah. Oh, here we go.
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Excellent. 120 Hertz gotta enable that.
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So we have a 1920 by 1200p display going at 120 Hertz
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16 by 10, fricking love that,
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we also have an eight bit color depth. And what did you say?
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Hundred percent DCI-P3. Okay, don't know exactly what the color space is
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but it has Dolby vision support and it's Pantone Validated. So all the colors should be nice and accurate, yeah.
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So we're here in Forza Horizon 5, 10 ADP.
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It looks like that we're getting 60 to 70 FPS on low.
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Now that might not sound amazing but this game looks really good.
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Even on low settings. And remember, this is, this is a tablet.
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Like it is absolutely incredible that we can play a game that looks like this
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record it at the same time and still be getting 70 FPS.
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Like this is incredible. What it's doing right now.
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It's also nearly silent. I'm really impressed with how it's not making
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absolute racket. How are the speakers on this?
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That's really quite good. Like this is loud enough. - [Game] Go Team Motorcycle.
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- That you could very easily, if you're playing a game with a couple of your friends
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- [Game] Daredevil bikers. - You know, use these speakers effectively while
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having a group of dudes around it. Or gals.
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Yeah, like as far as just like a casual gaming
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experience goes, this is very good.
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There is a chance though that you saw that and we're like 60 FPS.
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What is this? I'm a PC gamer. I can't live with that.
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And I want to give ASUS a whole bunch more money.
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That's where the XG mobile comes in.
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Oh, so this is pretty sweet. Now you've got your multi-monitor display.
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You can look at lttstore.com and at the same time you can boot up
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your games on the other screen. So we go to Start Manager GPU RTX 30/80.
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Oh yeah. So now we've got our lttstore.com open.
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We've got Forza up top, which is a 1440p on high.
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I think that's what we'll get away with, with a mobile 30/80, which to be clear, the 30/80 in this eGPU
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is not a desktop 30/80.
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Like, you're probably wondering how the heck is it so small and it's 30/80. It isn't a 30/80, it's more like a 30/70 on the desktop
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but they call it a 30/80 in laptops. It's the same dye.
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16 gigs is a big RAM though, pretty sweet. Okay, Andy, you have to say, this is pretty sweet.
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- [Andy] Oh yeah. - Oh, one-sixty, a hundred sixty FPS.
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You cannot complain about that. We could probably increase the graphics a little bit
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but I'm one to go for 160 FPS over ultra quality
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and 140 FPS. This is clearly very awesome.
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Especially that you have that's, it's running off a tablet.
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Like, can you guys believe that? - [Jono] And an eGPU.
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- Yeah, it's a tablet and an eGPU. But like if you have bolder tier cash
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this is a really awesome way to have like your cake
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and eat it too with a laptop. Now, one thing that makes this so sweet is
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that it has a vapor chamber in there. So instead of having heat pipes
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that might dedicate a certain amount of your cooling to the GPU, certain amount to the CPU
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the vapor chamber's able to just take all that heat
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and sort of put it wherever it needs to go. It doesn't really care.
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So when you have it as a tablet the GPU and the CPU are going to be vying
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for all of that heat dissipation. Whereas in a setup like this, the GPU is basically off
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and the CPU gets all of the, you know thermals that this has built into it.
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So that's why you're able to have a super awesome situation where you're doing 160 FPS
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on a mobile CPU with an eGPU.
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Okay, so this thing is clearly a small gaming beast.
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What I'm curious of is can you upgrade it?
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Can you repair it? I don't know. It's the kind of device where I don't expect
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it to really, you know be upgradeable, but if it is, that's a massive bonus.
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I do see screws on the back. One thing that I didn't notice before is
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that there appears to be a little SD card reader right here.
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So you could slot one in for additional storage. So it looks like with just one screw
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you can take this little cover off and have access to your SSD for upgrading.
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That's pretty awesome. Look at that Andy. Yeah, I'm getting real
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if we want to get into this we gotta break out the heat gun vibes
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and I'm not in a heat gunning this and destroying it kind of mood right now.
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It is too bad that we couldn't open it up. I really wanted to check out the big old vapor chamber
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that goes all the way along here. Underneath it there is liquid metal.
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That's how you keep your parts all nice and cool. And also there is a muck switch
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so that your GPU goes directly through your CPU and doesn't have, you know
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the associated losses with that. Before we head out, I just want to quickly see
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how good this webcam is. Okay, front facing camera looks pretty good.
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This is more than acceptable for your typical like tablet or laptop.
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Let's see about the back facing. Okay, yeah. So this is actually pretty decent.
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It's pretty much, you know what you'd expect from a normal phone camera except it's in a laptop.
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So that makes it way more impressive. Cuz they're always so (bleep) on laptops.
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Anyway, Flow Z13. Huge thanks to ASUS for sponsoring this video.
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Oh, Jona wants me to mention that there's a 4k 60 Hertz version. Don't buy it.
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If you do, you're an idiot. Thanks for watching. Goodbye, have a good day.