Asus ROG Flow X13
If you go counting, you can name the laptops that combine gaming with portability at your fingertips. There are not many of them out there. Most of the time, a laptop can either be portable and good for on-the-go productivity or be good for gaming in a chunky form factor. The Asus ROG Flow X13 (2023) combines the best of both worlds to offer a lightweight gaming laptop that’s actually good enough in both departments.
Design and display
The Asus ROG Flow X13 features a textured aluminum design both on the lid and the back. It’s a premium design and sporty look that stands out from smooth lids found on most laptops. At 1.3kg, it is one of the most portable gaming laptops out there. For reference and to put things into perspective, the 13-inch M2 MacBook Air weighs 1.2kg. The Asus laptop measures 32mm in thickness and slides easily in my backpack, which is meant to carry lightweight laptops.
The laptop has two type C with Display Port 1.4 lying on the right edge, while a 3.5mm audio jack, an HDMI 2.1 port, a microSD card slot are situated on the left side alongside XG Mobile Platform to attach external GPUs and make it a more powerful gaming machine when you’re at your desk. As for wireless connectivity, it includes WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. It features a hinge that allows you to rotate the screen 360 degrees for tablet and tent mode.
The power button placement on the right side is weird, for me at least. I would have preferred it to be on top of the keyboard or somewhere more accessible. In my two weeks of usage, I could hardly get used to it. I had to look for the power button every time to switch on the laptop.
The Asus ROG Flow X13 sports a 13.4-inch display with a QHD+ 2560 x 1600-pixel resolution in a 16:10 aspect ratio. It supports up to 165Hz refresh rate, Dolby Vision HDR, and MUX switch to switch to discrete graphics mode when needed. It’s a touch panel that goes up to 500 nits in brightness. It’s a ROG Nebula display, which means it is Pantone certified, comes with DCI-P3 100 percent color gamut and TUV Rheinland certified.
It’s a sharp display with vivid colors. I didn’t have a problem working indoors. But in bright daylight or cafes, the reflective display is a bit uneasy to use. Although, it’s still good enough to get work done outdoors. The display is good for content consumption – I liked watching movies on Netflix and Prime Video. It handles changing contrast levels in games very well. The speakers are good enough for movie sessions if there is limited ambient noise.
Performance and battery
The Asus ROG Flow X13 is powered by AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS (up to 5.2GHz octa-core processor), with an integrated Radeon 780M GPU and equipped with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4050 (6GB DDR6) or RTX 4060 options in GPU (8GB GDDR6). My review unit has the latter. It is paired with 16GB of LPDDR5 dual-channel RAM and 1TB of M.2 PCIe 4.0 SSD.
Playing Forza Horizon 5 gave me 50fps gameplay in Full HD. Mortal Combat II and Red Dead Redemption 2 ran very well too, with the latter giving me 48fps in Turbo mode. The fan kicks in in gaming, which is a given. I didn’t find abnormalities in the fan. It isn’t too noisy – the noise is as much as you’d expect from an average gaming laptop.
Apart from gaming, it gets warm on day-to-day usage with several Chrome tabs opened and Slack running in the background – so much so that it can get uncomfortable on the thighs because of the dual vents positioning at the bottom. While it features dual heat pipes, liquid metal thermal, and three heat sinks for ventilation, it still gets quite warm but works smoothly despite that.
The ROG Flow X13 runs Windows 11 Home. It is bundled with a few Asus apps that actually help you instead of being bloatware. For instance, the Armoury Crate app allows you to customize your laptop with RGB, change GPU mode, and check CPU stats, temperature, and more. The 1080p FHD webcam is one of the better ones for video calls and doubles as an authenticator for Windows Hello. There is no fingerprint sensor, which is a miss.
Most gaming laptops offer three hours of battery life. The ROG Flow X13 is one of the best gaming laptops that can be used for productivity because it packs a good battery life for the form factor. I got around 6.5 hours of battery life on average without me configuring the performance modes. The 75Whr battery takes more than two hours to charge with the bundled 130W charger.
Keyboard and trackpad
The ROG Flow X13 is comfortable to type on with good travel. The curve on the keys add the typing experience. It features backlighting that can be customized to up to three levels. You also get additional function keys at the top. There is enough room to keep the palms and not once did I experience mistakenly resting my palm or unintentional finger touches on the trackpad, which is big and supports multi-window gestures.
Price and availability
The Asus ROG Flow X13 starts at Rs 1,74,990 (as per the company’s website) for the GV302XU variant that features NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 GPU. The GV302XV model (reviewed here) with RTX 4060 GPU option will set you back at Rs 1,84,990. Both variants are powered by the same AMD Ryzen 9 9740HS processor, paired with 16GB RAM and 1TB storage. You can purchase the devices from Asus stores and third-party vendors in the offline markets. As of writing this review, the laptop is unavailable on the Asus website.
Verdict
The Asus ROG Flow X13 is meant for those who value on-the-go productivity but also want a gaming machine that can be made more powerful with an external GPU. If that sounds like you, the ROG Flow X13 is for you. It offers a sturdy build, great display, good performance and battery life without being too heavy in the bag.