Asus ROG Flow Z13 Initial Review

[Mnky313]

There's not really a backstory with this one. I was kind of just looking around for something to replace my surface (pro 2017) and when Asus announced this I immediately wanted one.

I ended up finding one open box for what I considered a reasonable price...
I ended up getting the top end one (i9, 3050Ti, 1TB SSD) from BestBuy for $1700 (Normally $1900).
For some reason on Newegg & Ebay they seem to be going for ~$2400 which is a bit ridiculous IMO.

There was a shortcircuit video on this so if you want more detailed information about it check there first.

Performance:

It's very powerful especially for the form factor. The GPU isn't anything to write home about, mine has the 3050 Ti and for the games I play (mainly Minecraft & BeamNG.Drive rn which are both very CPU intensive) it has no issues. The CPU is where it really shines though, scoring near my 10900k in cinebench.

I'm super impressed that managed to cram a h series i9 into something this portable and not have it throttle a ton under any sign of load. It can spike up to ~100W for a short time but settles in around 55W while using the original 100W charger (more on this later)

Obviously for the price you can get a laptop with an RTX 3070 which would destroy the 3050Ti in this machine but if you want a surface pro like form factor there really isn't anything like it. The closest thing in terms of performance in the ROG Mothership and that is much larger and heavier. Also the Surface Pro 8 with a (low power) i7 and no dedicated graphics/16GB RAM/1TB SSD (same RAM/Storage as my Flow Z13) is ~$125 more than I paid for my Flow Z13 and you don't even get a keyboard...

Here's a Firestrike run as well for good measure.

Display/Keyboard:

 

To start, mine has the 1200p@120hz panel and that's the one I would recommend. 120Hz smoothness and no scaling is way better than the added resolution and better colour in my opinion.

 

It gets decently bright and it looks quite nice, I'm not really the one to ask about colour accuracy as I don't really care as long as it doesn't look like total ass... But the panel is quite responsive and I haven't had any complaints.

 

(also if you care, Twinkletray works perfectly with it).

Now the keyboard, it's good. The typing experience is pretty similar to my Surface Pro 4 keyboard.

Even though mine is a US layout, Asus did 'connect' the slash and enter key similar to how the enter key is shaped on other layouts, no idea why but it doesn't really change anything as they are still separate keys.

The keyboard isn't per key but it is RGB. I don't really care but it would have been nice to have per key RGB (though I also understand that it's super thin and also not really necessary)

Ports:

 

It has 2 USB-C ports (one of which is under the rubber cover and technically part of the XG-Mobile port). The exposed one is thunderbolt 4 compatible and both do 10Gb/s and can be used to charge.

It also has a USB 2.0 Type A port which I really wish was 3.0, it's not a huge deal but it would be nice to just be able to plug in a flash drive or my phone and not have to worry about being limited to USB 2.0 speeds. (though again, there is an extra type C port so I could always get a dongle or just a USB-C flash drive/C to C cable for my phone).

It also has a 3.5mm jack and SD card reader.

The XG-Mobile port is so close to being amazing. It's still cool, especially because you can use it to charge and add extra ports to it however I really think Asus missed a super cool opportunity to make a dock for desktop GPUs that connect via the XG Mobile connector, I feel like even with the limitation of Gen3x8 a desktop 3080 would destroy the mobile 3080 in the current top end XG-Mobile dock thing.

 

Battery:

 

I leave mine with the Optimus disabled and the battery life seems to be ~2 hours while doing normal stuff like browsing the web/watching YouTube and obviously much less when gaming. I'm sure if you re-enabled optimus and turned on power saving you could probably push 3-4 hours maybe more but battery life definitely isn't great.

 

Problems/Inconsistencies:

 

The biggest complaint I have BY FAR is the bullshit arbitrary limitation on their chargers. Apparently this isn't a new thing but Asus is using USB-C PD however they limit non Asus chargers to 65W over USB-C despite the fact that their charger uses the same voltage/amperage as the USB-C PD standard (20V@5A). This is fucking ridiculous in my opinion.
If you want full CPU performance (>30W) you NEED the official charger, and on top of that the only place I can find to buy one is asus-accessories.com and it costs $90+shipping which is quite steep for a 100W USB-C PD charger. Also you don't get the ability to use your own cables with the official adapter.
To be fair, the gaming performance seems to be similar using a USB-C PD charger and the official one however the laptop will discharge when using one.

Another complaint I have is the weird lighting issues I am having, it just feels unfinished. You need to either select a preset pattern or use Aura Creator, but the problem is Aura Creator is not great.
But once you have the lighting set up you're not free of my main issues. The window on the back appears to just randomly decide to switch to a different white only light effect when charging. I don't know if this is supposed to indicate it's done? or maybe just indicate it's charging? no idea, but it would be nice if there were options to configure this.
Also sometimes the keyboard backlights doesn't come back on when waking the device and the only way I can fix it is detecting the keyboard and re-attaching it. It gets really annoying and I'm hoping I can find a fix for this.

Also for some reason Armoury Crate reports the GPU max TGP is 50W. I never see over 35W and even Asus' own site says it's 40W max (and so does Nvidia's system information thing).

 

 

Conclusion:

 

In conclusion I still really like this machine, it's not for everyone and it definitely has it's problems but for me it's great and I'm hoping to keep it for many years to come. (Also the design is fucking amazing in my opinion, I love Asus ROG's new design style).

Feel free to post questions and suggestions below.

 

 

 

[Mnky313]

1 month update!
 

Honestly the charger thing isn't as annoying now because I think I fixed all of the performance issues when using other chargers.
I switched back to windows 10 and didn't install armoury crate, that combined with throttlestop appears to have allowed me to use the full 55w cpu power limit on any charger (but it will drain battery under load on PD chargers).

Also there's a 3d-printable cover for the XG-mobile port that leaves the type c exposed which comes in handy.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4906771

 

I experimented with different vBIOS with higher power limits but for now there's too many issues. afaik the MUX chip does not work with other vBIOS so enabling it would result in a black screen and the only way to recover is to navigate windows blindly and flash the original vbios or switch it back to optimus mode.

Also for the games I play I don't really need the extra GPU power, the higher CPU power is better.

 

I did get the high score for 12900h/3050Ti (I believe the Z13 is the only device with this hardware combo).

 

I also discovered that the keyboard LED issue was caused by the 'Asus Optimization' service being disabled, don't know why it's labelled that, I disabled it to see if it was causing the weird power throttling issue but I think that was armoury crate.

[Donut417]

If this device was a bit cheaper Id probably really consider it. Mainly because I wouldn't mind to have a portable device that can do light gaming. 

[Mnky313]

(Almost) 1 year updates:

 

If you own one of these I highly recommend joining the ROG Flow discord server (https://discord.gg/wdvZNP97), this device has some weird issues but almost all of my complaints can be fixed with a little tweaking.

 

most of my complaints are with the software.... Armoury crate is AWFUL but is also required for the XGm eGPUs......

 

I've completely given up on Aura, it works fine for a bit then just dies and fails to apply anything... you can set basic stuff through armoury crate which is what I've been doing.

 

I also HIGHLY recommend people combine throttlestop & the UEFI variable mod to increase power limits, the performance difference in gaming is huge, 22w is just not enough for this i9 to push stable framerates, even increasing it to ~30w can make a big difference but if you don't mind slow battery drain you can increase it to 35w or even 45w and the cooling can just about keep up.

 

You can also re-enable S3 sleep and it seems to work great on Windows 11 however I've had issues on windows 10, it likes to go to sleep then ramp the fans up and shutdown....

I just started using hibernation instead and it's honestly not bad, it takes probably 5-10 seconds to wake from hibernation but it's been reliable so idc.

 

I also picked up a 3080 XGm because I found a pretty good deal on a used one, honestly haven't used it much. I mostly picked it up to have a second powerful system that's extremely portable and just to check it out.

I REALLY hate that Asus only put 1 DP and 1 HDMI on the XGm.... it makes it impossible to use with my current setup as I need 2 DP connections and MST won't work as my main monitor doesn't support DSC and needs all the DP bandwidth to run at 4k120hz.... Like come on ASUS, it's a 3080... it can easily drive 3 or 4 monitors, there's no reason why you couldn't have had more DP ports...

 

Also the requirement of armourycrate to enable the XGm is kind of stupifd, I'm sure it's because of their nonstandard implementation of connecting the GPU but it still is annoying.

 

Other than that I really like this thing, I just wish they offered 32gb of RAM because I'm constantly running out when doing stuff with VMs or Minecraft xD (running multiple instances and doing mod testing)...

 

There's rumours of a 13900h/4070/32GB version but it's looking like that's approaching the $3k mark which is WAY too much for me to drop on another machine....

[Mnky313]

Update 2

lots of stuff has changed so I'm probably missing some stuff but I'll try and touch on the big things.

 

Linux runs fine on the 2022 Z13 (assuming you rollback the BIOS to (the quite old) 310)... The latest 317 has a bug with Intel DPTF that results in the CPU being locked into a <10W power profile making performance significantly worse. I've attempted to contact ASUS about the issue but they completely ignored me basically saying it's a Linux issue and they don't support Linux so it's not their problem... Even after me explaining this can happen on Windows as well if the DPTF drivers are not working correctly.

 

Battery life on linux is about the same as windows, it's actually worse with the weird 10W power bug somehow which I don't really get but eh. writing this with nothing else open I'm still only gonna get ~2-3 hours max. Sitting fully idle on the desktop you *might* be able to push it to 3.5 hours. This is with the dGPU disabled and the screen/backlight on max brightness.

Running the XGm on Linux is a hot mess currently, it does work but supergfxctl is very finicky... If I had to guess it's related to nvidia drivers on linux but it very often gets confused and says in on the Integrated or Hybrid profile while leaving the XGm active and changing modes does nothing, forcing me to just surprise hot-unplug it causing the nvidia driver to trough a fit because the device just 'falls off the bus' which the only way to recover from seems to be forcibly shutting down and booting back up.

The fingerprint sensor is also hit or miss, it is technically supported by libfprint and will work as a swipe reader once configured properly but also likes to randomly disconnect and is overall quite slow, I haven't even bothered to set it up since I re-installed.

 

Keyboard/Trackpad also has it's issues. Backlight likes to stop being configurable randomly (usually after closing it or going into suspend) The trackpad also sometimes thinks it's a mouse, which you have to find the ID and manually change it to hid-multitouch.

[root@FlowZ13 ~]# dmesg | grep asus
...
[    5.565631] asus 0003:0B05:1A30.0004: input,hiddev97,hidraw2: USB HID v1.10 Mouse [ASUSTeK Computer Inc. N-KEY Device] on usb-0000:00:14.0-6/input3
[root@FlowZ13 ~]# echo "0003:0B05:1A30.0004" > /sys/bus/hid/drivers/asus/unbind
[root@FlowZ13 ~]# echo "0003:0B05:1A30.0004" > /sys/bus/hid/drivers/hid-multitouch/bind

Not that you'll be using suspend anyway as it hangs for 30+ seconds when resuming from suspend. Tried a few fixes but it seems to be related to the microSD reader which also fails to appear after resuming from suspend.

Now for the not Linux related stuff

 

Hardware wise it's been solid. I personally haven't had any issues with the keyboard failing to connect at different angles or anything. I swear some keys repeat occasionally but it's probably just me as I've never been able to recreate it.

If you are on windows use G-Helper instead of Armoury Crate. It works perfectly from my experience and is so much lighter than AC.

 

I'm still of the belief that hardware wise this thing is 90% of the way to perfect for me. It's compact and easily portable while still having plenty of power on tap + the XGm port is awesome as it not only acts as a dock but gives you a (mostly) proper GPU.

The propitiatory charging thing I complained so much about in my initial review is kind of mute with the XGm as well because if I'm using it for gaming where I really need the extra CPU power I probably want the GPU power as well... It's still stupid but it hasn't really been that bad for me.

I'm also gonna rant about the 2023 model at the end here. I have 0 plans on upgrading to it for 3 main reasons (besides cost):

 

WHY IS IT 1600p. It's a 13" device, there is no benefit for it to be more than 1200p IMO, you basically have to use scaling and scaling on windows (and linux) is garbage. With scaling it just seems like a complete waste, no extra real estate, extra battery drain, and worse performance in games (unless you lower the panel res)...

(This one's more subjective but) I vastly prefer the fingerprint reader over the IR camera facial recognition thing. But why not just have both??? The chassis is virtually identical between the 2 models so why didn't they just keep the fingerprint reader power button and add facial recognition for those who want it.

Final thing is it's still limited to 16GB RAM unless you get the special ACRNM collab one which is cool but so expensive.

Edited December 14, 2023 by Mnky313
typos