A gaming laptop and tablet with serious power

The Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025) is a new gaming laptop 2-in-1 that continues the company’s Z13 lineup, and which is still trying to convince the world that a gaming tablet pretending to be a gaming laptop is a winning formula. Helping immensely with this latest addition is the inclusion of AMD’s brand new Ryzen AI Max 300 lineup of CPUs, which have stunningly powerful integrated GPUs that unlock new levels of performance for such a compact device.

Whether it all adds up to creating one of the best gaming laptop devices around will largely depend on whether you see the potential in the hybrid tablet/laptop form factor that Asus has chosen. It’s certainly primed to be one of the best thin and light gaming laptop options in terms of power, but a high price could mean it struggles against chunkier and more conventional laptops.

However, with a 180Hz, 1600p display, and plenty of ports, this portable PC has more going for it than just a new chip. To see if it all comes together into a winning package, I’ve spent the last week putting this device through its paces, running gaming and productivity benchmarks, as well as gaming at home and while traveling. Read on to find out how it fares.

Specs

There’s only one place to start when it comes to the specs of the Asus ROG Flow Z13, and that’s its AMD Ryzen AI Max 390 processor. This chip (which was codenamed Strix Halo before release) is a brand new AMD design that has a huge integrated GPU, allowing it to deliver true gaming laptop performance but without an extra laptop GPU. This single-chip in theory saves on the space that would be taken up by a separate GPU and all the circuitry it needs, such as VRAM chips, potentially allowing for smaller, lighter machines.

The GPU part of the Max 390 chip is named the Radeon 8050S (Radeon 8060S on the higher-spec Max+ 395 model) and it contains 32 compute units based on the company’s RDNA 3.5 graphics architecture, with these cores running at a very fast 2,800MHz. RDNA 3.5 is a slightly tweaked version of the RDNA 3 architecture that powers the Radeon RX 7000 series, such as the RX 7800 XT. So it’s not quite as powerful as the RDNA 4 architecture that’s inside the company’s newest cards, which we tested for our 9070 XT review.

Nonetheless, those 32 compute units (also known as graphics cores) are the same number housed in the desktop AMD Radeon RX 7600 graphics card. While that’s certainly not a high-end graphics card, it is still a full-fat, desktop-class card that can deliver playable frame rates in modern games at 1080p with high settings. For comparison, the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (Strix Point) CPU in the new Razer Blade 16 2025 also has an integrated GPU but with only 16 graphics cores, and that GPU is already far more powerful than most other integrated GPUs.

The Max 390 isn’t just about GPU power, though. It also hosts a capable CPU with 12 cores (able to process two application threads each, so it appears like a 24-core chip) that can run at up to 5.1GHz. In our tests, we could only get it to hit 4.8GHz on a single core, while a full load on all cores saw this drop to 2.75GHz, but that’s still very fast for a laptop chip. Those cores are also based on the company’s latest Zen 5 architecture, which is what powers the undisputed best gaming CPU around, the 9800X3D.

There is also a version of the Z13 Flow available with the even more powerful Max+ 395 processor, which has 16 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores. However, it’s the Max 390 version we’re testing here.

Backing up this powerful CPU and GPU is a healthy 32GB supply of 8,000MT/s LPDDR5X RAM. This RAM is actually shared between the CPU and GPU, replacing the dedicated VRAM you normally get with a graphics card. However, not only does the Max 390 use a quad-channel connection to that RAM, to ensure a very fast 238MB/s of memory bandwidth, but this sharing of the RAM means the GPU has a larger pool of RAM available to it than the VRAM on many entry-level graphics cards, such as the RTX 4060.

A crucial downside of this RAM, though, is that it’s soldered to the board so can’t be upgraded at a later date. That’s a common arrangement these days, particularly for smaller systems like this one – the Razer Blade 16 2025 also uses this configuration – but some larger gaming laptops have upgradeable RAM. Overall, though, 32GB is enough for a gaming tablet such as the Z13.

Thankfully, the 1TB SSD that’s loaded into this laptop is upgradeable to the best gaming SSD you can afford. It uses the tiny M.2 2230 standard that’s the same one used in the Steam Deck OLED and original Asus ROG Ally, and up to 2TB drives are currently available in this format. It can be accessed via a cover on the outside of the device, with just a single torx screw needed to open it up.

Features

The Asus ROG Flow Z13’s intriguing tablet/laptop hybrid design largely dictates what other features it offers. So, for instance,  a crucial addition to allow the screen to stand up – in lieu of having a laptop screen hinge – is a foldout kickstand that can hold the tablet at any angle between 70 degrees (shown below – it’s very unstable at this angle) and 19 degrees.

You also then get the keyboard/trackpad cover section that attaches via magnets to the edge of the tablet. The cover can either fold flat onto the screen to protect it or open up to be used as a keyboard. It can then sit either completely flat against the desk. or magnets can hold it up slightly against the tablet to raise its back edge (as shown above), simulating how keyboards can be raised via rear feet. Notably, the keyboard doesn’t have a battery so that it can work wirelessly, which seems like quite an oversight as it negates one potential big benefit of a detachable keyboard/trackpad.

Thankfully, though, the quality of the keyboard and trackpad is decent. The keys have plenty of travel and feedback so it’s easy to touch type. They’re also backlit so they’re easy to see in the dark, though the lighting doesn’t get particularly bright. Meanwhile, the trackpad is large, responsive, and has a satisfying physical click – there’s no haptics or touch-only response here. The keyboard is a bit flexible, though, so it can bounce around a bit when used on a lap.

What’s more, the tablet includes a great selection of ports around its edges. As well as two USB C ports on its left edge, it has a full-size USB A port on its right edge, making it quick and dongle-free to plug in any of the devices many of us still use that have an older-style USB plug. Likewise, there’s a full-size HDMI port on the left, so plugging it into a monitor is a breeze. A microSD card slot is also available for quick file transfers and storage expansion, and there’s a combi audio jack for when you don’t want to rely on speakers.

Speaking of speakers, the pair of 2W drivers in this tablet fire out of the sides and from two tiny slits on the lower front edge of the tablet, and… they’re not great. This is obviously a small device with limited space for speakers and it has effectively no bezel around the screen from which to fire the sound straight but, nonetheless, they sound particularly shrill, with even my mid-range (~$300) 10-inch Samsung Android tablet sounding smoother, if not as loud.

Thankfully, the screen on this tablet is considerably better than its speakers. Its 2,560 x 1,600 resolution is a great match for the screen size, offering a high pixel density without pushing to a 4K resolution that would be wasted on a panel of this size. The extra screen height is also particularly useful, as compared to the normal 2,560 x 1,440 resolution that you get on many of the best gaming monitors. It gives you a little more vertical room when using the device in a landscape orientation, and gives you more width when it’s used in a portrait orientation too.

Its quality is decent too. Colors have plenty of punch and it can deliver HDR levels of color depth. We measured the maximum brightness at 526cd/m² which is plenty for use in bright outdoor conditions. Contrast is strong too, at 1,326:1. On a fully dark screen, you can clearly see some backlight grayness shining through, but this screen is great for most uses. That said, there’s no denying that an OLED panel feels like it would’ve been the ideal choice for a very expensive tablet such as this one.

Thankfully, with a 180Hz maximum refresh rate, the display feels really snappy in gaming – and the high refresh rate makes for a lovely smooth feel while scrolling around the desktop too. Plus it offers a variable refresh rate so that Windows can dynamically lower the refresh rate when not needed, to save battery life.

Design

There are two key aspects to considering the design of this gaming laptop/tablet. One is the overall styling and build quality of the machine but the other is looking at the overall tablet format and how this affects the usability of the device, and we’ll look at this aspect first.

Put simply, this being a gaming tablet rather than a laptop feels really weird. The tablet itself is really thick at nearly 15mm, and although it’s impressively light for a laptop at 1.2kg, it’s still quite heavy for a tablet – a Switch 2, it isn’t. Plus, its size means you really feel that weight when holding it one-handed, due to the extra leverage. The net result is that it feels very unwieldy to use as a conventional tablet, whether just for watching video and browsing the web or trying to do something more demanding like reply to an email, let alone play a game. It only really works well when already on a flat, stable surface such as a gaming desk.

Not helping is the fact that the tablet runs Windows, which still isn’t a particularly touch-friendly operating system. Accidentally rotate the tablet when you pick it up and all your windows awkwardly resize and move about while games can be interrupted.

Then there’s the fact that the keyboard attachment doesn’t help support the tablet at all. You can’t pick up the tablet via the keyboard and it doesn’t prevent the tablet tipping backwards. The kickstand can provide support but there are countless situations where it just isn’t a practical or stable option, not least because the size and weight of the tablet makes it quite top-heavy.

In contrast, some 2-in-1 laptops, such as the Lenovo Yoga, still have the keyboard section attached like a normal laptop, while some non-keyboard covers for tablets can be tucked under the tablet to provide support, as shown in the image below. Both these arrangements feel far more secure than relying on a kickstand alone.

Furthermore, the kickstand is just a little bit too awkward to deploy. Most of its edge is tricky to grab and there’s just one small tab on the bottom right edge to help you pull the stand out. Even then it’s quite stiff and awkward to pull out the stand while holding the tablet.

This all adds up to a situation where I was constantly craving the ability to just set up this machine as a normal laptop. Sat on the sofa gaming casually, plugged in and gaming on a desk – where the fact it’s a tablet has no advantage anyway – or crammed into a train seat trying to watch a video or do some writing, none of it felt like it benefited from being a tablet. The only upside was that when used on a lap or resting on soft furnishings it didn’t suffer from overheating, as can so often happen with laptops where the ventilation is on the underside. Here the cooling is on the back and edges of the screen.

As for styling, again the obvious factor is the thickness of the tablet, but this aside, most of the design has a fairly smart look with a plain black color used throughout and just a few angular touches here and there, such as the cooling vent shapes. However, there are three more visible design features to note.

The first is the front of the tablet cover (underside of the keyboard), which has half an Asus logo and the words “for those who dare” written on it. Meanwhile, round the back, two of the vents look like the letters O and G while the big party trick of this tablet is its RGB-illuminated rear window. This slash of two-way mirrored plastic reflects back at you when the tablet is switched off, but then shows the circuit board inside when its RGB lights are on. It’s of course a gimmick but a rather fun one.

As for build quality, the tablet body is all made from premium-feeling aluminum, with the kickstand in particular feeling really solid. The keyboard section has a much softer feel, with its outer face having a grippy rubbery finish and the inside having a slightly cushioned soft-touch plastic that feels very pleasant under your hands.

Performance

I’ve run the ROG Flow Z13 2025 through a range of benchmarks and general gaming sessions to see how it performs, and it’s here that this tablet and its new AMD CPU really shine. It’sstill an entry-level machine in terms of overall gaming laptop performance. but this device will genuinely let you play even modern games at 1080p and even the display’s native 1600p resolution, with a little help from FSR upscaling. It can even do a bit of ray tracing, if you don’t mind frame rates that only just push past 60fps.

Cyberpunk 2077

Despite being several years old, Cyberpunk 2077 remains a tough challenge for any graphics card and it really hits lower-end GPUs hard when cranked up, with its ray tracing being particularly demanding. However, with support for FSR 3 upscaling and frame gen, it gives low-end GPUs such as this tablet a chance.

I ran the game at both 1,920 x 1,080 (1080p) and 2,560 x 1,600 (1600p) both with and without upscaling, to get a sense of how viable it is to game at the display’s native resolution. Likewise, I tested without ray tracing at both high and ultra settings and with ray tracing at ultra settings, to gauge the impact of enabling ray tracing.

Starting at 1080p with ultra settings with no upscaling or ray tracing, this tablet could hit a 45fps average with 1% lows of 22fps. That’s some way short of truly playable in this game. It doesn’t need much above 60fps average to feel playable but 45fps is pushing it, especially with such a low 1% low.

Switching to high settings, the game could hit a 50fps average, which is better but still short of truly playable. However, adding FSR upscaling set to Balanced saw the average jump to 86fps, which is plenty for this game, though image quality is noticeably worse than at native resolution – Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t natively support the much better-looking FSR 4. Adding FSR 3 frame generation, meanwhile saw the average leap to 154fps, making for a seriously smooth experience, even with the 1% low being a modes 54fps.

Jumping up to 1600p with FSR upscaling set to Balanced and the game set to Ultra resulted in a 38fps average and 22fps 1% low. Stepping down to High settings saw the Flow Z13 was hitting a 71fps average, for a just about playable experience. Adding frame gen into the mix bumped this up to a 99fps average. All told, these figures show us that Cyberpunk 2077 is legitimately playable on this machine at perfectly decent-looking settings.

However, adding ray tracing into the equation told a different story. At 1080p with no upscaling or frame gen and using the Ultra ray tracing preset, the Flow Z13 hit just a 16fps average and an 11fps 1% low. With upscaling this jumped to 25fps average, then adding frame gen pushed this to 51fps average. That’s just on the edge of playable, such that you could at least experience ray tracing for the sake of it, but it isn’t a setting we’d use to play through the game.

Comparably, the Acer Nitro V15 is equipped with an RTX 4060 dedicated laptop GPU and it hits a 25fps average and 22fps 1% low when set to 1080p with ray tracing ultra settings. Meanwhile, with DLSS upscaling and frame generation enabled, that machine hits a 73fps average and an impressive 63fps 1% low.

As such, this integrated AMD GPU is soundly beaten, particularly for those 1% lows, but the experience is far from night and day. Both are effectively unplayable without upscaling and frame generation when it comes to ray tracing in this game, while both are comfortably playable without ray tracing.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Next up on our gaming benchmark roster is Bethesda’s Indy adventure, which forces you to use ray tracing at every setting, making a good test to get a sense of the future of AAA games, now that more and more titles require ray tracing. It also has a particularly brutal path tracing mode, and in our RTX 5070 review, we found this 12GB GPU couldn’t run the game at these settings, as it ran out of VRAM. Despite these daunting demands, the ROG Flow Z13 actually coped surprisingly well with this game.

Starting off at our usual 1080p Ultra setting, this tablet does struggle with just a 32fps average and 23fps 1% low. This is a slow game where a very high frame rate isn’t crucial, but only just over 30fps is right on the limit.

However, dropping to high detail settings saw the game hit a 46fps average, which was just about playable when using a controller for movement. Meanwhile, at low settings, it hits a 57fps average. As we saw with Cyberpunk 2077, the Achilles heel of this tablet is its 1% lows being quite low, which is a common problem with integrated graphics. However, I did still find the above low settings to be playable.

Engage FSR 3 upscaling (quality) and frame generation and this game really opens up. At ultra settings, it hits a 65fps average while at medium you’re getting an 87fps average.

Jump up to 1600p with ultra settings and FSR 3 upscaling (balanced) and frame gen and you’re getting 58fps average and 37fps 1% low, while at medium settings these numbers jump to 76fps and 49fps respectively. At these settings you’re getting a very noticeable jump in sharpness over 1080p, and a big step up from the experience on most gaming handhelds.

I also tried the path tracing mode with the game set to 1080p with FSR 3 frame gen and upscaling set to performance and the game delivered a 22fps average and a 7fps 1% low. Well, it was worth a try…

Fortnite

Fortnite gives us a glimpse at the complete opposite end of the gaming scale to games such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Cyberpunk 2077. Even on high-end graphics cards, many gamers will turn down graphics settings in a game like this, to keep the frame rate and latency as low as possible.

To that end, I ran the game without ray tracing and at just two main settings. One running at 1600p and the other at 1200p. All upscaling, frame generation, and other trickery was left off and the game was set to medium detail settings.

At these settings, the tablet could achieve a playable frame rate, with a 64fps average at 1600p, while at 1200p it hit a 100fps average. The former is ok for playing on a controller, while the latter was ample for playing with a mouse and keyboard. For games such as Apex Legends and CS2, I’d want to hit an even higher frame rate but that should be achievable by turning down the detail settings a touch further.

Cinebench

Cinebench is a great test of raw CPU power, so it can show just what the CPU portion of the AMD Ryzen Ai Max 390 can do. It runs both a single-core and multi-core test, and in these tests, both this chip and this tablet excelled.

In the single-core test, which is the one more relevant to gaming performance, it scored 114 points. That’s comfortably ahead of competing chips on smaller, slimmer, more affordable gaming laptops, such as the Acer Nitro V15, Lenovo Legion Slim 5, and Alienware M16 R2.

As for multi-core, the Max 390 wipes the floor with the competition. Its  score of 1,133 beat all before it by a considerable distance. It struggles against truly high-end gaming laptop CPUs, such as the one used in the Razer Blade 16, but it’s not bad for a chip crammed into the tiny space of this tablet.

As a result of that raw performance, and the speedy RAM, SSD, and GPU, this tablet does feel generally fast. Just navigating around Windows, loading apps and games, or browsing graphically intense web pages are tasks that it handles effortlessly.

What’s more, its cooling system is reasonably effective without being too loud. It can certainly get reasonably loud on occasion, topping out at just shy of 40dB from a distance of 20cm when under load. However, on plenty of occasions while gaming it would only hit around 36dB, which is quiet enough that I could play using the speakers for audio and not have to rely on the best gaming headset to drown out the fan noise.

Battery

Squeezed inside this compact gaming tablet is a 70Whr battery, which is 14Whr larger than the one used in the 2023 version of the ROG Flow Z13. This hints at the advantage of the space saved by only using a CPU with integrated graphics, as the older version of the tablet also housed an RTX 4050 GPU.

Thanks to both its decent capacity and the power-sipping features of AMD’s new Strix Halo CPU, this tablet has very good battery life. It managed to last 10 hours and six minutes in the PCMark 10 Modern Office productivity battery test. This was run with the screen set to half brightness (208cd/m²) which is a sensible level for general indoor use.

Understandably, when it comes to gaming, you get far less time to play with, though. The PCMark 10 Gaming battery test lasted just one hour and 28 minutes. That’s still ahead of many competitors, and this will vary a lot from game to game but is still quite a short space of time. With some tweaking to your settings to limit screen refresh rate and game frame rate, along with dialing down detail settings, you could potentially extend this time, but realistically you’re unlikely to push much past two or three hours of 3D gameplay.

Price

The Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025) price starts at $2,099.99 / £2,199.99 on Asus’ web store. This makes it a very expensive gaming laptop option for the performance it offers, with Asus’ own Zephyrus G14 available for under $1,500 with a notably more powerful RTX 4060 GPU. Although the Flow Z13’s performance and compact form factor are impressive from a design standpoint, there are very few situations we’d recommend buying this device at this price.

Alternatives

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

The Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 has long been a favorite of ours when it comes to compact, slim, stylish gaming laptops with a reasonable amount of power, and for many gamers, it remains a far more sensible choice than this tablet. It’s more powerful yet cheaper. We’d love to see a version of the G14 with a Strix Halo processor and an extra big battery, though.

Read our full Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 review.

Acer Nitro V15

For under $1,000 while delivering gaming performance that comfortably outpaces this Asus gaming tablet, the Acer Nitro V15 is an obvious alternative if you’re not after a particularly portable option. It’s a much chunkier machine but for half the price it’s a solid choice.

Read our full Acer Nitro V15 review.

Verdict

For some people, the combination on offer here has every chance of making the Asus ROG Z13 Flow (2025) their ideal portable gaming device. Its compact, tablet-like abilities combined with its powerful AMD Ryzen AI Max 390 CPU are very impressive, and if you have a particular use case in mind that could benefit, there are few devices that can compete with it – it’s clearly the best gaming tablet around.

The standout factor is the AMD Ryzen AI Max 390 chip that powers the tablet. It provides fantastic performance across the board while offering efficient power consumption and resultantly long battery life, all from a tablet that’s tiny relative to most gaming laptops.

However, the gaming tablet with a keyboard form factor used here is one that many gamers will simply find far less useful than a conventional laptop, or even than alternative two-in-one laptop designs. As a tablet, it’s too cumbersome, and as a laptop, it has effectively no advantages over a normal laptop while having several disadvantages.

Once you factor in its very high price, it’s hard to recommend this device for most gamers. Instead, we suggest waiting for other thin and light gaming laptops powered by the AMD Strix Halo processors to arrive.

For more portable gaming ideas, check out our guide to the best laptop games, as well as our guide to the best handheld gaming PC, where we take you through all our recommendations at a range of prices.