ASUS ROG Flow Z13 (2022): Windows detachable gaming tablet

ASUS ROG Flow Z13 looks like a laptop hybrid with a tablet: it is too “thick” to be called simply a “tablet with a keyboard”, while the removable keyboard has the form of a typical “tablet accessory”, so it cannot be considered “a laptop-transformer”. This category of devices (its most famous representative – the Microsoft Surface Pro line) is called detachables.

Specifications

Set

Unlike in most conventional tablets, the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 set is really good. In addition to the power supply, there is the wired mouse ASUS ROG Impact, a stylus and a high-quality protective case for transportation … which hides another case: larger for the tablet, smaller for an additional module Rog XG Mobile (bought separately). Covers have thick soft walls and rubberized moisture protection.

Design and layout

Externally, the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 does not look like a tablet in a traditional sense. For a thickness of more than 1 cm, it reminds rather of a thin laptop, especially with an attached keypad. And the total weight – one and a half kilograms – is also a feature of laptops, but not of tablets.

The keyboard connects to the lower edge of the tablets with magnets and holds quite reliably. It is not very easy to disconnect it.

Behind there is a folding metal stand. It can be adjusted to the tilt angle of the screen. The keyboard has two positions: horizontal when it is completely “lying” on the table, and with a small angle. For this, its upper part “sticks” to the bottom of the tablet.

Behind in the case there is a small transparent “window” with RGB backlighting, through which you can see the elements of the board. It can be considered a tribute to the Gamer Direction ASUS ROG FLOW Z13.

The cooling system pulls in air through the openings on the back of the tablet, the hot air exhaust occurs through the ventilation openings on the upper side facet.

On the right of the body there is a power button, a volume control, a combined minijacker for a wired headset and one USB 2.0 connector. On the left there is an activity indicator, USB-C with DisplayPort and Power Delivery support and a closed compartment with another USB-C and interface for connecting the ROG XG Mobile module.

Also behind, under the stand, a microSD card reader and a closed compartment with the installed SSD can be found. So you can easily replace it.

Keyboard

The removable keyboard ASUS ROG Flow Z13 performs the functions of the protective “cover”. It is thin and relatively lightweight, with a rubberized body and full laptop keys. The keyboard slightly bends during operation, therefore, if it is mounted with a slight inclination and touches the table only with the lower edge, during intensive printing, its body can significantly vibrate.

Beyond this, it gives quite a pleasant impression: the size of the keys, the distance between them and the move when pressed are the same as those of the usual laptop. The touchpad is relatively small, but also quite convenient to use.

The keyboard has a full RGB backlight. You can configure its behavior with the help of the brand utility Armoury Crate. The tablet supports Aura Sync, so in the presence of other gamer products, their backlighting can be synchronized.

ASUS ROG Flow Z13 Screen

The tablet uses Sharp Touch Panel (LQ134N1JW54) with a diagonal of 13.4 inches, a resolution of 1920×1200 and aspect ratios 16:10 (a bit unusual for the gaming device). The maximum screen update frequency is 120 Hz.

Maximum brightness – 530 cd/m²; minimum – 25 cd/m². It’s a bit too much for a mobile screen, but this level of brightness is quite comfortable even in full darkness. The color coverage is standard, almost accurately equal to the color space sRGB.

In the Armoury Crate utility in the GameVisual section, you can choose different video modes (cinema, bright, standard, for specific gaming genres, etc.) and adjust the color temperature.

In the Default mode, the color coverage is 98% sRGB (76% Adobe RGB, 76% DCI-P3), the gamma almost perfectly corresponds to the standard value of 2.2, and the color temperature is permanent on the entire brightness range and equals 6300-6400K, which is also very close to the standard (6500K). To make an image warmer or, on the opposite, colder, you can move a slider in the settings – a scale from 0 to 100% allows you to smoothly change it within 5400-7200k.

The screen demonstrates excellent results in the color temperature test on the entire area of the screen. The maximum deviation is slightly more than 2%. The uniformity of brightness is a bit worse, but still quite good, especially due to the WLED-backlight and a relatively thin body. The accuracy of color reproduction is pretty high for a display of the tablet: the average value ΔE is slightly more than one (it is believed that the usual user is not able to notice the deflection of colors if this parameter is lower than 2 or even 3). Static contrast in this mode at 1200: 1 is a pretty good result as an IPS panel.

Other video modes offer different color temperature, brightness, color gamma, etc. – for example, in Vivid mode the image is brighter and more saturated, and contrast rises to 1400: 1, in Cinema mode color coverage is slightly reduced. It gives more “calm” colors, and gamma is lowered to more “cinematic” – 1.9.

As a result: the screen in the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 demonstrates a high-quality image, with a sufficiently high brightness and contrast, a standard color coverage, and a fairly high color accuracy, and thanks to the GameVisual menu, you can select the mode you like, and adjust the color temperature according to your taste.

Hardware platform

In the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 (2022), there are several models that differ in specifications. They may have a processor from Intel Core I5-12500H to I9-12900H, GEFORCE GPU, 3050 Ti Laptop GPU, or without a discrete video (with built-in Intel Iris Xᵉ Graphics). Also, the models may have two different displays – 1920×1200 @ 120 Hz or 3840×2400 @ 60 Hz, and the repository capacity can be 512 GB or 1 TB.

Such a configuration: Intel Core I9-12900H, 16GB of RAM, GeForce RTX 3050, Ti Laptop GPU 4 GB, Intel Core i9-12900H. Intel Core i9-12900H is a very powerful mobile processor belonging to Alder Lake family. It was presented in early 2022, in general has 14 cores – 6 productive (Golden Cove), with Hyper Threading, and 8 Energy Efficient (Gracemont), so the processor can handle up to 20 streams at the same time. The TDP processor 45 W, the frequency of productive cores can vary in the range of 2.5 to 5 GHz, energy-efficient – from 1.8 to 3.8 GHz.

ASUS ROG FLOW Z13 is equipped with 16GB DDR5. Chips are fixed on the board, it is impossible to increase its capacity. In our model, the SSD Micron 2450 MTFDKBK1T0TFK with the capacity of 1 TB was installed (M.2 2230 NVME PCIE 4.0).

Productivity

Intel Core i9-12900H is one of the most powerful mobile processors that are currently in the market, and shows a very high performance in various tasks. M.2 NVME SSD offers high performance: reading speed 3300 MB/s, recording speed – 3200 MB/s. Unfortunately, with this processor in the system, GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU videocard becomes a “bottleneck”. In games, the tablet shows generally good performance, but it would be great to get more powerful results. But there is a way out – if, of course, you are ready to spend an additional, rather significant amount of money.

The thing is that the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 can be connected to an additional module – an external XG Mobile video card. At this time, ASUS offers two models, and the tablet is compatible with both – last year’s version with the NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 3080 LAPTOP GPU and the newer AMD RADEON RX 6850M XT. In addition, XG Mobile has a built-in power adapter with 330 W capacity and additional USB, DisplayPort, HDMI and Ethernet ports the tablet lacks.

The Armoury Crate utility allows you to choose different cooling modes that directly affect the performance of the system. Silent mode makes it very quiet, Performance offers an optimal speed and noise ratio, Turbo gives maximum CPU and GPU, and Manual mode allows you to create custom profiles with your own settings for different tasks.

We compared the performance of the systems using the Cinebench R23 utility while loading all the cores. From the results it can be concluded that performance during single-flow tasks almost did not rise, while in multiflow mode, the growth has been significant.

3DMark CPU Test (Performance/Turbo):

In the Performance mode, the noise level was rather moderate, in the Turbo mode cooling system began to work much louder, but the noise is quite tolerable. At a typical distance from the laptop it was approximately 47 dB. Also, note that in both modes – Performance and Turbo – during the stress test of the system stability in AIDA64, throttling has not been fixed.

AIDA64 System Stability Test (Performance/Turbo):

Unfortunately, without the XG Mobile module, game Ppoductivity of ASUS ROG Flow Z13 is not very high for the gamer system. In addition, 4 GB of video memory for modern games is not enough, especially if you want to set better graphic settings. With many projects in this case you will see a warning that the game needs more memory than is available. But with the average settings in the Full HD resolution, the user may well count on 60+ FPS in the overwhelming majority of modern games.

Productivity in games, Full HD, average quality graphics:

Battery life

ASUS ROG Flow Z13 is equipped with a battery capacity of 56 W per hour: not too much for a laptop, but to place a larger battery in such a case was clearly impossible. The battery life is decent. For brightness at 120 cd/m² in the battery benchmark PCMark 10 test, the tablet worked 8 hours in standby mode. Regarding the game application, there are no surprises here: in the corresponding test ASUS Rog Flow Z13 lasted only an hour.