Credit:
Kevin Purdy
Armoury Crate running on the Asus ROG Flow Z13. (“Turbo” is not available because it’s not plugged in).
Credit:
Kevin Purdy
Rounding out the experience of using this device for things outside a fullscreen game are Asus’ apps: MyAsus (device and firmware updates and support), ScreenXPert (side button pop-out bar), Armoury Crate (device performance and gaming-centered settings), and Aura Sync/Creator (RGB lighting). Like most Asus software, these are interlinked apps filled with occasionally useful shortcuts, obsessive tweaks to little things, and roughly 34 points that all want your eye focus at once.
A bewildering array of ideas and priorities exist in these apps. There are tabs inside Armoury Crate named “Content Platform” and “Promotion” that seem built more for Asus executives than humans who use computers. It’s not too hard to avoid these things and stick to your apps and games, though you will likely want to keep them installed for BIOS and device-specific updates.
Heavyweight gaming, for its size
The AMD Ryzen integrated chip inside the Z13 is dubbed the “AI Max+” 395 because everything is maximum AI these days. But this is an impressive little chip in plenty of non-AI scenarios. Running at full “Turbo” settings, this little guy goes hard. It runs at 3.0 GHz and has 16 cores and 32 threads and a 32MB cache, with a unified memory architecture providing up to 96GB video RAM (I had 8GB dedicated in BIOS settings for testing). It’s not a light device, but it’s definitely punching above its weight.
To provide a broader perspective on the Z13’s chip, I’m including the last two generations of Apple’s MacBook Pro models in some of the tests. AMD’s handouts on this chip put it up against the dedicated GeForce RTX 4070 GPUs in gaming laptops along with Apple’s M4 Pro in benchmarks from Blender, V-Ray, and Corona. Those comparisons raised my eyebrows at first, but they’re not outlandish—at least while the Z13 is plugged in and able to run its fans full blast.
Heat, weight, and especially battery life, while harder to definitively test, do matter. If you don’t need to worry about them, though, the Z13 can do some heavy graphics work (and maybe local AI, too, if so desired). I ran all the tests shown using the Z13’s highest pre-set “Turbo” profile, to mirror how the other devices were set for maximum performance. You could technically push this thing even further with manual configurations in Asus’ software; I stuck to Turbo for consistency.
