GAMING TABLET?? Asus ROG Flow Z13 + XG Mobile RTX 3080 Review

Asus might have gone completely mad… This is a gaming tablet – but not some cheap android thing, no this is an entire gaming laptop, but it’s a tablet. Insane, I know! This is the ROG Flow Z13, and it’s a gaming tablet like no other. Optionally, you can spend another grand and pick this machine up with this extra box here, which is the ROG XG Mobile, specifically an RTX 3080 Laptop GPU with a 150W TDP. There is a lot to cover here, so let’s jump right in.

This is certainly an unusual form factor, where instead of the main hardware being under the keyboard, the hardware here is all behind the display, leaving the keyboard as nothing but an RGB-backlit type-cover (which yes you can remove if you want). This has some advantages – if you want to use this as a drawing tablet you don’t have a keyboard on the back to hold onto, plus the airflow to the power hungry parts is much better thanks to the clear intakes on the back and exhausts at the top.

There are some downsides to the design though, like how, despite the type cover folding and magnetically holding itself slightly raised, it has a frustrating amount of deck-flex. It can flex enough to get in the way of typing, which is already a difficult task thanks to the design. The Z13 does include an adjustable kickstand so you can stand and recline the tablet to most angles you could want – but the catch is you need way more desk (or lap) space to use this machine, which is a bit of an irony. You need the space for the kickstand, plus the keyboard, whereas on a “conventional” machine you only need the space for the keyboard.

You are also pretty limited in the I/O department, with just a single Thunderbolt 4 USB C port, a USB 2.0 type A port, a headphone jack, and the XG Mobile connector (which includes a USB C port). Seriously Asus? A USB 2.0 port? As the only Type A?? Plus only a single Type C port you have to use for charging, since you only have a 56 WHr battery, netting you something like 6 hours of media playback battery life. What’s also frustrating is the XG mobile connector cover. If you don’t have long fingernails you are never getting that out, and even if you do it’s then fully disconnected meaning you will lose it.

Still, the unique design hasn’t managed to interfere with the pretty beefy hardware. My unit is rocking an i9-12900H with a shocking peak power limit of 95W (40W standard), 16GB of LPDDR5-5200 which is soldered, alongside an RTX 3050 Ti with a peak 40W TDP (35W + 5W from dynamic boost), and a 1TB PCIe Gen 4 2230 M.2 SSD which is user serviceable, although you won’t find many higher capacity 2230 size drives at the moment.

Performance from the 12900H can be pretty remarkable. Of course it won’t hold a candle to a thicker standard laptop which can cool the chip better, but in its turbo mode it jumped to the fastest all-core result I’ve ever had in Cinebench R20, and the same for the single threaded result, although thermal throttling caught up to it quickly in R23 immediately after as it ended up running a hair slower than the 12700H in the ZenBook Pro 14 Duo I checked out recently. In its standard performance mode it runs at more like 40W, down from 50W, meaning performance is more limited. R23 multi-threaded runs a fair bit behind most last-gen Intel and AMD 8 core chips.

Blender rendering in turbo is pretty fast, only being beaten out by the 12700H in the ZenBook. The performance mode drops positions pretty considerably though, landing much more mid-field. The Gooseberry render is much the same, impressive performance in turbo mode, and a decent showing in performance mode.

In the Premiere Pro using Puget Bench it actually doesn’t do all that well here. The actual user experience for editing was pretty lacklustre too. After Effects doesn’t fare much better, netting the same kind of back-of-the-pack performance. Only in Photoshop do we get a healthy result – not the fastest I’ve seen but perfectly decent.

Of course this is a gaming machine, so how does it game? I ran the benchmarks with both the RTX 3050 Ti dGPU, and the RTX 3080 eGPU. Starting with Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the 3050 Ti nets just over 54 FPS on high settings at 1200p, with the 3080 netting 99 FPS on the same settings. Cyberpunk netted 45 FPS average on the 3050 Ti on medium settings, with the 3080 just shy of 110 FPS average. Microsoft Flight simulator hit over 80 FPS average on the 3080 which I think is a first for my testing, while the 3050 Ti nets near-on half that at 41.5 FPS average. Finally in Fortnite the 3080 storms ahead at 242 FPS average, while the 3050 Ti is a more modest 81 FPS average.

I would normally include data from games like Watchdogs Legion and CSGO, but as was pretty common in my usage of the Z13 and the XG Mobile, both games refused to run for seemingly different reasons. CSGO failed to create a D3D device on either GPU, regardless of any settings I tried, and Watchdogs Legion would launch but got stuck on a black screen and stopped responding. I also had some strange performance results, like in Cyberpunk where despite the XG mobile supposedly being a “hot plug” type device (well you have to activate and deactivate it, but you shouldn’t need to restart Windows), I was getting iGPU levels of performance until I rebooted. I should note this setup does contain a MUX switch which is great, although that hasn’t stopped it from causing issues.

It’s also worth noting that the connector for the XG Mobile is massive, and a massive pain. Especially since it connects to the tablet and not a keyboard base, it’s easy to stress it and I could imagine it wouldn’t take much to have it snap off. It can’t need to be this massive Asus, right? A more slim connector would make a lot more sense here.

Now, speaking of the display, this model is the 1920×1200 120Hz IPS panel option, which sounds great on paper but in practice is… mediocre at best. It covers around 100% of the sRGB spectrum with relatively good accuracy, peaks at just shy of 500 nits in SDR, but my god the response times are terrible. The panel clearly lacks any overdrive modes or profiles, meaning it runs a dreadful average of over 20ms for any given transition. That’s really, really bad, especially for a gaming display. Anything under 5ms I generally call good, anything under 10ms is passable, but over 20ms? That’s not a display you want to game on.

That’s translated in the high speed footage of the UFO test, where you can see just how many ghosted frames are on screen at once. That’s, what, 4 frames? At 120Hz that’s a new frame every 8.3ms, so 4 frames works out to around 33ms which is about right. You can also see that the black pupil of the alien never gets rendered, and the white of the eyes barely shows up even right as a new frame starts to be drawn. That’s how slow this thing is.

The actual gaming experience on this is definitely a weird one. With the XG Mobile connected you (generally) get good performance – except when you don’t – and the display is noticeably slow to render new frames. The fact all the heat is in the display and not under your hand is a nice quirk, although any time you go to reposition the display while gaming you will be met with a burned hand as the entire chassis, especially on the back, gets painfully hot.

On the whole then, this is a rather strange machine. I’m not quite sure who it’s for, since it doesn’t really excel in any one area. As a tech demo I think it’s really interesting – for Asus to cram this much performance into, well, a tablet is incredibly impressive, but as an actual machine you should go and spend £3,000 of your own money on (for this plus the XG 3080), especially when the Flow X13 is currently just £2,200 for the same XG 3080, but a more standard foldable chassis with a 6th gen Ryzen CPU instead.