Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025) review: hold up, integrated graphics are good now?

The beefy Windows gaming tablet is back, and it’s done two things I thought impossible. It made me respect integrated graphics, and it convinced me a Windows tablet can be fun.

The Asus ROG Flow Z13 is a 13-inch tablet with a detachable keyboard, a bright screen, and the guts of a gaming laptop. I knew it was something special when I used a clamp-on controller to turn a preproduction model into some kind of superpowered, supersized Steam Deck. In daily use, it’s more like a husky Surface Pro, with an AMD Strix Halo processor featuring powerful integrated graphics for gaming and a battery that lasts a full workday in non-gaming tasks. It’s a charming and versatile device that could plausibly replace a desktop, laptop, and a tablet or handheld for a certain type of PC gamer — one who doesn’t mind the $2,100 starting price.

The ROG Flow Z13 is a tablet that’s also trying to be a hardcore gaming machine. It has a 13.4-inch, 180Hz IPS touchscreen with pen support, 32GB of unified memory (up to 128GB), a 1TB m.2 SSD, and ample port selection, starting at $2,099.99. The Ryzen AI Max Plus 395 APU in our $2,299.99 review unit offers surprisingly good gaming performance, especially for a tablet. And the detachable keyboard with larger keycaps and trackpad feels like it’s pulled directly from the excellent ROG Zephyrus laptops. It makes for a potent portable gaming device — one you can even use on your lap without your legs burning up.

I used it keyboardless on the couch for a Discord movie and game night with some buds, and it left enough space on my lap for my cat to curl up. I stuck it on my desk, between my giant 4K monitor and my mechanical keyboard, and it doubled as my desktop computer and a handy secondary screen. I even plugged it into my TV like a game console — one with much better graphics than any docked handheld. The ability to do all these things makes it a lot of fun.

The Flow Z13’s Strix Halo processor is very capable in graphics-heavy games at its native 2560 x 1600-inch resolution. Don’t expect extras like path tracing, but do expect solid framerates in the 50 to 60-plus fps range on low-to-medium settings. In games that support FSR 3 and frame generation, you can push things further: with those scaling options enabled, Cyberpunk 2077 hit over 60fps and even pushed into the 70s at high settings on a 4K external monitor.

I’ve also played a bunch of Elden Ring on the Z13. (I blame the recent Nightreign network test for giving me the itch again.) At native resolution, it was consistently in the 50fps range on high settings, and at 1200p, it hit the game’s 60fps ceiling. By comparison, the first Z13, back in 2022, could barely muster 30fps at 1200p on medium settings in the Lands Between. That wasn’t far off from the much cheaper and less powerful Steam Deck, which tops out around 40fps at 800p and medium settings, with plenty of framerate dips.

Elden Ring remains one of the most-played titles on Valve’s $400 handheld. But it’s so much better on the new ROG Flow, and the delta between the Z13 and the Steam Deck is now much wider. You can even play for around 90 minutes on battery on the Z13, as opposed to 70 minutes on the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck is cheaper and comfier to use, but it’s also another device to keep track of. The Z13’s detachable keyboard gives it some of the play-anywhere benefit of the Steam Deck while still being good for other things. If the Z13 just had dedicated controllers like I tried to adapt, it’d be like a Super Steam Deck.

This is the first device of any kind we’ve tested that uses AMD’s new Ryzen AI Max Strix Halo processors, which combine speedy CPU cores like the ones on AMD’s Strix Point processors with AMD’s most powerful integrated graphics cores. It also gives this Z13 much better battery life than previous models. It lasted a very respectable 10 hours in our battery rundown test, and I could get through an eight to nine-hour workday if I wasn’t reckless (no games, around 200 to 300 nits brightness, power efficiency mode, and battery saver at 30 percent). The last Flow Z13 we tested, in 2023, with an Intel Core i9-13900H CPU and Nvidia RTX 4070 mobile GPU, lasted around four and a half hours in regular use and just 48 minutes while gaming.

In our benchmarks, the Z13’s AMD Ryzen AI Max Plus 395 beats the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 of the Asus Zenbook S 16 (a productivity laptop) and Zephyrus G16 (a gaming laptop) — and pretty much any Intel chip we’ve seen in a laptop recently — in single-core and multi-core CPU tests. And the 40-core Radeon 8060S is astonishingly powerful for an integrated GPU, rivalling Nvidia’s RTX 4060. The RTX 4070 in the Zephyrus G16 still handily wins in GPU performance by 40-55 percent in Geekbench and 3DMark Time Spy, but Strix Halo proves formidable. And allow me to emphasize once more: integrated graphics.

To get that performance on the Z13, you’ll have to pony up $2,299.99 for the configuration with the Ryzen AI Max Plus 395. That’s $200 more than the AI Max 390 chip in the base model, but according to YouTuber Cary “The Phawx” Golomb’s hourlong deep dive into both versions of the Z13, the upgrade, which gets you four more CPU cores and eight more GPU cores, is worth the money.

All configurations of the Z13 are 0.51 inches thick and 2.65 pounds without the keyboard, which adds 0.86 pounds. By comparison, a Surface Pro 11 is 0.68 inches thick and 2.7 pounds with the keyboard. Asus’s upcoming 2025 ROG Zephyrus G14 will be 0.63 inches thick and 3.46 pounds, which is slightly lighter and thinner than the chonky-for-a-tablet Z13. Hefty as the Z13 is, its compact size and rigid build make it feel more portable and knockaround-friendly than you’d expect. The sturdy kickstand really helps when toting it around the house or repositioning it, since you can stick your hands under it and lift with support from your forearms, as opposed to just your fingers. It’s still best thought of as a gaming laptop with a detachable keyboard, but it’s surprising how much more flexible that makes it.

The Z13 also has a 5-megapixel webcam and 13-megapixel rear-facing camera. You’d have to be deranged to take actual pictures with the rear camera on a Windows tablet; it’s mostly useful for showing people things on video calls. The dual speakers are workable but don’t offer a particularly full sound, especially at the low end, and you may accidentally block one when holding it in landscape orientation. And the chunky 200W power adapter uses Asus’ reversible proprietary connector (it supports 100W Power Delivery via its USB-C 4 ports, as well).

As a tablet that makes a plausible gaming laptop and even desktop, the ROG Flow Z13 is as close to an all-in-one device as there is right now. And like any all-in-one, it’s expensive and it makes some compromises compared to more traditional devices — price being the most obvious. You can spend less money on a more powerful (and even more compact) gaming laptop like the Zephyrus G14, or you can go the other way and get a desktop and a Steam Deck. But there’s something about the Flow that’s charming and joyful. If it weren’t quite so expensive, I’d be tempted to buy it instead of a traditional gaming laptop and handheld.

The Strix Halo chip inside the Z13 may end up being a bigger deal than the tablet itself. That’s already evidenced by its implementation in Framework’s endearing little Desktop and more traditional laptops on their way. But, for now, this intriguing chip takes one of the quirkiest and coolest tablet-laptop hybrids and makes it more powerful, more efficient, and a lot more compelling.

Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge