It feels even thinner when you’re using the device itself. When all you have under your palms is that thin keyboard cover, and you’re not seeing how thick the back of the device is, it’s kind of magical, especially while gaming.
That brings me to another huge advantage of this type of design—the thermals. This thing never got above 70 degrees Celsius internally, even under stress testing in Performance mode. And it stayed fairly quiet. It’s especially noticeable when you aren’t gaming. The Flow Z13 does a great job of keeping quiet and cool when it should, which can’t be said for many gaming laptops. That makes it an even better hybrid work/gaming device.
The excellent thermals have the vertical orientation to thank, sucking in tons of air through the intake vents on the back of the tablet, unobstructed by a desk like the bottom of laptops. The exhaust vents, meanwhile, are located right across the top of the tablet, as far away from the keyboard and your hands as physically possible. That’s another big change over gaming laptops, which often spew hot air at your mouse hand.
A Tough Sell?
Photograph: Luke Larsen
I don’t love the limited configurations for the Flow Z13. Asus sells only expensive configurations with at least 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage, starting at over $2,000. It’s a shame there isn’t a lower-tier option to get that starting price down. Not everyone needs that much memory and storage. If the starting price were closer to $1,500, I could see it attracting a larger audience. That’s especially true since the Flow Z13 isn’t necessarily a performance-first machine.
I also wish the speakers and webcam were a bit more impressive. They get the job done and are better than what you find on many gaming laptops, but if they could match the Surface Pro, they’d have an even stronger upper hand over even the most premium gaming laptops. And I’d be remiss without mentioning the newly launched Nvidia RTX 50-series Laptop GPUs. It’ll be a bit before the lower-tier RTX 5050 and 5060 laptops arrive, but when they do, they may make the comparison to the Flow Z13 less favorable.
The price-to-performance comparison with comparable gaming laptops doesn’t play out in the Flow Z13’s favor. It will never hold a candle to its peers on that spec alone. But that’s never been the point. Instead, the Flow Z13 continues to challenge the conventional idea of gaming laptops, and with the 2025 model, it’s surprisingly successful.
