A powerful Surface.
When it comes to laptops with a detachable keyboard, Microsoft's Surface series is typical, but ASUS has just announced at this year's CES "ASUS ROG Flow Z13”. It is a terminal that combines the best of ASUS, mobility and power.
I can feel ASUS' motivation just by looking at the spec table. An Intel Core i9-12900H CPU with Nvidia's RTX 3050 Ti graphics, 16GB of memory (DDR5-5200MHz), and a PCIe 4.0 SSD with a capacity of 1TB.
Last year's ROG Flow X13 was equipped with a GTX 1650, and I felt that this was a bottleneck, but ROG Z13 has been upgraded. This will allow you to play most games in medium to high definition. (Editor's Note: The later model of ROG Flow X13 also has the RTX 3050Ti)
If you want to increase the 4K image quality and frame rate, ASUSs XG Mobile eGPU can be connected (via PCIe 3.0 x8) to GeForce RTX 3080 mobile GPU or AMD Radeon RX 6850M XT GPU.
As for ASUS, ROG Flow Z13 is probably positioned as a terminal that can do everything with this one. Sometimes it is used as a tablet with an emphasis on mobility, like Surface Pro 8, and sometimes it is connected to an eGPU and used as a powerful game machine. EGPUs are expensive and in short supply, so it's a matter of having the money and supplies.
For all its power, you can't expect it to be as thin as an iPad. The thickness is 0.5 inches, which is almost the same as ZenBook 14. Since the keyboard is attached here, it will be thick as it is, but there is no doubt that it is thin for the specs. In order to support high power, a liquid metal 84-blade dual fan is equipped with a rice par chamber that is the same width as the terminal size. ASUS says the cooling system makes about 32dB of noise, even for heavy tasks, so it's mostly unnoticeable.
Although it is very similar to Surface Pro as a terminal, the appearance design is the exact opposite. While Surface has a simple minimal design, this is a stronger cyberpunk. The rear chassis is CNC aluminum with sharp etching and a bright red ROG logo. It seems to be attacking that the motherboard has a transparent glass window that can be seen through and the RGB light shines.
The 13-inch display can be selected with a refresh rate of 3840x2400 at 60Hz or 1920x1200 at 120Hz. Both have a brightness of 500nits, so you can use them in the sun without worrying.
Ports include 1 Thunderbolt 4, 1 USB 3.2 Type-C, 1 eGPU connection port, 1 USB 2.0 Type-A, 1 HDMI 2.0, and microSD card slot. There is also an earphone jack. With XG Mobile, you can add four USB Type-A, an SD card reader, and a wired LAN connector. The magnetically attached RGB keyboard has a keystroke of 1.7 mm. I don't know the specifics of the 56Wh battery life, but I can play Halo Infinite for hours.
The release is scheduled for the first half of this year.
By the way, the ROG Flow X13 also has an update, and you can select up to AMD Ryzen R9 6980HS, RTX 3050 Ti GPU, and DDR5 memory.
