Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025)

Introduction

The Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025) is one of the most versatile laptops I’ve ever had my hands on.

I don’t think there are many other options out there that can double as an outright gaming machine with ultrabook levels of battery life and a versatile 2-in-1 laptop. It may be expensive at £2199.99/$1999.99, but combines the power of a mid-spec gaming laptop with the style and portability of an ultrabook.

A lot of that is down to the fact it’s powered by one of AMD’s new Strix Halo chips, the Ryzen AI Max 390, which combines a lot of power with great efficiency. It builds on the successes of the ROG Flow Z13 (2022) from some time ago and turns it into what’s easily one of the best laptops we’ve tested.

Design and Keyboard

• Quite heavy for a compact 2-in-1 laptop
• Decent port selection
• Trackpad and keyboard are good, but suffers from dim backlighting

The ROG Flow Z13 (2025)’s interesting thing is its form factor, being positioned as a gaming 2-in-1 as it were, especially with the ROG branding and all. There is a ROG logo on the keyboard cover, as well as on the metal kickstand and lid. So you’re in no further doubt that this is a ROG product, it even comes with a custom boot screen.

The chassis here is fully metal, giving what is a generally small and slender product a bit of heft, with a 1.2kg weight for the main unit. Adding in the keyboard cover takes it to a total 1.59kg, making it quite heavy for something that comes with less overall material than a standard laptop. Even with that heft, the ROG Flow Z13 (2025) is especially portable because it’s only 12mm thick and folds up to nothing.

Being just 12mm thick has meant some sacrifices with ports against more conventional gaming laptops. The left side comes with a pair of USB4-capable Type-C ports, as well as an HDMI port, a DC-in for power, and a Micro SD reader.

The right side has a 3.5mm headphone jack and a singular USB-A, as well as buttons for power, volume and to summon a settings menu. This input selection is fine, although a second USB-A wouldn’t have gone amiss for more legacy connections.

To use it as a more conventional laptop, the ROG Flow Z13 (2025) features an excellent metal kickstand that extends out of the back, keeping the main body up nicely, Like its predecessor, there is a keyboard cover with a trackpad that Asus says comes with raised keys against the previous model for easier typing.

It’s comfortable to type on, although, like the Asus Zenbook Duo (2025), it feels a tad on the thin side. It is RGB-backlit, in keeping with the gamer aesthetic, although it suffers from horribly dim backlighting.

By comparison, the trackpad is of a decent size for such a small machine, giving your fingers plenty of real estate. It’s quite tactile, with solid actuation under finger, and good overall tracking.

Display and Sound

• Similar IPS screen to its predecessor
• Fantastic detail and colour accuracy
• Speakers are decent

One area where the ROG Flow Z13 (2025) hasn’t changed too much against the previous model is with its display. I was arguably expecting Asus to bundle in a compact OLED screen here, as they have done in some of its recent ultrabook releases, such as the Zenbook A14.

Instead, they’ve stuck with the same 13.4-inch IPS screen, complete with a 2560×1600 resolution for excellent colours and solid detail.

There has been a change in the refresh rate, with this new model clocked up to 180Hz for even smoother motion handling, which is ideal for high-intensity competitive games. It is a responsive touchscreen which means you can use this laptop as a proper Surface Pro-style tablet if you wish.

Its colour accuracy is sublime with my colorimeter measuring 99% sRGB, 97% DCI-P3 and 88% Adobe RGB colour space coverage, making the ROG Flow Z13 (2025)’s panel well-suited for both productivity and colour-sensitive workloads.

Asus is also quoting a 500 nits peak brightness with this display, and my colorimeter measured 458.2 nits – that keeps images vibrant with popping colours. It also supports Dolby Vision for added vibrancy for supported HDR content.

There had to be some sacrifices with this panel, not being an OLED and all. The most pressing of these is ita black level and contrast ratio, which measured at 0.17 and 1070:1 when at half brightness. That result is fine, although you will get much deeper blacks and stronger dynamic range from an OLED panel.

As for the speakers, the ROG Flow Z13 (2025) comes with four of them that offer solid body and decent volume for casual listening, and support Dolby Atmos in supported content for more immersive audio. They do seem a little imprecise with their handling of treble, though.

Performance

• Ryzen AI Max 390 is a beefy CPU
• Unmatched gaming performance for an iGPU
• Snappy SSD and solid RAM quantity

The big draw with this new ROG Flow Z13 (2025) is the presence of one of AMD’s brand-new Strix Halo APUs, which AMD promised at CES would offer some monster performance. While this laptop can be specced with up to the top Ryzen AI Max+ 395, my sample has the next one down the rung – the Ryzen AI Max 390.

This specific one comes with 12 Zen 5 cores, 24 threads, and a boost clock of up to 5GHz, as well as the beefy Radeon 8050S iGPU and a base TDP of just 55 watts. That’s scarily efficient for such a powerful chip, although it can boost up to 120W when needed.

As much as CES is usually a time for marketing hoo-ha and outlandish claims, I think AMD was on the nose with the pure power on offer with these new Strix Halo chips. Scores in Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 are among the best I’ve seen for a laptop, trading blows with Intel’s new Core Ultra 9 285H. Where the Core Ultra 9 285H was 7.5% slower in Geekbench’s single core test, it was 8.4% quicker in Cinebench.

Multi-core performance is stronger for the Ryzen AI Max 390, with a 2.3% boost in Geekbench 6, but a 34% increase over the Core Ultra 9 285H in Cinebench R23.

As for generational uplift, this new chip is also significantly ahead of the Ryzen AI 9 370 HX from last year’s Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024) in multi-core workloads with a 31.2% increase in Geekbench 6 and a 46.2% increase in Cinebench R23.

To put these numbers into perspective, it means the Ryzen 9 AI Max 360 is on par with the likes of the Ryzen 7 9700X in a desktop-class sense. With this in mind, its single-core performance is barely behind the newer chip, and the Ryzen AI 9 370 HX still remains a beefy chip nonetheless.

The biggest draw for the Ryzen AI Max 390 though is its integrated graphics, in the form of the Radeon 8050S. This potent iGPU managed a 3DMark Time Spy score that’s not too far off discrete GPUs in the best gaming laptops – for reference, it’s 14% behind the RTX 4060 inside MSI’s Crosshair 16 HX D14V (2024). In addition, its scores are significantly ahead of the Core Ultra 9 285H and Ryzen AI 9 370HX. I think that borders on the ridiculous for integrated graphics.

The reason for this large uptick in potency is simply down to raw power. Against AMD’s previous flagship iGPU, the Radeon 890M, the newer Radeon 8050S has double the Compute Units, with 32 against the 890M’s 16.

This, combined with a lot more bandwidth and general power, makes the ROG Flow Z13 (2025) one of the first credible gaming laptops in its form factor running solely on integrated graphics. Against fully-fledged gaming laptops at a similar price point, its results may not be that impressive, but against comparably-priced and specced ultrabooks, it blows them out of the water, especially thanks to some up-to-date RDNA 3.5 power.

For reference, at 1080p in Cyberpunk 2077, the ROG Flow Z13 (2025) managed 53.94fps, while in Returnal, it served a result of 54fps. That’s a fantastic result considering it’s from integrated graphics. For reference, the Intel Arc 140T iGPU in the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H only managed 23.03fps, and the RTX 4060-powered MSI Crosshair 16 HX D14V (2024) hit 84.34fps.

As for a more eSports based title in Rainbow Six Extraction, the Ryzen AI Max 390 helped this laptop to a fantastic 116fps, which is especially playable for more competitive scenraios with responsive inputs. The Crosshair 16 HX D14V (2024) only managed 82fps, while the Prestige AI 16 Evo (2025) languished at 50fps.

At 1440p, the ROG Flow Z13 (2025) managed 32.16fps in Cyberpunk 2077, while the Crosshair 16 HX D14V can hit 55.62fps and the Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) clocked in with a result of just 14.70fps.

There is a chink in this iGPU, though, which is where AMD has typically fallen down – ray tracing. Putting Cyberpunk 2077 to its RT: Ultra preset and running at native 1080p left it languishing with a 12.55fps average. For reference, the Crosshair 16 HX D14V’s RTX 4060 helped it along to a higher result than this at 1440p, showing its power. With FSR 2.1 set to Quality, you can get this up to 23.07fps, if you don’t mind some upscaling powers.

With this in mind, this laptop is compatible with Asus’ new revamped ROG XG Mobile, so you can combine this internal power with a proper RTX 5090 or 5080 for immense performance over a Thunderbolt connection.

My sample of the ROG Flow Z13 (2025) came with 32GB of fast low profile DDR5-8000 RAM, although it is possible to configure it with up to 128GB if you so wish, while the 1TB internal SSD is quite generous for such a small machine. It’s also quite a quick SSD, with measured read and write speeds of 6158.08MB/s and 5362.02MB/s respectively.

Software

• Clean Windows 11 install
• Copilot+ PC chops are present

The Windows 11 Home install that this Asus laptop comes with is reasonably clean otherwise, coming with little in the way of unwanted anti-virus or bloatware. There are a couple of Asus-specific apps though, such as GlideX which is where you can manage tasks such as casting or mirroring the Zenbook A14’s screen to other devices wirelessly, or transfer files across the same network. You can also enable remote access to a mobile device, too.

As a gaming machine, the ROG Flow Z13 (2025) also comes with Armoury Crate, the brand’s gaming software that also works with their peripherals, components and otherwise. This allows you to do everything from check on your system’s vitals to syncing its RGB lighting on the reverse to other Asus ROG peripherals you may have and fiddling with power modes to get optimal gaming performance.

Even with its gaming chops, Microsoft has also given the Copilot+ PC label to the ROG Flow Z13 (2025) because of the 50 TOPs of power that the Ryzen AI Max 360 provides. With this, you get In generative AI found in the Photos and Paint app to do things such as add filters to your photos or stylise any of your creations into an oil painting, watercolours or other art styles. I’m sure these are useful for someone, although I don’t necessarily have much utility for them, especially on a gaming machine.

Arguably the handiest part of all of this is the inclusion of Windows Studio effects for the ROG Flow Z13 (2025)’s 5MP IR webcam. Here you can do everything from blur the background to enable auto framing to ensure you’re always in the frame on a call. It can even ensure you maintain eye contact even if you aren’t looking at the screen. That’s particularly eerie at first, but works in a similar way to Nvidia’s AI tools that I’ve experienced before in webcams including the Elgato Facecam MK.2.

Microsoft is still touting its controversial Recall feature with these Copilot+ PCs, and even if it isn’t on the Zenbook A14 at the time of writing, it is labelled as ‘coming soon’. The idea of it is that it takes screenshots of your screen every few seconds so you can look back and remember things you’ve looked at, even if you haven’t manually bookmarked them or used the Snipping Tool to take a screenshot. Due to privacy concerns, it remains for Windows Insiders, and it seems to need some ironing out before it gets released into the wild.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 11 hours 38 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for between one and two working days

One of the main drawbacks of the older 2022 iteration of the ROG Flow Z13 was its poor battery life, owing to the combination of a powerful Intel Core i9-12900H and discrete RTX 3050 Ti inside that managed to last for just five hours on a charge.

With the gains made in integrated graphics and efficiency thanks to AMD’s new Ryzen AI Max 390 chip, this new 2025 model eclipses the old one by providing 11 hours and 38 minutes on a charge with its 70Whr cell. This means you’ll be able to essentially get two working days out of it without needing to go anywhere the mains.

That’s a respectable result for such a potent gaming machine and sits more in the ultrabook category of efficiency alongside the likes of the Arm-based Dell XPS 13 (2024) than comparably priced gaming laptops. For instance, the MSI Crosshair 16 HX D14V (2024) with an Intel Core i7-14700HX and RTX 4060 garnered shy of four and a half hours.

The ROG Flow Z13 (2025) also benefits from gaming laptop charging speeds thanks to a 200W charging brick which took it from dead to a half charge in just half an hour, while going from zero to full took just 70 minutes.

Should you buy it?