Asus ROG Flow Z13 GZ302EA Convertible Review - AMD's Strix Halo GPU is neck-and-neck with the RTX 4070 Laptop

[RobertJasiek]

Where is NikoB by the way?

Apparently he has realised that admins dislike some of his off-topic excesses. Everybody of us or new users need to replace his valuable on-topic contributions. I also miss his contributions but we have to cope with the temporary void.

[astolfo]

This will be the holy grail AMD product that will open the eyes of its fanatics. It checks a lot of boxes for it to be a failure in the long run:

-Expensive
-Niche form factor (and heavy for a tablet)
-138W power consumption and that's while using its iGPU (lol)
-As with things AMD, good luck finding it in stock

• I honestly dont know what they were aiming for. People who work on AI stuff will use a proper workstation or rent one off from the Internet from some server farm.
• Tablets main selling point is good performance while keeping weight, battery life and comfort under acceptable levels. It's a game of equilibrium. ASUS here has just thrown all that out.
• On that note, this is aiming at being a gaming machine, too, and a expensive one for what it is. Even the Surface Pro with Lunar Lake has a more sensible price, heck, even the Macbook Pro M4 does. 128GB of ram is not even close to 90% of what an user needs. Most would be fine with 32 gb at this point.

[Vadim]

Asus uses a Wi-Fi module from MediaTek (MT9725)

Typo: it's the Mediatek MT7925.

[rutto noise]

The competition with Nvidia in the mobile gaming market is for sure a very good thing but, as of now, this 8060s just looks like a weird technological flex. Call it "integrated" if you like, it still has a TDP of almost 150W...
Long live the non-AI 8840u in my onexplayer 2 pro! ^____^

[Bizarro_NikoB]

Not sure I'm feeling this design!

[Ghazza]

Where is NikoB by the way?

Yeah, I miss him aswell. Without his expert analysis, difficult for me to make a decision on whether to get this or not. I hope he writes here again soon.

-138W power consumption and that's while using its iGPU (lol)

Bit confused. In one place in this review it does state this figure but in another it states short term 86W, drops to 70W for a few min before then eventually settling down / leveling off to 62W. So which one is it exactly? Unless one is a comparison of when connected to mains, fully unthrottled, total device power vs on battery, just cpu+gpu package power, and throttled.

I'm more inclined to believe that it's nowhere near 138W on battery because that'd imply 30 min battery life and worst case here shows 50 min. Other reviews have shown with few tweaks / running in a lower profile - you get substantial wattage savings with no much performance loss - so I think it's a bit disingenuous to state this number outright without giving the correct context.

-Niche form factor (and heavy for a tablet)

Agreed about the weight. Although tbf all 10"+ tablets are just too heavy to hold for long durations. The best size for weight is 7" and then you don't have enough screen real estate. So I'm not even sure it'd matter much in real world use cases even if it weighed as much as 13" iPad or an android tablet.

-Expensive

True, again no argument here. But how many other devices are in this form factor and can have up to 128GB of soldered ram? Anything even remotely similar does not come cheap either. So it's literally competing in a segment by itself which allows Asus to do apple like pricing here.

I think I will wait to see what the zbook ultra g1a brings and how it compares. Which should be out end of March, the last time I asked hp rep on webchat.

[Ghazza]

I don't think anyone's very pleased with the form factor of device. But from every review I've seen thus far,  there's almost unanimous universal excitement regarding the AMD chip inside and the technology behind it, that this is a real revolution.

Exciting because if AMD can learn to keep iterating on this product with future success generations with better supply / availability and pricing, it could become a force to be reckoned with. The fact that Nvidia is responding to this threat by starting to build their own pc chips is just further confirmation.

Remember first generation products are rarely without flaws or rough edges. Anyone who thought any differently is just naive.

[Worgarthe]

Where is NikoB by the way?

Yeah, I miss him aswell. Without his expert analysis, difficult for me to make a decision on whether to get this or not. I hope he writes here again soon.

Lmao, Niko typing here under several different names, funny stuff. Yeah, his inaccurate stuff and delusions, like "Author is lying!", "4K 120 Hz is minimum." (just to instantly bitch about a 4K 120 Hz laptop with "4K 144 Hz minimum is needed in 2024"), "We need 8K in laptops.", "No work is doable without numpad." etc. is really something to miss 🙃

[Worgarthe]

Battery Runtime

Load (maximum brightness)   0h 51min

Exceptional battery life, remarkable stuff. Probably the new record? I don't remember the last time I saw a laptop without a dGPU, but with less than 1h 5m of battery life under max load.

[Bizarro_NikoB]

Lmao, Niko typing here under several different names, funny stuff. Yeah, his inaccurate stuff and delusions, like "Author is lying!", "4K 120 Hz is minimum." (just to instantly bitch about a 4K 120 Hz laptop with "4K 144 Hz minimum is needed in 2024"), "We need 8K in laptops.", "No work is doable without numpad." etc. is really something to miss 🙃

Actually if you're wondering he has moved on to one of the other mainstream tech sites and posts there incessantly. I can see if I can find it again, but I was really surprised to get NikoB bombed in the comments when I was reading about some random processor. I thought "I know this guy!" and for the record I am not him, but adopted my username after he was s*** posting microwaves should be illegal and I had a superman/bizarro superman moment with him in the comments. lol

[Worgarthe]

Actually if you're wondering he has moved on to one of the other mainstream tech sites and posts there incessantly. I can see if I can find it again, but I was really surprised to get NikoB bombed in the comments when I was reading about some random processor. I thought "I know this guy!" and for the record I am not him, but adopted my username after he was s*** posting microwaves should be illegal and I had a superman/bizarro superman moment with him in the comments. lol

Holy hell, thanks for the info, that was nice to see before going to sleep haha! I believe I know which site is that but I rarely ever read comments there, I did now and whoa, he is really in full force 😁 One absolute gold to quote, under the article about Arrow Lake H laptops:

The point is that even the newest 5090 are poorly suited for generating an honest picture in 4k, they are frankly weak for the latest releases and requirements of game engines. Not to mention the transition to "analog" picture, which I have been dreaming about for more than 10 years, as soon as it became possible to support 4:4:4 8k@60fps at least in discrete cards (but really you need at least 120Hz in 2D, even for smooth scrolling in Word!) with 30-36 bit color and the market became ready for 8k panels.

.

And all this has been holding back and is holding back the mass distribution of 8K monitors – almost ideal for the human eye on diagonals up to 32" due to the elimination of refocusing problems (and nervous system fatigue) from the pixel structure of the picture to its object essence and back. Starting from about 250 ppi, this problem is practically solvable at any position of the head from the screen at distances from 25 cm...

And that kind of expertise is what some people here are missing? Never-ending obsession with 8K panels and watching 8K 32" displays from 25 cm distance? 🤣

Sorry for the off-topic admins! This was simply too hilarious to see, heh.

[A]

• I honestly dont know what they were aiming for. People who work on AI stuff will use a proper workstation or rent one off from the Internet from some server farm.
• Tablets main selling point is good performance while keeping weight, battery life and comfort under acceptable levels. It's a game of equilibrium. ASUS here has just thrown all that out.

My guess maybe an AI touchscreen assistant?

Bit confused. In one place in this review it does state this figure but in another it states short term 86W, drops to 70W for a few min before then eventually settling down / leveling off to 62W. So which one is it exactly? Unless one is a comparison of when connected to mains, fully unthrottled, total device power vs on battery, just cpu+gpu package power, and throttled.

It is nothing complicated, cold start may push it up, then things begin to normalize either due to it not needing it anymore or thermal throttling. This is why there is a chart of battery life in different usage.

I think I will wait to see what the zbook ultra g1a brings and how it compares. Which should be out end of March, the last time I asked hp rep on webchat.

It is going to be overpriced and not worth it. Wait until it gets into less flagshippy products