ROG Flow X13 2021 Refresh Review

The ROG Flow X13 is a laptop that’s in a class of its own. The 13-inch gaming/creator laptop is packed in with a RTX 3050Ti GPU and Ryzen 9 5900HS processor and suffice to say, this is the best possible configuration you can get at this size. The interesting addition however is the XG Mobile external graphics enclosure that’s sold separately but allows you to boost performance with the addition of a RTX 3070.

You can call the Flow X13 as a sort of Ultrabook, a gaming ultra-book if you will. It comes with a touchscreen and pen and can fold into a tablet so it also becomes a 2-in-1. The overall design itself is very minimal and has the ROG aesthetic all over the laptop chassis. This could also double up as a mini-Zephyrus laptop. It weighs in at 1.3 kgs and it’s remarkable they put in a top-of-the-line GPU and CPU in this packed body.

ROG says the design textured lines are designed to embody its versatility in a “gravity wave” design that also adds to the overall strength of the laptop body.

The panel is a 13.4-inch display with a 1920 x 1200 resolution with its 16:10 aspect ratio. That strange resolution comes from its 16:10 aspect ratio WQHD 120Hz 16:10 13-inch IPS display. The edge-to-edge Pantone validated display is protected with Corning Gorilla Glass and with the stylus, the touchscreen offers better interactions which are great for artists.

The keyboard is pretty straight forward too. There’s no RGB but it does have a basic white backlit keyboard with three levels of brightness that work well for creators so you can see where ROG are going with this laptop.

On the ports side of things, the ROG Flow X13, ostensibly comes with the default you can expect for a gaming laptop but this being a small device has a USB-C port for charging and display. And USB-A on the right side and on the left, it has the Its proprietary PCIe interface for the XG mobile external card and a headphone jack and HDMI.

The XG mobile enclosure can support an NVidia GeForce RTX 3070 that’s technically the world’s lightest and most compact external GPU (eGPU), that can go up to speeds of 1,810MHz with ROG Boost. Given that this is a proprietary solution, the eGPU avoids bottlenecks, gives users an additional few port choices to use as well and allows for the 13-inch laptop to become a workhorse beast capable of being plugged on a 4K display with little to no trouble at all.

Nvidia’s Max-Q technologies helps to bring powerful performance in a design like the one found of the ROG Flow X13 with RTX 3050Ti and provides to be a great solution for gaming and overall content creation.

The AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS is a 35-watt processor comes with eight cores and 16 threads and would be ideal for content creation workloads especially when you have video and photography editing and the 3050Ti should handle most games at medium to high settings.

But the real power comes with the XG mobile interface, a simple connection allows you to update the firmware to account for the GPU change with ROG software.

With the addition of the RTX 3070 depending on what you have in the enclosure, you get a boost in graphical performance enabling you to run most games easily on maximum settings. Cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla ran beautifully on the big screen on testing and playing on full HD was a breeze but you can play to 4K if you make a few reductions for the graphics settings.

The overall battery life of the ROG flow X13 will last you about 5 hours and 30 minutes on regular usage considering that it runs on a high refresh rate display and it is running a base RTX card by default.

There’s a lot that’s packed in the ROG Flow X13. It’s an unique offering in the laptop space and technically a one-of-a-kind laptop if you count that it has its own eGPU.

With a stellar CPU performance that’s expected of AMD and of course the choice to use the 3050ti or upgrade to a much more powerful RTX card to use on a bigger display, ROG has made something quite special in putting this kind of tech in a small frame and is the epitome of big things coming in small packages.

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