Pick up the powerful 13-inch Asus ROG Z13 Flow laptop for $700 after a Woot discount
A nice piece of kit, it must be said.
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Asus make some of the best gaming laptops going, and their Flow Z13 (discounted today!) is one of the most interesting too. It's an ultraportable 13-inch machine with high-end specs, a 1200p (1920x1200) 120Hz touchscreen and a detchable keyboard. Plug in Asus' discrete GPU (or any other eGPU solution), and you're left with an extremely powerful gaming machine - then unplug and you've got a thin and light laptop for getting work done or consuming media on the go. Nice.
Anyway, this laptop retailed for $1300 when it first debuted last year, but now it's down to $700 at Woot in the US. That's a substantial savings and a good deal for a 13-inch laptop with a Core i5 12500H CPU, 16GB of DDR5 RAM and a 512GB NVMe SSD.
The biggest downside to choosing this particular model is that you do need that external GPU for actual proper AAA gaming performance, as the integrated graphics are fine but not quite up to much beyond esports titles. Asus make their own XG Mobile eGPU, which can come equipped with up to an RTX 4090. A version with an RTX 3080 costs $1100 new, so this is still going to be quite a significant expenditure to be aware of - unless you can find a discounted unit on Ebay!
However, as an extremely portable mobile workstation, the Flow Z13 works incredibly right out of the box. It's much thinner and lighter than even other 13-inch laptops, thanks to having an iPad-style keyboard, but I'd probably pair it with a low profile mechanical keyboard for a better typing experence.
What do you think about this model? Is there anyone in the audience that's actually got one? I am interested to hear your thoughts, as I've only played with one for a short (but impressive) review period.