2023 Asus ROG Flow X16 - Still Amazing?

so today I've got a laptop that I've been waiting for not too long though because the first version of this laptop only came out like six or seven months before this one but this is the second iteration of my current favorite laptop of all time the Asus Rog flow x16 this is the 2023 model which ironically released only like six months after the 2022 model but it's back for Better or For Worse uh and yes some things are worse unfortunately but we'll get into that in a second so the model I have here is the equivalent pricing and specs of last year's model just with the updated GPU going from the RTX 3070 Ti from last year to this year's RTX 4070 and Asus pulled a fast one on us and they switched it up from last year's AMD ryzen 9 6900 HS to an Intel I9 13900h giving us more cores a little more performance and a little less battery life I know the main reason they probably did this was to get it to Market faster and while I hated that decision at first in the end it's actually not not that bad so yeah this laptop is still expensive but again there's nothing like it on the market it's a convertible laptop with a glossy touch screen it can be a tablet and it can run your favorite games at Max settings in the US this is also available with a 4060 and a standard IPS panel for about 700 less than the mini LED one that I have here and to give some perspective from that jump the 4060 model offers about 10 to 15 percent less performance in games which isn't bad and of course the CPU performance is the same but you're losing out on that mini LED display and that's a hard pill to swallow once you've seen it the IPS display is still great though it's not a bad screen by any means so the gpus here run up to 120 watts which is well above the cut off to where these 4060 and 4070 gpus stop offering any additional performance which is around 100 Watts so you'll have no problems matching the performance of much Bowl here machines with the same gpus as this one and the CPU here runs up to 110 watts in a CPU only load it's got eight performance cores and 6 six efficiency cores for a total of 14 cores and these can be parked and allocated in a variety of ways within Armory crate now it's nowhere near as heavy of a hitter as the 13th gen HX chips or the ryzen HX chips this year but still overall we've got great wattage Potential from both the CPU and GPU especially for a device this thin all right so first let's talk design so this is the same flow x16 chassis that we all loved from last year actually there is one weird difference that this one has a darker finish from what I've seen even last year there were some dark finishes floating around but the gray ones seem to be the most common now the black finish seems to be the most common one and I don't even know if they're selling the gray finish anymore and it's hard to say which one I prefer because the black one does look sleeker with the keyboard blending and a lot more with the keyboard deck but it also attracts fingerprints a little bit more than the gray finish did either way neither of them are anywhere near as much of a fingerprint magnet as like Razer Blade laptops but yeah the body is part aluminum part magnesium alloy it's very sturdy and the hinge has actually been tightened a little bit this year I know some people were really worried about the 2022 model hinge and although I never really found that to be too loose or anything I do appreciate the extra rigidity that they gave to the 2023 model I can't really measure it but I'll just like arbitrarily say it's like 20 more rigid than last year's hinge and obviously the coolest part about this hinge is that it folds all the way back to where you can use this machine as a big tablet you can throw it in tent mode or whatever you want to call this one uh easel I think is what people are calling it and the laptop knows when you folded it and actually adjusts power limits accordingly which I'll touch on so you've still got the nice heat sink at the back that covers the entire rear of the laptop it looks really nice and keeps some of the fan noise and heat behind the lid instead of it bouncing back at you like the zephyrus machines it's also got very small rubber feet which is nice for keeping it super low profile on a desk and very comfortable to use in your lap now they did change a couple tiny Design Elements like the emblem on the lid for some reason I mean like sure whatever but the numbers they added on the hinge are kind of weird definitely not necessary but Asus loves to do little weird things like that so not a huge deal cause they're pretty muted anyway and the keyboard is still the same as last year's it's single zone RGB and it feels absolutely amazing to type on it's centered which I'm forever thankful for Asus doing I know some people like numpads but like I always say a numpad usually means everything is now off-centered speakers have to be moved underneath the laptop or they sound a lot worse and you can always buy a cheap external numpad on Amazon for like 10 bucks so just my little rant there but anyways rant over speaking of the trackpad it's also the same as last year's super nice large glass track pad except the click for some reason is a lot softer this year it doesn't take quite as much force to click it either which I actually really enjoyed that so here's a sound clip of both of the keyboards and track pads foreign now the webcam is 1080p this year it's still nothing super special but you know it's just an averagely decent laptop webcam and the charging brick has increased in size a little bit you now get a 280 watt charging brick instead of the 240 watt one from last year I'm not really sure why they did that but my only guess is that maybe it was because the Intel CPU is a little more power hungry and runs at higher wattages than the ryzen one did it's not much larger than last year's though so I can't really complain I've also heard some people say their region still ships with the 240 watt one so I guess maybe it varies by the country or model that you get either way though it's nowhere near as large as some of those giant like Lenovo or Alienware charging bricks so that's good luckily I haven't noticed any major quality control issues on mine there's no rattling trackpad no coil wind no screen wine from the mini LED display like I had on the M16 no dead pixels so I'm happy to see that although I have heard some minor uh QC issues here and there like rattling track pads and Screen bleed and yeah I had a number of people talk about screen bleed and actually noticed it a little bit online which there shouldn't be any bleed on a mini LED display but that is the one little issue that mine does have you can only see it in single zone mode and it must have been maybe from the glass panel not being pressed evenly all the way across the factory but yeah me and a few others all have the same little bit of bleed in the bottom center of the display and it's not really that noticeable like most of the time I'm in a multi-zone anyway so it's not even there but still just the weird thing to see on a display like this but yeah overall it's the same design as last year which is still in my opinion like one of the nicest and sleekest looking laptops out there like it's super thin for the power that it packs the bezels look really nice with the glass the display being on top everything is centered and neat it's simple it's sturdy Asus just really knocked it out of the park with this design alright so the display so we all know last year's flow x16 was the first laptop to have a high refresh mini LED display it was a huge selling point because it was simply incredible many LEDs get amazing contrast like almost OLED levels but they can double the brightness typically of OLED panels and and you have no risk of burning and they've brought that display back but with even better specs this time on the 2023 flow they've now doubled the dimming zones from 512 to 1024 and the refresh rate has now increased from 165 Hertz to 240 hertz now these are very welcome improvements as many people noticed that the dimming zones were a little easy to spot on the 2022 model since it was kind of a low number like typically more dimming zones means less blooming and better brightness uniformity as you can usually see on like the new Macbook Pros and I made a whole video about these displays and what to look out for so I definitely recommend checking that out but anyways you're probably thinking I'm going to say like this is the best display out there but unfortunately I think I like last year's better so now you're thinking how is that possible last year's had worse specs well one thing that goes beyond specs is the dimming algorithm which is handled on the back end and I think that's where Asus made a little bit of a mistake this year but I think I understand why so some things have been fixed completely like the splotchiness at low brightness on the 2022 2 model is now gone and I think that was asus's asus's number one priority because yeah that's gone but I think it came at a cost because now we oddly have like more noticeable blooming on the 2023 model despite it having doubled the dimming zones like an honestly happy questioning whether they actually increase the dimming zones or not and I saw the same behavior on the zephyrus M16 from this year that has the same exact display as this one so I know it's not just my panel but basically you can see in these clips how the blooming around the cursor and certain elements of images are much more noticeable on the new flow now if you've never seen another mini LED display though then honestly you're probably not going to notice it like it looks way worse on camera than it does in person and it's really not easy to spot all the time especially when you're just viewing content or playing games so honestly for most people I would say that this is a non-issue it's just that for me like I'm used to the 2022 model I'm used to that screen and so that was just a little disappointing after being like really excited for that upgrade now there is a silver lining in this for those of you who might be worried about the Halo effect and is something that's still only Asus has implemented which is crazy to me and that's the single zone toggle switch in Armory crate so here you can turn off the dimming zones completely and have your display act as one big dimming Zone which basically makes it more like an IPS display this of course reduces contrast and brightness but you get complete brightness uniformity across the screen and it's crucial for Content creation or for people who are just browsing the web and like to have uniform brightness across their entire screen you know you don't want to be like checking emails and half your screen is dark or your cursor is dim or the the letters get dark but then bright again so like I still cannot believe that only Asus has done this like no one else thought of this but yeah it's it's an absolute game changer for many LED laptops so Props to Asus there but I do have one more issue and that's the color and brightness disparities when you switch between single zone multi-zone D GPU mode and hdr on this one so when you're putting these both next to each other and you can see this here the the brightness and colors kind of vary depending on which mode you're in on this laptop and I think Advanced Optimus maybe had something to do with that because or maybe it's a back end Windows color management I'm not really 100 sure what's going on here but you'll see that sometimes the display is a bit warmer and sometimes it's more accurate sometimes it's brighter than last year's flow sometimes it's dimmer than last year's flow so that part is kind of strange I'm just going to play some of the clips so you can see the differences here in the different modes but yeah overall I would say for Content creators you might want to stick to the most accurate profile which for me I think was hybrid mode HDR off of course and then if you are using HDR I think hybrid mode HDR was the most color accurate without it getting too warm so just something to think about but overall the color gamut is amazing though 100 srgb 99 DC ip3 and over 1100 nits of brightness like this thing is so vibrant and bright that it is just insane I picked up a legion Pro 7i and that display like especially with it not having a wide color damn it it just looks so like subpar to me now that I've been using the flow for so long so it's a great display overall oh yeah one thing I forgot to mention too with the algorithm is that sometimes on certain content bright images are artificially dimmed so that was kind of weird I noticed that in my when I was doing my calibration that the spider X sometimes wouldn't be able to read the max brightness because the display was dimming some of those white spots a little bit so I'm not really sure what's happening there it did not happen on last year's model but it did happen on the new flow and the new Zephyrs so do I think that's gonna really affect most people probably not like it still looks amazing when you're watching content or gaming it just looks incredible so just little quirks that I noticed with this algorithm all right so the ports so the flow has the same ports as last year except since it's Intel now we have some Thunderbolt action going on here so the right side is our two USB type A ports micro SD card slot which I always vouch for because it actually goes all the way in the laptop and it can be used for extra storage even though it's not the fastest and then you've got your power button on the left you've got your power input which is thankfully at the top you've got HDMI 2.1 instead of HDMI 2.0 B so now you can actually drive a 4K 120 hertz display here instead of last year's model you could not do that and then you've got your Thunderbolt Port which connects to the integrated graphics and then your other USBC Port is part of the xgm port and that one is connected directly to the Nvidia Graphics the HDMI is also connected to your Nvidia Graphics the D GPU so but it can also run off the integrated Graphics when you're in eco mode so that's really cool that you can hook up to a monitor on battery without depleting your battery like crazy a lot of laptops don't allow you to do this so that's a nice little feature but I do need to talk more about this port right here because this one could be an absolute game changer for some people so this is the XG mobile Port this is where you can plug in up to a 4090 external GPU from Asus and turn this thing from a great gaming machine into an incredible gaming machine only the flow series of laptops have this and it's really cool to have as an option for like future proofing your machine without having to buy a whole new laptop because in five years you know you could buy the RTX 6080 XG mobile or whatever they make and still be competing with laptops at the top of the league for that year and then lastly of course you got your headphone microphone audio combo Jack here and your activity lights all right so the speakers so again we've got the same great speakers as last year's flow Asus did a really good job here they're upward facing you get Dolby access for further tweaking your sound and yeah they're just super Punchy and crisp for a gaming laptop [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] all right so getting inside the flow honestly isn't too hard just remove a set of screws none that are hidden thankfully like they do on the zephyrus models uh just pry it a bit and you're inside so once you're in you'll see the unique cooling system that they've got here which is really helping the laptop keep decent temperatures and low fan noise you've got three fans a giant rear heat sink and of course plenty of heat pipes going across so it all feels really well put together they also gave us two replaceable Ram slots which is pretty unique for a machine this thin and they're up to par in speeds with most ddr5 Ram out there you also have a space for an extra SSD so my primary SSD on this model came in the slot where the empty slot was on the 2022 model so that was interesting but maybe they were afraid of people breaking the cable on accident that it sits on but yeah the empty slot can hold a double-sided SSD I used a four terabyte one to test that with and the speeds of the stock SSD are also pretty good as well the Wi-Fi card is right here and it's replaceable but you probably won't need to since this one is Intel and lastly you've got your 90 watt hour battery right here at the bottom all right so for my laptop with the software first thing I always do is uninstall McAfee update Armory crate do Windows updates since this is Intel we're going to download Intel support assistant to update all the Intel drivers you might also need intel Graphics Command Center for your igpu drivers update everything in my Asus including the BIOS update everything in the Microsoft store get the latest updates from Nvidia GeForce and we're good to go oh and don't forget to download the Windows update show hide tool and hide Windows update from Auto installing an older Intel graphics driver because it really likes to do that I'm going to try to quickly go through Armory crate here because I've explained this software quite a bit in the past already and it's very similar to how it is on the zephyrus M16 so I go in full detail on that review so basically an Armory crate you have your power profiles here at the bottom Windows just aligns with whatever windows power profile you have silent prioritizes fan noise it really doesn't even like to hit like 40 decibels in this mode it cuts back performance a little bit but it still performs really well in this mode performance is basically your balance mode it gives you pretty low fan noise but better performance of course and then turbo is like your maximum performance but maximum fan noise power profile however like I'll show in a little bit the turbo mode on here is actually not nearly as loud as other laptops um manual mode is where you go to customize things to your liking you can do overclocking on the GPU you can adjust your Dynamic boost your thermal Target to determine how hot you'll allow it to go you can set fan curves to determine how fast you want the fans to spin at any designated temperature on the CPU side you can adjust your pl1 which is your sustainable CPU power limit and then your pl2 which is like your short-term boost power limit a new feature this year with the 13th gen Intel is core parking so you can actually choose how many P cores and how many e-cores you want active here um I haven't found it to really Grant like a ton of more battery life but it does lower performance a bit so maybe this can be used to like decrease fan noise a bit more or if you're just trying to tune it for a certain low wattage or you're trying to disable e-cores for a certain game compatibility things like that you can do that here and then in the system configuration panel this is where you'll find some pretty important settings so you can disable the Windows key here you can disable the touchpad you can please disable that god-awful boot up sound you can enable or disable panel overdrive you can turn on panel power saver which automatically lowers the refresh rate when you unplug your laptop and then probably the most important one here is your backlight control for single zone or multi-zone like I explained earlier that just gives you more control over your brightness uniformity and then you have your GPU modes so I'll just quickly go over this so standard is your Advanced Optimus mode which allows the GPU to switch dynamically or you can switch it yourself in a video control panel going into ultimate mode disables Advanced Optimus and it only just runs everything through your Nvidia GPU which consumes more power and reduces battery life of course eco mode disables the RTX GPU completely which usually gives more battery life and since the GPU is disabled it's never going to get woken up by any programs so this runs everything through their Intel integrated graphics and then optimize is basically a combination of standard in Eco what it does is when you're plugged in you're in standard mode and then when you unplug you're in eco mode and then your other settings here you have your GPU power saving where you can stop any programs using the GPU you have customizable hotkeys if you want to switch those around at the top for a variety of actions you have your lighting area which you can go to adjust your keyboard lighting audio and then another cool one here is the modern standby assistant what this does is actually really good to see that Asus is combating the windows modern standby issues that plague a lot of laptops Linus Tech tips made a video on that so this is here to help prevent your laptop from you know like overheating or draining all your battery while it's asleep and then you have rsync for more complex lighting effects another cool thing here you also have game visual which is which actually brings a really cool new feature to 2023 Asus laptops and that is the color gamut clamp so some people don't like the widened color gamut for Content creation because it can affect what you're looking at if your display has a really wide color gamut but you're working in the srgb color space sometimes this can lead to oversaturated Colors such as Windows for example so what this does is it clamps those colors so that you are seeing srgb colors in the srgb color space so that is really helpful for creators or just people that don't like saturation and then of course to check your updates you just go to settings and Update Center where you've got your themes and I'll quickly talk about Advanced Optimus real quick since that's new to the 2023 models but basically you have it right here in Nvidia control panel you can go to manage display mode and what you'll see is you can choose between Optimus or Nvidia GPU only of course you're going to get a little performance boost using Nvidia GPU only whereas Optimus gives you battery life boost or you can have it automatically select which it doesn't always get right so I usually just do it myself a really helpful tool though is if you hit desktop you can enable the switcher to be in your taskbar so you can just do this on the Fly which is really nice and to check which mode you're in obviously you're going to have more settings like g-sync and you'll see in the physx panel that the laptop is connected to the RTX GPU instead set of the integrated graphics and then for the BIOS there's some decent customizability here nowhere near as much as like MSI laptops but I'll just quickly scrub through the settings here all right so now let's talk about the fans before I get to that part I just want to quickly remind everyone to please if you could subscribe to this channel um it really helps support the channel helps it grow and who knows maybe one day this will be my job and I can actually put videos out in a timely manner but until then please subscribe if you could leave a like all of that helps thank you so much so some of y'all know I'm a fan of the fans on the flow all right this is like the best experience I've had with a gaming laptop uh was last year's flow and I'm happy to say that this year's is just as good we're looking about the same as last year so uh but we do have actually one pretty big Advantage with this year's model as far as the fan noise so of course silent mode is fantastic as usual with most Asus laptops you know fans are typically at zero RPM unless you're doing something intensive then they might just barely kick on but not enough to really notice or like be annoyed by so right off the bat this thing is Library approved for noise which means it's a Josh approved laptop all right like you can even comfortably game in silent mode and that is crazy and then in Turbo it's actually still not too bad just like last year Asus prioritized noise and this thing hits a beautiful maximum of only like 46 47 decibels in Turbo which is just like s tier compared to literally every other gaming laptop out there that hits like 50 decibels at the very least so you know some of them like the zephyrus M16 are literally twice as loud for perceivable volume at like 56 decibels which is to put that in perspective is 10 times the sound intensity as 46 decibels so and that's not even the best part the best power profile on this laptop is actually the performance mode and you're probably thinking well don't you lose some performance in performance mode since performance mode on Asus laptops is really like balance mode but because of how efficient these 40 60 40 70 chips are you actually lose like almost no performance dropping from turbo mode to this so the fan noise drops to about 43 decibels which is almost half the volume yet you're still getting almost identical frame rates in games I'm going to show you soon but it's actually only three percent less performance foreign so that is crazy I mean you could game in this mode comfortably around people without getting weird looks yet your laptop is absolutely just demolishing any game you throw at it so that's a huge win-win in my book and honestly that's the primary reason that I would pick this over last year's flow like this profile gives a really nice 20 uplift in performance over last year's model in the same profile while at the same noise level even though the 4070 is not a big uplift over the 3070 TI it's still just good to see Improvement somewhere and of course you can manually adjust your fan curves if you want more noise and lower attempts but I'd say it's not really necessary to Max them out unless you're really trying to get some Benchmark records or something and one fun new way I like to Showcase fan noise through this new graph I made which is basically your fan noise to Performance ratio so for each decibel of fan noise this is how many points the laptop would score you in time spy Graphics which is basically the industry standard Graphics Benchmark and I've separated this graph into three sections for each power profile so you want this number to be higher and you want this number your fan noise to be low lower so at the top here is our turbo profiles on each laptop you can see the Zephyrs M16 leads the chart of course because it has a 40 90 and that's really wise it's just because it has 40 90. if you look at the actual decibels it's running at it's 56 decibels which is super loud the 2023 flow x16 is the next best one on this chart at only 47 decibels so that puts it a little above last year's model as it does score a little better than that one and in the balance performance profiles you see the M16 leads the charts still but not by much here because again it's really loud the flow x16 is a much better choice since you're getting close to the same performance at a lot less noise and here's of course where you can see the 2023 model take a big leap over the 2022 at 273 points per decibel versus 223 points per decibel and then in silent mode this is where I found the Razer Blade 15 to really succeed but both flows do about the same here which is just excellent performance compared to many other laptops in their silent mode so yeah just once again I would call the flow x16 one of the best in fan noise for how much performance it gives you and how how compact that chassis is all right so CPU performance so yeah I wasn't happy about Asus switching the flow x16 from AMD to Intel I really wasn't but I think they chose a pretty good chip for the job the 3900h doesn't have like over the top performance like the Intel HX chips but it's not too shabby the chip maxes out at around a little over 100 watts and a CPU only load sometimes hitting like 110 115 so definitely more wattage than last year's ryza model was pushing out but it's Intel so it kind of needs it this leads to cinebench scores of around 19 300 which is about a 29 almost 30 percent gain in CPU performance over last year's model so that's not too bad although some of the Intel and AMD HX chips out there are scoring over 30 000 so definitely doesn't look quite as impressive compared to those and here's the geekbench CPU scores for those interested so your GPU here is of course the RTX 4070 which still has only eight gigabytes of vram for some reason uh running 120 watts which is only 20 watts less than the maximum allowed but this is my first 4070 I reviewed and yes the 4 4070 is an interesting card same with the 4050 and 4060 each one is only about 10 15 percent apart in performance from the other and the wattage does not really matter much at all on these cards well anything over 100 Watts that is because the performance tapers off there substantially so if you're buying like a bulky laptop with 140 watt GPU you're actually not faring any better than someone who bought a thin and light like the flow running around like 100 Watts or something so you know just want to take a second you know in your face to the people who doubted me to the people that bought the legion 5 Pro a few years ago that were like hating on my video about it this one's for you okay I was hard on that thing back then I'll admit but at the same time like this year is a great year for thin and light laptops you really do not need something bulky and heavy like that in 2023. unless of course you're getting a super high-end GPU now the sucky part with the 4070 as a whole though is how far behind it is compared to 4080 and 40 90 laptops those gpus are the ones that really got upgraded this year the 47 70 on the other hand is just barely any better than a 30 70 or a 3070 ti so that's a little depressing but that doesn't make it a bad card like I said it's very efficient and does extremely well at low wattages so in our time spy graph you can see it's getting about 12 344 points putting it almost 15 ahead of last year's flow so that's not bad it's especially nice to see it over some chunkier 3080 laptops but again looking at those 40 90 laptops it's just not even close now I also really like to look at how different Power profiles affect the scores because I know not everyone is going to be gaming on the maximum performance turbo mode 24 7. so and I never really see any other reviewers talk about this so I wanted to show that for those interested in maybe you know dialing performance back a little bit so your fans aren't going full blast all the time which I've also marked the fan noise here as well just for reference so in turbo mode we know how that performs already but in performance mode that's the cool part you can see it only dropped three percent in the score yes you heard me right only three percent whereas the 49 90 Zephyrs M16 loses about 22 percent of its performance that's the magic of the 4070 and the 4060 this year no matter which one you get you'll barely lose any performance going from Turbo to Performance mode even going to silent mode it now performs even better than the Zephyrs M16 here and a little better than last year's flow which had a God to your silent mode and also here's the geekbench GPU results for those interested alright so you might know this is a highly recommended laptop for creators and it even comes with the Nvidia Studio drivers pre-installed which you can switch of course but Asus clearly wants creators to use this machine so let's see how it does in Creator benchmarks first of all latency mod was looking just okay in hybrid mode and eco mode it wasn't bad but in dgpu mode it was not looking good of course this is mostly nvidia's fault as they're well aware of this on their end and it's like this on every Nvidia laptop for the Puget Photoshop Benchmark we've got a score of 1171 which is really good but you know not too much better than last year's just a seven percent increase there and Adobe Premiere Pro this is where we see see a really nice increase we're going from 734 on last year's flow to 1181 that is a 61 increase which is really awesome but of course that's mostly just because Adobe can use Intel's quick SYNC feature to accelerate Premiere Pro so it's really just that Intel feature that partnership that they have with Adobe and I've recently added a music production Benchmark so we've got the Ableton demo session running here which you can find right here if you want to replicate this and we're in the heaviest part of this track which has like over 20 tracks with lots of effects our CPU load is about like 17 18 whereas the flow from last year was hitting closer to 27 28 in this Benchmark so that's good to see some improvement there so yeah is it worth upgrading from last year's flow to this one for creators specifically personally I wouldn't unless Premiere Pro is like your bread and butter because Intel gets an advantage there but you know maybe also if you're seeing both for around the same price then sure you might as well get the one that performs better so yeah the 2023 model has a little more performance than the 2022 but how about on battery we know AMD laptops typically perform better on battery thanks to having more efficiency but how does the new 13th gen Intel do has Intel redeemed themselves well looking at our cinebench scores on battery it looks like uh yeah they did it the new flow beats last year's by about 15 on battery which is pretty crazy it's at the top of my charts and I'm super happy with that high of a cinebench score on battery now if you look at GPU performance on battery again we're doing excellent here literally on par with the 4090 and the zephyrus M16 so that's insane and about 32 percent ahead of last year's flow so you can expect much better GPU performance on battery here now let's take it a step further and look at gaming on battery now it's not like you're going to get more than like an hour or so of run time doing this but as you can see the flow is still just killing it almost on par with the 4090 and Shadow the Tomb Raider here and about 16 FPS ahead of last year's flow in The Benchmark and for creators who like to run on battery for you know photoshop on the go we're looking at pretty insane performance with a score of 968 and then for on-the-go video editors out there you're looking at a premiere Pro score of 968 on battery which is just amazing that score on battery is actually 24 better than last year's flow is when it's plugged in in turbo mode so yeah this thing is a battery Beast so I was really surprised to see that from Intel but did Intel also surprise me with battery life though Well turns out yeah they shocked me there too I was totally expecting this year's flow to get way less battery life being an Intel laptop but it actually came really close to last year's AMD model within less than an hour difference in battery run time at about six and a half hours in my typical YouTube playback test so that's about what you can expect doing basic tasks and I'm pretty happy with that personally for those of you getting the model with the IPS display you can expect about an extra hour or so since the mini LED display does unfortunately eat a bit more battery now as far as thermals they're actually surprisingly good for a laptop that's this flat on the desk with a small foot and you know being this thin so running Apex here you can see the GPU is hitting about 100 Watts CPUs getting you know 30 to 40 Watts this is in turbo mode and they're both just chilling in the 70s which is really good for a gaming laptop and then in performance mode it goes down a little bit more the CPU still gets a pretty good amount of wattage GPU goes down a little bit but both are still in the 70s and then of course since this is a convertible we can flip it around into tent mode and get even better thermals which if you're a controller player this is awesome for you because now CPU and GPU are both in the 60s and I've noticed even when the GPU is hitting like 100 120 watts it still kind of stays around that same level like 60s to 70s so that is really great to see I'm really impressed with the thermals on this thing all right so let's look at gaming performance so like I said the 4070 is not much of an upgrade over the 3070 TI as far as maximum performance goes same with the 4060 over the 30 60 they're all just kinda you know little upgrades I'm gonna throw a chart here that shows like the performance of each GPU how it scales and you can see the 4060 40 70 40 50 they're all kind of they're very efficient which is why they're so far left on that graph because they can achieve pretty high scores at low wattages but they don't really score much higher per se specially compared to you know 40 80s and 40 90s so that being said Don't expect too much of a gain here over last year's model in gaming but maybe that Intel CPU will also help us a little bit so let's check it out alright so let's start with shadow of the Tomb Raider my favorite Benchmark so the 2023 flow here gets 106 FPS whereas last year's model got 95 FPS now shadow of the Tomb Raider is influenced by CPU a little bit here so it's getting about an 11 FPS increase so I mean that's nice to see on the horizon zero Dawn Benchmark we're at the ultimate quality preset the new flow x16 gets about 95 FPS here comparing to last year's it gets 87 FPS there so not too much of a gain but it is a nice Improvement to see drop it down to 1080P and now we're getting 114 FPS versus last year's flow getting 103 FPS so you know it's better it's not like night and day better but still there's something there now in cyberpunk on the ray tracing Ultra preset we're getting 54 FPS here on the flow if we look at last year's flow we got 48 fps so 54 or 48 not too much maybe at lower FPS levels like that it is probably more noticeable um if instead we do just the ultra preset turned Ray tracing off turn dlss off we're getting 63 FPS compared to last year's which got 50 FPS so we actually do see a nice Improvement here now in Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2 on The in-game Benchmark at 1440p the new flow is getting 74 FPS decent increase about 11 FPS more than last year's flow which had 63 in this Benchmark so not too bad if we turn dlss on we're getting 99 FPS and again that's about 11 12 FPS more than last year's now control is a very GP heavy game the new flow is getting about 43 FPS here which is actually 2fps less than last year's for some reason so you know this is one maybe it's a driver difference who knows but pretty on par like I said 4070 is not much greater than 30 70 ti so you know maybe this is just margin of error stuff here if we turn dlss on the new flow is pretty identical at about 75 FPS so about the same as last year's now Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Benchmark with favor quality maxed out 1440p we're getting 65 FPS compared to 62 FPS on last year's model so not much of a difference there again if we drop it out to 1080p we're getting 82 FPS versus last year's 72 FPS so we do see a difference there probably again because the Intel CPU helping more at 1080p which is a little more CPU bound and then CS go so at 1440p the new flow actually scored lower than last year's for some reason not really sure what was going on there maybe it's a driver something like that who knows honestly but drop it down to 1080P and now we see the new flow actually beating the old one so maybe that's where the Intel CPU is coming in we're getting 468 versus 443 on last year's model and an X Legends 160 FPS versus last year's which got 140 FPS so that one's pretty good to see Apex is a little more CPU bound so that could be why we're seeing that difference there all right so my final thoughts and this is a really tough one for me because I love the flow x16 I love the 2022 model to me that was like one of the best all-around laptops that you could buy for last year especially since the 3070 TI wasn't like too far behind 3080 TI levels of performance so it's not like you were missing out on too much by going that route this year it's a little different because you've got these 4080 laptops that are around like the same price range and you know they're scoring way better in games they're doing way better in uh you know Premiere DaVinci Resolve so things like that so it is a little bit more of a tough sell compared to other laptops especially when Asus is making some other Creator Focus machines that have 4080s and 40 90s so there's the zephyrus M16 which has a 40 90 or 4080 and as you saw in charts it does really well so yeah if you're like gaming you might want to go that route if High FPS is like your top priority the Zephyrs M16 might be a better buy or even the G14 with the 40 90 or 4080 will get you a lot more performance in games all right so yeah if we're tallying up the advantages of the 2023 model over the 2022 we've got like a 20 to 25 better CPU about a 10 to 15 percent better GPU a better performance mode that performs just as well as turbo really HDMI 2.1 for 4K 120 hertz output a better webcam tighter hinges Thunderbolt support without any beta drivers needed a higher refresh rate of 240 hertz you've got Nvidia Advanced Optimus so no more restarting to use your Muk switch and you've got g-sync built into the Monitor and then some unique software advantages like the color gamut clamp core parking and modern standby assistant and Armory crate and then better performance on battery so that's a pretty good list and then of course first the disadvantages are more noticeable blooming for some reason despite it having more dimming zones and then there's like some occasional freezes that happen because of Advanced Optimus and HDR it's probably an Nvidia thing but and then a little bit worse battery life that's still really good for Intel though and then slightly larger power brick and then like I said a lot of people were noticing some screen bleed so yeah I mean it's hard to say like for me personally I don't think it's worth that upgrade over the 2022 model for those little features like if it was like a huge performance bump from like you know like it is going from like a 30 70 to a 40 90 then sure or even a 3070 to a 4080 like that would be amazing but unfortunately it's really not much uh gaming performance or GPU performance so unless you're really after that Intel CPU I would probably stick with the 2022 model but like I said if you don't have either of these I'd probably go for the 2023. now talking about this compared to other laptops on the market it's a much harder sell for me you know unless you really want that XG Mobile support there's a lot of laptops out there that have 40 80s and 40 90s already like the zephyrus M16 I think they're doing like a Zen book or a pro art laptop or something with a 4080 or 40 90 in it so there are other options out there from Asus and other brands too that have you know 40 80s 40 90s for a similar price um but yeah I mean most of those you are going to miss out on the touch screen or the mini LED display so you know it's still like overall an amazing laptop it just does not look nearly as good in games compared to some others that are releasing this year but you know comparing it to other 40s 70s 40 60s then yeah it's really good yeah it's more expensive than most but you know if we're specifically just comparing it to other 40 60 and 40 70 laptops out there then yeah it's amazing um it's still you know performs really well in games it's going to do just as good as you know a thick laptop like the legion 5 Pro and in a much Slimmer chassis that looks a lot more Sleek so you've got some advantages there when you're looking at the same G Apu across the board so yeah in that case I would absolutely recommend this one you know if you're willing to pay that extra amount to have you know the touch screen rotating hinge mini LED display like those things are still awesome in 2023 and yeah I mean it's just it's beautiful so yeah I would still say it's one of the best laptops out there um and there's a lot of good laptops out there this year so yeah that's my take on the 2023 flow x16 you have any questions about it hit me up in the comments if you enjoyed the video please leave a like subscribe uh hit that Bell for notifications and thank you so much guys I will see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Cravey

Views: 73,164

Keywords: Asus ROG Flow, Flow X16, 2023 Asus X16, Asus X16 vs zephyrus g15, Intel i9-13900h, rtx 4070 laptop, 4070 gaming laptop, Flow X16 Review, MiniLED Laptop, mini led review, legion or asus X16, touchscreen gaming laptop review, ROG Flow X16, 2023 zephyrus, gaming laptops, asus gaming laptop, Flow X16 Guide, X16 optimization, X16 wattage, Flow X16 gpu, Flow X16 fan noise, X16, X16 quality control, X16 qc, Flow X16 performance, detailed gaming laptop review, gaming 2-in-1

Id: SNRD8kSe12I

Length: 40min 8sec (2408 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 12 2023