Asus ROG Flow Z13 ACRNM review (2023) a fastest gaming tablet

The Asus ROG Flow Z13 ACRNM is a powerful gaming tablet with a dedicated graphics card and a powerful processor. In addition to the regular 2023 model with the Core i9-13900H and up to the GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop, which is also currently being reviewed, Asus also has a special edition made in collaboration with the German fashion brand ACRONYM that has a completely redesigned chassis and the more powerful GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop.

Asus ROG Flow Z13 ACRNM: Description

We take a look at the gaming convertible to see if the price of 3400 Euros is fair. The convertible also has a 13.4-inch WQHD IPS screen with a refresh rate of 165 Hz, 32 GB of LPDDR5-RAM, and a small, replaceable 1 TB M.2-2230 SSD. The Asus ROG Flow Z13 ACRNM is the RTX 4070 gaming system you can wear. How did we get to this strange point where fashion and tech are coming together? Errolson Hugh is to blame. He is a well-known fashion designer who helped start Acronym, a cool brand of streetwear worn by Drake, Travis Scott, and John Mayer. And for good reason: to buy anything from Acronym, you’d need money like a celebrity.

Hugh was asked by Asus to put his own style on the ROG Flow Z13, and the result is a laptop that looks like it could be used on a rock climbing trip. we can’t help but laugh at how weird the laptop looks, but its strange straps are surprisingly useful. The 13-inch machine can be changed into a shoulder bag, a cross-body bag, or a briefcase. You can even let it rest on your chest and face you, like a weird laptop Baby Bjorn.

Asus ROG Flow Z13 ACRNM: Pros and Cons

Specification Table

Asus ROG Flow Z13 ACRNM: Design

If the Asus ROG Flow Z13 ACRNM were a person, it would be the moody, cargo-pants-wearing character in a dystopian, high-tech metropolis with a grungy, edgy, cyberpunk style. The ACRNM looks like the Microsoft Surface Pro X, which has a tablet with a built-in kickstand and a keyboard that can be taken off. But it’s more street style. The Asus laptop has a digi-tribal look with a futuristic, metallic-looking CNC aluminum chassis. The back of the tablet has light-gray markings that look like they came from a early culture.

The black rubber feet are an eyesore, but they are useful if you want to use the ACRNM as a tablet. So the vents can work, they keep the tablet a little bit off the surface. The tablet is not an iPad Air, by the way. It’s super heavy. You can’t just hold this with one hand, so you’ll probably use the kickstand 99.9% of the time. Asus says that the keyboard, which can be taken off and used as a cover for the tablet, is made of “high-quality leather.”

This may be true, but the fabric doesn’t have that enticing feel that high-quality fabrics often have; it’s not interesting. On most gaming keyboards, only the WASD keys stand out. On the ACRNM, however, all the keys are black except for 20 caps, which include W, A, S, D, E, I, J, K, L, Esc, Backspace, Shift, and CTRL. All of them are decorated in some way with the khaki-yellow color.

Asus ROG Flow Z13 ACRNM: Noise and Connectivity

The 2023 Flow Z13’s cooling module is a vapor-chamber design with two fans and two radiators. Both the CPU and the GPU are cooled with liquid metal thermal compound. The tablet shape makes it easy for air to flow freely into the fans and for hot air to be pushed up and away from the user. All of these things add up to the good thermal results shown in the last section.

In Turbo mode, this ACRNM version of the Flow Z13 with the chunky metal back runs a few degrees cooler and is a few decibels quieter than the standard design. So the aluminum chassis’s extra weight is not just for show.

In conclusion, the noise level when running demanding loads is 44 dBA on Manual with max-fans, about 41 dBA on Turbo, about 39 dBA on Performance, and less than 30 dBA on the Silent profile. The Flow Z13 ACRNM is again a few degrees cooler on the outside than the standard model, with hotspots that are 4–10 degrees cooler around the components, either at the level of the screen or on the back. Because all of the parts are in the tablet part, the tablet folio stays very cool no matter what.

Keyboard and Touchpad

We thought the keyboard would be too small, too soft, and too spongy. But, to my surprise, the ROG Flow Z13 ACRNM’s detachable keyboard is so clicky we are all going to die. Even built-in keyboards we have used recently that were bigger and sturdier than this one were less responsive, and there was no good reason for that. The keyboard is more ergonomic because it doesn’t lie completely flat on the surface. Instead, it has a comfortable slope that makes it feel even better to use.

Let me show you my results on the 10FastFingers.com test to show how good the ACRNM’s keyboard feels to type on. On average, we type between 87 and 89 words per minute, but on the ACRNM, we typed 94 words per minute. Nice! The strange characters and symbols on the keys of the ACRNM’s island-style keyboard are the only thing we don’t like about it. You’ll see the usual QWERTY letters, but opposite them is what Asus calls a “new alphabet,” which gives the keyboard a strange tribal-futuristic look. This strange “new alphabet” has no rhyme or reason. It’s just a quirky design choice.

we also don’t know what the hell is going on with the function row keys, which are full of symbols 2we don’t understand. But if you read the small red text above the white letters, like “Sleep, Mic Off, Fan, Silence,” it all makes sense. The 4.1 x 2.4-inch touchpad is below the spacebar, and there’s not much to get excited about. It does its job, responding to touch gestures in Windows 11 like pinching to zoom, scrolling with two fingers, and swiping three fingers down to show the desktop.

Asus ROG Flow Z13 ACRNM: Performance

At $2,500, this laptop had better be able to handle everything we can throw at it and more. The Intel Core i9-13900H CPU, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB of SSD storage in the ROG Flow Z13 ACRNM made it laugh when I tried to suffocate it with 55 Google Chrome tabs, of which 10 were playing videos from different streaming sites at the same time. After opening a new Google Doc to test how quickly it worked, the ACRNM kept going even though chaos was going on in the background.

The ACRNM is up against some tough competition, which is too bad. On the Geekbench 6 overall performance test, the Asus laptop got a multi-core score of 13,611, which was higher than the average score for a premium gaming laptop (11,168). But it couldn’t compete with the Raider GE78 HX (Intel Core i9-13950H CPU) or the Origin EON16-S (Intel Core i9-13900H CPU), which got 15,916 and 14,068 points, respectively.

In our Handbrake test, which involves converting a 4K video to 1080p, the ACRNM was the slowest. The Asus gaming laptop finished the task in 4 minutes and 48 seconds, which is slower than the average premium gaming laptop (4:28). The MSI Raider GE78 HX (4:08) and the Origin EON16-S (3:46) are also faster than it.

Final Words

It’s a unique design, and some of you might even like it, but I don’t like the extra bulk and weight that doesn’t do much to improve the ergonomics. In fact, we like the regular Flow Z13 models better because they are simpler, and the keyboards on those models are much better than the weird and impractical one here.

On the other hand, this ACRNM model has all the same features as the standard Z13, but it has a few extra specs that some people might find useful. If you need 32 GB of RAM in this format, Asus only offers it on the ACRNM series. The 4070 dGPU is about 10-15% faster than the 4060 dGPU that comes with the regular models. Overall, though, I think the regular Flow Z13 models are better for most people, and only a few of you would benefit from the extras that this Z13 ACRNM model has. Or could explain why the price was higher.

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