This is a big-screen gaming laptop with a 360-degree rotating display.
Ultimately, however, it does make a surprising amount of sense on a gaming unit.
Move it into tablet position and it’s well-suited for creative work or touchscreen games.
If you’re able to stomach its size, it could even work for reading.
The design is underpinned with solid internals.
Gaming capabilities and processing power come courtesy of theGeForce RTX 3070 Ticoupled with the AMDRyzen 9 6900HS.
The model we’ve reviewed is the ROG Flow X16 GV601RW-M5110X that costs$2,499.
That build quality is evident across the entire notebook.
It’s undoubtedly impressive, but the convertible design isn’t perfect.
Also factor in 1.2 pounds for the power brick.
The battery is easy to remove, too, and the wireless card is accessible.
In the Adobe RGB space the Asus produced 91.1% of the shades required at 114.2%.
That figure isn’t high enough to handle demanding, color-sensitive workloads - just like the Delta E result.
Your games and movies will sound great, too, thanks to the quartet of speakers.
They’re easily good enough for gaming and watching media.
It’s a waste of space, at least until the XG Mobile 2023 with its RTX 4090 arrives.
The Asus ROG Flow X16 has a webcam with Windows Hello support, but no fingerprint reader.
Internally, it’s got dual-band 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2, but no wired internet.
There’s an HDMI 2.1 output for 4K/120Hz and 8K/60Hz gaming, but no Thunderbolt 4.
Happily, the 2023 refresh does fix some of these.
The keyboard could be a bit better.
Negatively, though, the Flow only has single-zone RGB LED lighting and there’s no numberpad.
If you’d like a deeper dive into this GPU,head over here for our full review.
Elsewhere, there are no surprises.
Our only complaint is that the SSD isn’t larger.
The RTX 3070 Ti isn’t infallible though.
That’s indicative of the RTX 3070 Ti running out of headroom in really demanding games.
Similarly, you’ll have to think twice if you want to use this laptop for some external scenarios.
It’ll handle esports games on 1080p/360Hz displays, but may struggle at 480Hz.
Widescreens and 4K panels will struggle unless you drop quality options down, too.
That Turbo mode added a whopping 9 frames to the rig’s Horizon score.
Other performance modes impress.
In Silent mode, the X16 still ran through those games at 59 fps and 54 fps.
InCinebench R23the X16 returned single- and multi-threaded results of 1,575 and 13,830.
The only bright spark came from the Excel test.
Its revised 7Zip scores of 54.6MB/s and 730.5MB/s are better, but still not hugely impressive.
You’ll only need more power if you want a laptop for 4K video editing and other demanding tasks.
In processing tasks the X16 was always quiet, which bodes well for content creation on this laptop.
In multi-core tests it never rose beyond 4.4GHz.
The X16’s battery performance was a little better.
That’s great, but it’s business as usual in the gaming test.
The X16 has a 90Wh power pack which only lasted an hour while gaming.
The ROG Flow X16’s sturdy, good-looking exterior works well as a laptop and as a tented screen.
This Asus ROG laptop suffers a little when it comes to value.
You’ll even find RTX 3080 Ti laptops at less than $2,750.
The Asus also comes with an RTX 3060, but it’s still pretty pricey considering its internals.
The future also undermines the X16.
Razer is also deploying 15.6" and 16" laptops with updated internals.
