Gaming Laptop & Tablet! ASUS Flow X16 Review
The Flow X16 from ASUS is special in at least two major ways. The first is you can completely flip the screen around and use it as a tablet, despite this being a fully fledged gaming laptop with RTX 3070 Ti graphics. And if that’s not enough, the second thing is the XG Mobile port, allowing you to upgrade the graphics. But these cool features do come at a cost, so let’s find out if the X16 is worth it in this review! The ability to fold the screen around allows you to use it in more than just the
traditional laptop mode, there’s way more flexibility. If you’re gaming with a controller or connecting a keyboard and mouse, stand or tent modes would improve thermals as the air intakes are no longer right against the table. The 360 degree hinge feels nice and smooth, though I did notice that it’s not quite as sturdy as other laptops. Maybe because it needs to flip right around. If I pick up the laptop a bit too quickly, the screen goes back with the force, though it didn’t move much when typing, so it’s not that loose. The X16 comes with a
stylus too, so you can create your next work of art with the touch screen. The lid has an aluminum grooved finish, and the magnesium aluminum interior is similar, but the grooves
The laptop alone weighs 2.2kg or 4.8lb, increasing to 2.9kg or 6.5lb with the 240 watt charger included. My configuration has AMD’s Ryzen 9 6900HS processor, Nvidia’s RTX 3070 Ti graphics, 32 gigs of DDR5 memory, and a 16” 2560 by 1600 165Hz MiniLED touch screen, but there are other configurations you can check using the links below the video. There’s a 720p camera above the screen in the middle, and it has IR for Windows Hello face unlock. This is how the camera and microphones look and sound, and this is what it sounds like while typing on the
keyboard. My keyboard has a single zone of RGB backlighting, and all keys and secondary functions get lit up. Key brightness can be adjusted between 3 levels of turned off by holding function and pressing the F2 or F3 keys, and F4 or the Aura key can be used to cycle between 5 lighting effects. You can get a bit more customization of the different lighting effects in the Aura Sync section of the Armory Crate software, which is the control panel for the laptop. The chiclet keyboard has 1.7mm of key travel and typing felt fine, no problems using
it, but there’s something about the hard plastic keys that made it feel like a cheaper laptop. There are also some extra keys above on the left for adjusting volume, muting the mic, or opening Armory Crate to manage the laptop. The big touchpad was nice and smooth, clicks down anywhere and works well. The left side has the power input towards the back, HDMI 2.0b output, USB 3.2 Gen 2 and Gen 1 Type-C ports, one of which is part of the XG Mobile connector, followed by a 3.5mm audio combo jack, The right has the power button towards
the front, a MicroSD card slot and two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports. The XG Mobile port offers direct PCIe connectivity to ASUS’s external graphics solution, and comes with a rubber cover. Unfortunately I don’t currently have an XG Mobile for this review of the X16, but I have compared both the Nvidia RTX 3080 against the Radeon RX 6850M XT in this video, and that was done with the smaller Flow Z13. Both Type-C ports here can be used to charge the laptop, and although both do offer DisplayPort support, if you connect an external screen to the
one closest to the back, it goes via the integrated Radeon graphics, while the one closest to the front connects directly to the Nvidia discrete graphics. So that’ll probably be the one you want to use if you’re using VR or something, or if you otherwise just want to bypass optimus to get better FPS in games. HDMI also connects directly to the Nvidia graphics, but ASUS aren’t using HDMI 2.1, so an external screen maxes out at 4K 60Hz 8-Bit with G-Sync. Getting inside requires unscrewing 13 Phillips head screws, and the 4 down the front are shorter than
the rest. It was easy enough to open using my usual pry tools, I’ll leave a link to them below the video. Once inside we’ve got the battery down the front, two memory slots just above, the installed SSD on the left, a second M.2 storage slot on the right, and an unusual third fan near the middle, more on that soon. In typical ASUS fashion, the Wi-Fi 6E card is hiding underneath the installed SSD. Wi-Fi speed was surprisingly good from a MediaTek card, one of the best results I’ve ever measured. MediaTek options are normally down the bottom,
and the same MT7922 is also used by other ASUS machines, but they’ve never done quite this well before. I was just able to squeeze in an M.2 SSD with chips on both sides into the second slot. It pushes down against this cable which sits below it, but it seems fine, and it fit without issue in the primary slot even with the Wi-Fi card underneath. The installed 1TB SSD was performing very nicely thanks to PCIe gen 4, something that AMD has finally added with Ryzen 6000. While we’re on the topic of storage, the MicroSD card slot
was performing very nicely too. The card clicks in and sits the whole way into the machine, so having some finger nails will make this easier. It’s also noteworthy that we’re getting two memory slots in the X16, because ASUS have other thin gaming laptops in their Zephyrus lineup like the G15 and M16 which only have one memory slot. So now that they’ve proven they can do this in a smaller machine, I’m hoping to see this more in next year’s models. The upgradeability score was quite good for a thinner design like this. Remember, this is kind of
a tablet design, so you’d expect less space, but we’re still getting removable Wi-Fi, two RAM slots and two M.2 storage slots. You know now that I’m thinking about it, should I rank it higher? I’m not factoring in the ability to connect the XG Mobile eGPU. I mean I don’t do that for Thunderbolt laptops, so if I do it for the XG Mobile I probably need to count Thunderbolt too.. Let me know what you think. There are speakers underneath towards the front left and right corners, as well as front facing speakers on either side of the
keyboard. I thought they sounded pretty good for a gaming laptop, above average with some bass, but tinnier at higher volume once you go beyond 60% or so. The latencymon results weren’t looking amazing. Speaking of sounds, it plays this one by default on boot. Fortunately you’ve got the option to disable it either through the BIOS or Armory Crate software. The Flow X16 is powered by a 4-Cell 90Wh battery. Like other laptops from ASUS, panel power saver is enabled by default, which automatically lowers the screen’s refresh rate down from 165Hz to 60Hz to help improve battery life.
We can also enable Eco mode which disables the Nvidia graphics to give us a further boost. I’ve tested gaming in our usual Witcher 3 test at 1080p medium settings with a 30 FPS frame cap, and the Radeon integrated graphics was lasting about 13 minutes longer compared to Nvidia, so you can get a bit more run time by gaming on the iGPU. It almost lasted for 8 hours in the YouTube video playback test, a great result and in line with many other Ryzen based laptops, which typically, but not always, tend to do better when compared to
Intel options. I ran this test with Eco mode enabled too for best results. Let’s check out thermals next. There are lots of heatpipes shared between the CPU and GPU, and Thermal Grizzly liquid metal is used on the CPU. There are three fans inside which exhaust air out of the right hand side, but not the left, and out the back. The third fan brings air in from underneath the laptop and pushes it out through the back. It’s kind of hard to see here, but the whole back is a heatsink with fins for air from the third
fan to pass over. We can see there are vents directly above all three intake fans, and all three also have a fine mesh dust filter. The ASUS Armory Crate software lets us change between different performance modes, which from lowest to highest are silent, performance, turbo and manual, but you can’t use turbo mode when running on battery, manual is fine though. Both turbo and manual modes apply the same overclock to the GPU, but only manual mode lets you customize it. Manual mode also gives you some control over CPU power limits, and you can adjust the dynamic
boost power range for the GPU, as well as modify the maximum thermal throttle limit if you’re paranoid about heat, just expect lower performance. You can also adjust the fan curve for all three fans individually in manual mode too, but any time we’ve tested in manual mode we’ve had all fans maxed out. The internal temperatures were fine when just sitting there idle. The rest of the results are from combined CPU and GPU stress tests which aim to represent a worst case full load scenario. The temperatures were on the cooler side, regardless of the performance mode in
use. Turbo mode was close to 80 degrees Celsius which is honestly ice cold when it comes to gaming laptops. Setting the fans to max speed was able to lower this by quite a bit, but if we instead use a cooling pad and keep the fans quieter we’re able to get a massive improvement. The cooling pad I test with can be found linked under this video. These are the clock speeds being reached during the same stress tests. The CPU was running exactly the same regardless of whether we’re using silent, performance, turbo or manual modes, however the
GPU speed was improving with higher modes. This is because the 6900HS was only using a bit over 20 watts, at least in this specific stress test. It seems like GPU power is preferenced, which is probably preferable considering the 2560 by 1600 screen. More pixels need more GPU power to run after all, but considering how cool things are running, I think they probably could have run the CPU higher without any problems. I’d prefer warmer internals and more performance, but maybe that’s just me. Here’s how an actual game performs with the different modes in use. Silent mode
enables Nvidia’s Whisper mode and caps the FPS in games to 60, but you can of course modify or change this through GeForce experience. Anyway manual mode was performing about the same as turbo, just 1 FPS ahead. Although the CPU was running quite low with the GPU active, it’s able to run much higher when the GPU was idle, like in Cinebench. Turbo mode initially ran the CPU at 90 watts, but quickly hit thermal throttling at 95 degrees Celsius and sat closer to 85 watts. Manual mode with the fans maxed removed the thermal throttling in this workload,
though it must have been a small throttle because the multicore scores are basically the same. For some reason the power limits in silent and performance mode varied quite a bit, even with the CPU running as cool as 70 degrees Celsius it randomly dipped and boosted back up, hence the big power limit ranges listed. It’s actually a great result from a Ryzen 6000 laptop, only beaten slightly by the 6900HX in ASUS’s Duo 16. Pretty much any 12th gen Intel i7-12700H or higher destroys it though, as they offer both more cores and threads, but also better performance
from a single core. Performance lowers if we unplug the charger and instead run purely off of battery power, but not quite as much compared to a lot of other laptops. Now the top of the graph has more AMD than Intel laptops, so things flip around a bit, as Ryzen generally seems to offer better performance when running on battery. Though as we can see, that’s certainly not always the case. Most laptops I test are in the low 30 degrees Celsius range on the keyboard at idle, and the X16 was a little warmer than this. It gets
warmer in the middle with the stress tests running, but closer to WASD where air gets pulled through the keyboard was fine. The higher performance mode was a bit warmer in the middle now despite the fans being louder. Turbo mode was warmer still, so maybe this is why ASUS aren’t turning up the CPU power limits. The middle was kind of uncomfortable at this point. It gets cooler with the fans maxed out in manual mode, but it’s also louder now too, let’s have a listen. I couldn’t hear the fans at all when sitting there idle. Turbo mode
was a bit quieter compared to most other laptops out there when under full load, though manual mode with the fans maxed out was above average and sounded higher pitch. My partner really hated how it sounded maxed out, so you’ll probably want to be wearing headphones for that, or use a cooling pad to instead stick with turbo mode while also lowering temps even more. Just before we get into the game testing, let’s check out the screen, given that’s what you’re going to be looking at when playing games, and this MiniLED panel is kind of different compared
to most others. The X16 has a MUX switch, and you can turn optimus off through the Armory Crate software by changing the GPU mode to ultimate. This requires a reboot as there’s no advanced optimus, and there’s no G-Sync with optimus off either. If you have Optimus on then you get FreeSync from the Radeon integrated graphics. Color gamut was quite good, but the most obvious thing to me was the much higher than normal contrast ratio. The darker parts just looked darker rather than washed out and I definitely noticed it. Sure it’s not quite as good compared
to OLED, but this is a benefit of MiniLED, though there is also an IPS option. Brightness was quite high, again with the mini led option, reaching 870 nits with HDR enabled as per the red line, or around 700 without HDR and viewing regular SDR content, as per the blue line. The glossy touch screen uses Gorilla Glass 3, so expect to see reflections easier, though increasing brightness helps reduce this. Average gray-to-gray screen response time wasn’t great, which seems to be the case with other MiniLED panels that I’ve tested too. ASUS advertise it with a 3ms response
time, and I mean technically we are seeing that on some of the fall times, but rise times were way higher. This combination of low and high results gives us an unimpressive average result, within margin of error distance to ASUS’s Zephyrus Duo 16 just above it which actually has the exact same panel. There are a number of other 2560 by 1600 165Hz panels that are doing better here. They’re just not mini led. The total system latency is the amount of time between a mouse click and when a gunshot fire appears on the screen in CS:GO. Despite
the slower screen response time, the X16 was doing fairly well compared to others here, more than 3ms faster compared to the Duo 16 with the same panel. The Armory Crate software lets us change the backlight between the default multi-zone to one-zone. There’s no backlight with a pure black screen, but as soon as anything is actually on the screen that’s not black, like the mouse cursor, it lights up, though there wasn’t bleed on either mode. It’s brighter in one zone mode as all backlight zones instead operate as one rather than only lighting up where needed. Alright
now let’s find out how well the Flow X16 performs in games and see how well it compares against other laptops. Although it’s got a 2560 by 1600 16:10 screen resolution, all testing here has been done at either 1080p or 1440p as these are just the resolutions we have data for for the purposes of comparing. Cyberpunk 2077 was tested the same on all laptops, and I’ve got the Flow X16 shown by the red highlight. I know it doesn’t have a 1080p screen, but after seeing the lower CPU power limit in the thermal testing I was curious
how it would do at a lower resolution, but it’s right in line with other 3070 Ti laptops. This continues at the higher 1440p resolution. The average FPS is basically in line with Razer’s Blade 15 with higher tier RTX 3080 Ti, another thinner design, granted that Intel based model has a better 1% low, so less dips in performance. Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested with the game’s benchmark, and the Flow was quite close to ASUS’s Zephyrus G15, the only other laptop I’ve had so far with the same CPU and GPU combination. The G15 does have a
slightly lower GPU power limit though. The X16 and G15 are very close at 1440p too, but now the even smaller Zephyrus G14 was able to do better, as this game seems to prefer AMD’s Radeon graphics. Control on the other hand prefers Nvidia graphics, so the G14 drops down quite a bit comparatively now. Again the X16 was near the G15, though slightly behind this time, but it’s close. At 1440p the other 3070 Ti laptops with higher GPU power limits were 5 FPS or more ahead, so technically in the lead, but consider this is a thinner device
compared to all of those. And how many of you are going to notice 5 fps when playing? Here are the 3DMark results for those that find them useful, now for some content creator tests. Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark tool, and Intel laptops with 3070 Ti graphics are clearly doing better compared to our AMD ones, as both the X16 and G15 were a fair bit behind. It wasn’t quite as bad in Adobe Photoshop, which surprised me because this test likes single core performance, and as we saw in Cinebench earlier, those 12th gen
Intel laptops do much better in that regard. GPU power usually matters more in DaVinci Resolve, and the X16 is near other 3070 Ti options, though generally behind Intel based options even if they have lower GPU power limits, such as MSI’s GS66 or ASUS’s Zephyrus M16. The Blender score was behind the higher powered 3070 Ti options, but close to the G15 and M16 which have similar GPU power limits. Only 12% ahead of the best 3060 result though. We’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads. The BIOS looks nice, but there’s not a whole
lot of customization available through here, at least compared to what MSI are offering through their advanced BIOS. Linux support was tested with an Ubuntu 22.04 live CD. By default the touch screen, keyboard, touchpad, speakers, and camera worked. Wi-Fi was able to detect networks, but never prompted me to enter a password, so I couldn’t connect. Keyboard shortcuts for key brightness still worked, but volume adjustment didn’t work, and neither did screen brightness, though that one might be because I had to boot with safe graphics mode to make it work. Let’s discuss pricing and availability next. This will
change over time, so refer to the link below the video for for updates and sales. And speaking of sales, make sure you check out my new website gaminglaptop.deals, we update it daily with the latest deals to save you money on your next gaming laptop! At the time of recording, in the US the Flow X16 goes for $2000 USD for the RTX 3060 configuration, so around double compared to a cheaper 3060 laptop. I had to go to Newegg to find the 3070 Ti version that I’ve tested, which was over $1000 more. If you’re planning on buying
the XG Mobile it’s probably not worth spending the extra money to upgrade the GPU inside the laptop, of course assuming you can find one, because the XG Mobile still seems harder to find than the laptop. Clearly you’ve got to pay a premium if you’re after this unique design. Apart from ASUS’s smaller 13 inch X13, the fact is, no other companies are offering this sort of form factor with this level of performance. So if this is the type of thing you need, there’s not really any other options. If you don’t actually need the tablet functionality or
eGPU upgrade options, you can definitely save the money and get literally any other gaming laptop. Not only does the X16 give you the option of using it as a high powered tablet, but you can also attach up to RTX 3080 or RX 6850M XT graphics, and in theory, next gen graphics too like Nvidia RTX 40 series or AMD’s RDNA 3. Of course assuming that ASUS keep on making the XG Mobile. They have been making them for about 2 years now, and the XG Mobile port is still appearing on new laptops. So hopefully it doesn’t stop,
but at the same time it’s kind of hard for me to suggest anyone goes out and buys something like this based on a future promise. Because we just don’t know what’s going to happen. If you do plan on using this laptop with the XG Mobile, then check out this video next. There are some very important differences between the Nvidia and AMD XG Mobiles that you need to know about! So definitely check that next before you exchange your whole wallet!
