The ASUS ROG Flow Z13 tablet is so powerful it beats beastly gaming laptops

(Image credit: Asus)

published 6 January 2022

CES 2022 feels a bit like Christmas for gamers: we've seen some of the best gaming laptops given even more power, and there are some brand new toys to get excited about too. Toys like the ASUS ROG Flow Z13, a tablet designed specifically for gamers.

Windows-powered gaming tablets aren't exactly common, so we suspect ASUS is right when it says this is the world's most powerful gaming tablet. It has a 12th-gen Core i9 and an RTX 3050 Ti GPU, up to 16GB of DDR5-5200 RAM and up to 1TB of PCIe 4.0 storage. The RTX runs hot but ASUS says that the tablet form factor is actually better for cooling than traditional laptops, enabling the cooling system to blow air more efficiently. There's Thunderbolt 4, which includes DisplayPort 1.4 and USB-PD, and a second USB 3.2 Gen 2 port. The price? We don't know that yet.

New gaming GPUs, CPUs and screens

Among the usual performance improvements, ASUS's best gaming laptops in 2022 will also get even more spectacular displays. ROG's new Nebula display in the ROG Zephyrus G14 offers 120Hz refresh rate, 500 nits of peak brightlness, 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 colour gamut and a 3ms response time; it also has Dolby Vision, Adaptive Sync and Pantone validation.

The ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 is available with a Nebula display too, but this time it's Nebula HDR with 512 mini-LED dimming zones and 1,100 nits of peak brightness. The 16:10 panel has a 165Hz refresh rate.

That's not the only option, though. You can also specify a Dual Spec panel, which can switch between 120Hz 4K and 240Hz Full HD, enabling you to prioritise resolution or frame rate on a game by game or app by app basis.

Given that the previous ROG Zephyrus G14 tops our guide to the best gaming laptops, the spec bumps and new displays have got us very excited about ASUS's 2022 gaming laptops. The ROG Zephyrus has an RRP of £1,699.99, as does the Duo G15, and the Zephyrus M16 starts at £1,899.99. Expect to see them on sale from February for the M16 and March/April for the G series.

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Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).