Asus ROG Flow X16

HDR done right, at last 

- JEREMY LAIRD

REMEMBER THAT THING we were saying last month about Asus and world-beating laptop innovation? Well, Asus is at it again. Last time around it was the 14inch Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED with its OLED tech and dual screens. This month, get a load of the new Asus ROG Flow X16, a 16-inch gaming beast that’s also a two-in-one tablet, has a big old battery, an incredible mini-LED touchscreen, a monster AMD CPU, and support for Asus’s ROG XG Mobile external graphics.

It feels like a full-time job keeping up with Asus’s laptop output of late, let alone the rest of the industry. Anyway, let’s dig into this beauty in a little more detail. It’s running AMD’s hot new Ryzen 9 6900HS CPU, an eight-core and 35W variant of AMD’s latest mobile CPU. That’s paired with a 125W version of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti GPU, along with a MUX switch to ensure maximum graphics performance extraction.

Factor in the 32GB of DDR5 memory, not to mention a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, and you have a portable PC that’s seriously up there when it comes to raw specs. Sure, there are quicker CPUs and GPUs, though not by much. Of course, there are plenty of laptops that offer high-end chips but what most of them can’t compete with is the X16’s screen. It’s a 1440p panel with 2,560x1,440 pixels and runs at 165Hz, which is pretty much the perfect combo for pairing with the 3070 Ti graphics—4K would be overkill in visual terms and also wallop the frame rates.