Asus ZenBook Flip 13
Asus is showing its mastery of laptop design in another flexible convertible with premium perks.
The Asus ZenBook Flip 13’s 1080p screen is a 13.3-inch OLED panel with Full DCI-P3 colour compatibility, which is a pretty standout bonus in an otherwise tight race… especially when it’ll cost you nothing extra.
The standard online price for the ZenBook Flip 13 with a Core i7, 16GB of RAM and 512GB PCIe SSD is $2,299, but we’ve seen it on sale for as little as $2,077 – which is on par with the best price for an i7 Evo we’ve seen. It also comes in an i5, 8GB, 512GB variation (still with the OLED panel) for $1,699 full-price or $1,598 on sale.
The keyboard is a little elongated, but this doesn’t seem to affect the overall typing experience too much. The backlit trackpad, which is now super easy to turn on and off, means the responsive trackpad doubles as an awesomely convenient number pad.
We’re guessing Asus did some component binning, as this more affordable laptop takes a little bit of a hit in general performance benchmarks, but it’s less than 10 percent generally. The gaming performance was a little more disappointing, with unplayable average frame rates in both The Division 2 and Metro: Exodus. The ZenBook Flip 13 did achieve parity in synthetic GPU testing however, so we suspect these GPU performance issues can be solved by tweaking some power settings and updates to software.
Storage was also the slowest of the pack, but it’s still a 2,000MB/s PCIe storage device, so it won’t feel sluggish by any means. Battery life was also solid, getting more than 10 hours in both PCMark 10 and 1080p movie playback benchmarks.
Our overall pick for this years best value Evo Ultrabook with a standout OLED screen.