Meet The ASUS ROG Flow X13, With An External GPU Bonus
16 Threads And 35W; How Does The Ryzen 9 5980HS Cope?
The Ryzen 9 5980HS inside the ASUS ROG Flow X13 laptop is a lot of power in a tiny space which leads to the question of how well ASUS managed to handle the heat. The laptop also includes a GTX 1650 Max-Q for graphics and even with the same 35W rating the laptop is a mere 15.8mm thick so there is not a lot of room to dissipate heat. Kitguru propped this convertible laptop up on their test bench to see what you can expect.
It will come as some comfort to find that there were no signs of thermal throttling during the testing, at least once they found a way to mitigate the odd throttling behaviour that the firmware in some AMD powered ASUS laptops applies. In this case the resolution offered by ASUS did not work, however both the ‘Manual’ Armoury Crate mode and changing the orientation of the laptop did. The issues that Kitguru discovered were more omissions than issues, the lack of a proper Thunderbolt port was felt, as well as a wish for a better NVMe drive and at least one more USB Type-A port. The fact that the laptop does not support PCIe 4.0 was also felt.
One thing the ROG Flow X13 does have is a proprietary external PCIe Gen 3 x8 connection which can be used to attach the optional ASUS’ ROG XG Mobile eGPU enclosure. Kitguru installed an RTX 3080 (lucky them!) in that enclosure to see how well the R9 5890HS can keep up with a high end GPU. The gaming tests show performance both on the internal monitor as well as to an external one, not to mention the score from the 8 Vega GPU cores working on their own.
The AMD Ryzen 9 5980HS is an eight-core, sixteen-thread Zen 3 processor squeezed into a 35W TDP package. We examine the performance of AMD’s newest HS series flagship processor inside the sleek ASUS ROG Flow X13 laptop.
