ASUS ROG Flow ASUS ROG Flow - AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 AMD Radeon Review

So you're looking at the ASUS ROG Flow, a 2-in-1 laptop that's trying to be a portable powerhouse. It's a 13.4-inch convertible with a 2560x1600 touchscreen, a 180Hz refresh rate, and a surprisingly light 1.2kg frame. People searching for a 'powerful 2-in-1 laptop for work and gaming' will find a lot to like here, especially with that massive 128GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. The price is firmly in the premium tier, hovering around $2800, which puts it up against some serious competition. Is it good for students or creatives on the go? The high portability score suggests yes, but we need to dig deeper.

Let's talk about what this thing can do. It's powered by an AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 processor, which is a 6-core chip. In raw CPU performance, it lands in the 27th percentile, which honestly means it's not the fastest processor you can get at this price. For everyday tasks and even some creative work, it's perfectly fine, but don't expect it to crush heavy video rendering. The discrete AMD Radeon 8060 GPU is a different story, sitting in the 79th percentile. That's solid for a machine this size. You can game on it, but the overall 'gaming' score is its weakest area at 45.7/100, so expect to dial down settings on newer AAA titles. The real star is that 128GB of quad-channel LPDDR5X RAM. It's overkill for almost anyone, but it ensures multitasking is absolutely seamless.

At around $2800, the ROG Flow asks a lot of you. You're paying a premium for extreme portability, a fantastic screen, and that insane amount of RAM in a 2-in-1 form factor. If your workflow genuinely needs 128GB of RAM for virtual machines or massive data sets, and you must have a convertible, it's a niche option. For most people, though, that money could get you a more powerful traditional laptop or a more balanced ultrabook.

This is where it gets interesting. Compared to the Apple MacBook Pro 14" with an M4 Max, you lose out on massive CPU and battery life performance, but you gain a touchscreen, 2-in-1 flexibility, and more ports. Against a dedicated gaming laptop like the MSI Vector 16 HX or Gigabyte AORUS MASTER 16, the ROG Flow's GPU can't keep up, but it's half the weight. The Lenovo Legion Pro 7i will run circles around it in pure gaming and CPU tasks. Even the ASUS Zenbook Duo offers a unique dual-screen setup for multi-taskers. The ROG Flow's real competition is itself. It's a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none, excelling only in portability and RAM capacity.

Should you buy the ASUS ROG Flow? It's a tough sell. If you are a digital nomad, a student, or a creative professional who needs insane amounts of RAM for specific tasks and values the 2-in-1 format above all else, it could be your machine. The portability is fantastic. But for nearly everyone else, the answer is probably no. The CPU is underpowered for the price, and you can get better gaming or creative performance from other laptops in this range. It's a cool, niche device that doesn't quite justify its cost for most use cases.