Asus ROG Flow X16 Review: Flexible Big-Screen Gaming

8.1/ 10
SCORE

Asus ROG Flow X16

$1,750 at Best Buy

Pros

• Modular design allows for GPU upgrades
• Hybrid 360-degree hinge
• XG Mobile GPU can be used with multiple Asus products

Cons

• Expensive for the components you get
• XG Mobile GPU uses a proprietary connection
• Limited ports

Gaming laptops with 16-inch screens are common enough. What's unusual is finding one with a 360-degree hinge to become a foldable 2-in-1 hybrid. Add another level of ingenuity and you've got the ability to plug in a more-powerful external GPU for even better performance. 

That makes the Asus ROG Flow X16 a very unique gaming laptop, but also an expensive one. The base system we tested is $1,999, frankly way too much for a gaming laptop with an Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU. 

And the sold-separately Asus XG Mobile external GPU box, which adds a high-end Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics card, is $1,199, for a total of nearly $3,200. 

As of this writing, I've seen the X16 on sale for $1,750, which is at least a little more reasonable. Asus also makes a version of the X16 with an RTX 3070 Ti GPU, fast enough that you wouldn't need the external graphics add-on, and that model is $2,699. 

If you follow gaming laptop pricing, it's tough to imagine spending that much on a laptop with just 16GB of RAM and a single 1TB SSD. At the same time, there's a great value both to the flexibility of being able to turn the X16 into a gaming tablet and the ability to swap the better RTX 3080 graphics in and out as needed. 

If you skip the 360-degree hinge and the proprietary port for an external GPU box, similar 16-inch gaming laptops with the Nvidia RTX 3060, like the HP Victus or Dell G16, can be found for around $1,300. But while it's true you can spend less for similar components, there are a lot of unique features to the Flow X16 that really appeal to me. 

We previously reviewed (and liked) the 13-inch take on this concept, called the (you guessed it) Asus Flow X13, as well as a tablet-based version, called the Z13, which is kind of like a gaming Microsoft Surface. All of these work with the Asus XG Mobile external GPU. If you feel the need to have both a 16-inch desktop replacement and a 13-inch tablet or ultraportable laptop, it's nice that they can share the XG Mobile for better graphics performance. Still, it's an expensive, and proprietary, ecosystem to buy into. 

Ports and interfaces

Open the ribbed lid and the keyboard is flanked by dead space (with speaker grilles) on both sides. That's because it lacks a separate number pad, which many 16-inch, and even a good number of 15-inch, laptops have. The touchpad is larger than I've seen on many gaming laptops, where it's usually an afterthought. 

Asus also follows a growing number of gaming laptops in adding discrete buttons for volume control, instead of mapping those commands to Alt/Function keys. Above the Function row, you get three buttons -- volume up, volume down, mic mute and a shortcut button for the Asus Armoury Crate app, which offers access to various system tools.

Connectivity is on the light side, with no rear panel ports. On the left, there's HDMI, USB-C, audio and the XG Mobile connection (which has a second USB-C port within it if you don't have the external GPU plugged in). The right side has microSD and two USB-A ports. 

If you're allergic to lots of wires cluttering your space, keep in mind that the laptop has a standard power brick and cable, and the XG Mobile box requires its own power cable, so you'll need at least two outlets. 

Gaming performance 

In our benchmark tests, the Asus Flow X16 was a strong performer for a gaming laptop with an Nvidia 3060 card. Its AMD Ryzen 9 CPU matched well with the 11th-gen or 12th-gen Core i7 chips in similar gaming laptops. It was, as expected, much faster than a gaming laptop we tested with an AMD Ryzen 7 CPU.

Battery life was above average for a big-screen gaming laptop, somewhat surprisingly. It ran for about 7.5 hours. Obviously that's for video streaming, in an actual game, you'd be lucky to get a few hours. 

But the really interesting thing was when we plugged the XG Mobile in and re-ran some tests. In the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, using just the internal 3060 card, the game ran at 70 frames per second at Ultra detail settings. Switch to the XG Ultra, with its Nvidia 3080, and the same settings gave us 109fps, a huge leap. 

In 3D Mark Wild Life Extreme, a general test we use across a very wide range of devices, the X16 got a score of 15,224, near the bottom of our comparison pack. With the XG Mobile, it leapt to the top, scoring 22,753, edging out the powerful Acer Triton 500 SE, which uses an Intel Core i9 CPU and Nvidia 3080Ti GPU. 

A highly specific take on the gaming laptop

This is a non-standard take on a gaming laptop, so the usual calculations about price, performance and features may not fully apply. If you're looking for a basic mainstream gaming laptop with an Nvidia 3060 card, this ain't it. 

If you like the idea of a gaming hybrid that can fold into a kiosk mode and work with a gamepad, that's something almost no other gaming laptop can do. If you're especially interested in the XG Mobile as an add-on device that can work across different types of Asus computers, the X16 is a key part of that ecosystem and one of only a handful of ways to get that kind of modular performance. 

Watch this: Best Gaming Laptops of 2022: Gifts for Gamers at Any Budget

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