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日本ASUS ROG Flow X16 (GV601, 2023) review – the most powerful convertible on the market
Verdict
As it turns out, convertibles can make for very good gaming laptops. Who would have thought? Well, obviously ASUS, because they made this gorgeous, aggressive, yet elegant piece of hardware.
Its processor and graphics card work as intended, providing a ton of performance. Currently, there is no title on the planet that won’t work at max settings and native resolution on this laptop’s maxed-out configuration. What comes as a negative bonus here is the price – but sometimes beautiful things cost a fortune.
ASUS ROG Flow X16 (GV601, 2023)’s touchscreen IPS panel has a Mini LED backlight, a WQXGA resolution, high maximum brightness, and comfortable viewing angles. It also features a good contrast ratio and full DCI-P3 coverage. Thankfully, the Armoury Crate app allows you to emulate the sRGB color gamut too and provides accurate colors in both the sRGb and the DCI-P3 mode.
In addition to that, the 240Hz refresh rate is extremely useful for gaming, making the image really smooth and sharp even in dynamic scenes. On the downside, the backlight uses PWM with a low filling coefficient, which might appear uncomfortable for the more sensitive users.
Like many high-tier ASUS laptops, this one has a hybrid refresh rate mode, which is extremely helpful when it comes to battery life. Because of the beast hardware, however, there is a huge 90Wh unit inside. It lasts for about 8 hours and 30 minutes of Web browsing, or 8 hours of video playback.
Surely, you won’t be using this laptop only for media consumption, so expect the battery life to be considerably shorter should you hit it with some meaningful workload.
By the way, this is a perfect machine for photographers. You even get a MicroSD card slot, besides the two USB Type-A 3.2 (Gen. 2) ports, the Thunderbolt 4 port, the HDMI 2.1 FRL connector, and the XG Mobile interface. To be frank, we doubt that many people are going to need the XG Mobile because the dGPU inside this device is spectacular.
Well, maybe if you go for the RTX 4050, you would need the increased power of the ROG XG Mobile. By the way, one of the reasons why this machine is so good for gaming is the fact that it has a MUX Switch. It allows its dGPU to have access to the full bandwidth because it can be connected directly to the internal display, instead of having to use the iGPU for imaging, which acts as a bottleneck.
This is more often seen in single-channel RAM modifications. Thankfully, there are two SODIMM slots, which work with DDR5 RAM and support 64GB in dual-channel mode. You even get two M.2 PCIe x4 slots for Gen 4 SSDs.
So currently, there are no obvious competitors to this notebook. Unfortunately, this means that ASUS can do whatever it wants with the pricing of this product. However, if you can afford to get one, the ROG Flow X16 (GV601, 2023) will not disappoint you.
You can check the prices and configurations in our Specs System: https://laptopmedia.com/series/asus-rog-flow-x16-gv601-2023/
Pros
- The most powerful convertible on the market
- Very good cooling with liquid metal applied to the CPU
- 16:10 aspect ratio is great for work and the 1600p panel has a 240Hz refresh rate (BOE NE160QDM-NM4 (BOE0B74))
- Covers 100% of DCI-P3 (BOE NE160QDM-NM4 (BOE0B74))
- The Armoury Crate can emulate the full sRGB color gamut with accurate colors (BOE NE160QDM-NM4 (BOE0B74))
- 2x SODIMM + 2x M.2 PCIe x4 Gen 4
- Great build quality
- Dedicated stylus inside the package
- Thunderbolt 4 + MicroSD card slot
- Supports an RTX 4090 (150W) via ROG XG Mobile
Cons
- A bit expensive
- Uses PWM
