Asus ProArt PX13 review

When there is a laptop with an RTX card NO gaming laptop? When it is ajar! No, wait, when this is a artistic machine aimed at professionals, not gamers who want CAD, not COD, and for whom shutter angle is the main factor affecting frame rate.

And that’s what we have here. You could say it’s a artistic laptop because it has Nvidia Studio drivers installed, not Game Ready drivers. And because there is a stylus in the box. The ProArt PX13 it’s also a 2-in-1 model with a touchscreen and a hinge that allows it to fold back into a tent or even into something resembling a tablet. Thick tablet.

As a result, you have to grip it firmly, holding it like something from Star Trek, which led to a design that avoids both the slim wedge shape beloved of ultrabooks and the odd angles and unexpected vents of a real gaming machine. Even the power button is located on the side of the device, which can make it tough to find when you first turn it on. For a 13-inch laptop it is compact, you could even say it is compact. Cute. Cute. Which is odd for a black rectangle of metal and plastic, but the last laptop I tested was the monstrous Acer Predator Helios 18 and the contrast is stark.

The 13-inch laptop is a very portable laptop that’s effortless to throw into a bag or slip into a suitcase, and while the PX13 is thicker than the thinnest portables on the market, the truly compact ones don’t come with an RTX 4070 on board.

What’s also notable about this machine is that it comes with one of AMD’s newest chips, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. According to the marketing geek, it’s “for premium AI computers” and it mainly comes down to the presence of the XDNA NPU, a piece of the parallel processing architecture , which can handle less electrifying tasks that Windows can offload to the neural network, such as blurring backgrounds in video calls and recognizing objects in images.

Adds 50 TOPS of AI to the CPU for a total of 80 TOPS. This far exceeds the threshold of the Copilot+ computer. This particular moniker was reserved for ARM-based laptops at launch, but since the release of AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series and Intel’s Lunar Lake chips, the definition has expanded. If you can’t get enough of chatbots, there is also a Copilot button on the keyboard.

The processor in question is the Zen 5 model codenamed Strix Point and offers 12 cores. Four of them are full-fat Zen 5s, and eight are Zen 5c units with a larger confined cache. It has a default TDP of 28W, a boost speed of 5.1GHz, and comes with an integrated Radeon 890M (RDNA 3.5) graphics card, which it uses to save power when the Nvidia chip is not needed.

It’s demanding to say exactly what the NPU is doing since there are also two GPUs on board, but the generative AI in applications like Photoshop certainly worked smoothly, although apart from denoising in Lightroom on 60MP images, they’re not unacceptably snail-paced using the integrated graphics. Adobe offers a choice of local or cloud computing for its Firefly features, but while GPU acceleration is available in the app’s preferences menu, there’s no mention of NPU support.

Turn this large guy on and you get very good gaming performance, although the odd screen resolution (2880 x 1800, 16:10) meant you couldn’t run anything at 1440p. 1080p resolution is available in games, but the best option is of course the native resolution, and during testing the PX13 offered 60 fps in Horizon Zero Dawn Complete Edition and only 15 fps in Cyberpunk 2077’s Ultra ray tracing mode. The Razer Blade 14, which also it has an AMD/RTX 4070 processor combo, it was faster in most games. The PX13 also has an oddly snail-paced SSD compared to its gaming-focused brethren, delivering average throughput nearly 120 MB/s lower in the Blade 14 tests and over 200 MB/s lower than some larger laptops.

However, not everything is so bad, there are actually a lot of very good things here. Having a 2-in-1 device is very convenient if you can overcome the greater thickness compared to a tablet, and Windows 11 is still not 100% satisfied with the touchscreen interface. Connect a Bluetooth controller and you can play without the keyboard getting in the way, but if you want to play WASD old-school style, the key travel and feel are very good, which is a testament to the increased case depth on offer.

The trackpad can have some issues – it can’t decide whether it wants to be tapped or clicked, and I found myself accidentally rearranging icons on the taskbar when I was simply trying to launch apps. It also comes with an intriguing little knob that won’t be of much operate to gamers other than as a volume control, as it’s really for controlling brush sizes in Lightroom and timeline scrolling in video editing apps, and it’s a joy to operate, you just shoot finger to make something happen.

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The OLED screen is as glowing and contrasty as you’d expect. However, it maxes out at 60Hz, which is a question mark in these days of 360Hz laptops. However, its touch interface is speedy and exact, and having the stylus in the box instead of being an optional extra is great. It also has a really nice charging connector – a reversible rectangle that’s not too dissimilar to the MiniDisplayPort plug, but is smaller than the one Lenovo uses. This leaves Thunderbolt 4 ports free for video and high-speed data transfer applications, and there’s also a full-size HDMI 2.1 port for the ultra-wide-angle OLED display.

Overall, the ProArt PX13 is a good laptop if you’re monetizing your digital creations and then want to play some games. However, it doesn’t make sense as a dedicated gaming machine and it’s unfair to expect it. Until in-game NPCs start using ChatGPT to generate dialogue (there is a Skyrim mod that did this, but at the time of writing it was “hidden” in Nexusmods), the NPU also seems redundant. So while Asus has created a really intriguing machine by combining the latest technology and vintage standby of a great GPU with a trumpet and plenty of RAM, it will be a while before it makes a large impact on gaming.