It feels even thinner while you’re utilizing the gadget itself. When all you may have underneath your palms is that skinny keyboard cowl, and also you’re not seeing how thick the again of the gadget is, it is form of magical, particularly whereas gaming.
That brings me to a different large benefit of this sort of design—the thermals. This factor by no means received above 70 levels Celsius internally, even underneath stress testing in Efficiency mode. And it stayed pretty quiet. It’s particularly noticeable while you aren’t gaming. The Stream Z13 does a fantastic job of conserving quiet and funky when it ought to, which may’t be mentioned for a lot of gaming laptops. That makes it a good higher hybrid work/gaming gadget.
The wonderful thermals have the vertical orientation to thank, sucking in tons of air by the consumption vents on the again of the pill, unobstructed by a desk like the underside of laptops. The exhaust vents, in the meantime, are situated proper throughout the highest of the pill, as distant from the keyboard and your palms as bodily potential. That is one other large change over gaming laptops, which regularly spew scorching air at your mouse hand.
A Robust Promote?
{Photograph}: Luke Larsen
I don’t love the restricted configurations for the Stream Z13. Asus sells solely costly configurations with at the very least 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage, beginning at over $2,000. It’s a disgrace there is not a lower-tier choice to get that beginning value down. Not everybody wants that a lot reminiscence and storage. If the beginning value have been nearer to $1,500, I may see it attracting a bigger viewers. That’s very true because the Stream Z13 isn’t essentially a performance-first machine.
I additionally want the audio system and webcam have been a bit extra spectacular. They get the job achieved and are higher than what you discover on many gaming laptops, but when they may match the Floor Professional, they’d have a good stronger higher hand over even essentially the most premium gaming laptops. And I would be remiss with out mentioning the newly launched Nvidia RTX 50-series Laptop computer GPUs. It’ll be a bit earlier than the lower-tier RTX 5050 and 5060 laptops arrive, however after they do, they could make the comparability to the Stream Z13 much less favorable.
The value-to-performance comparability with comparable gaming laptops doesn’t play out within the Stream Z13’s favor. It’ll by no means maintain a candle to its friends on that spec alone. However that’s by no means been the purpose. As a substitute, the Stream Z13 continues to problem the standard concept of gaming laptops, and with the 2025 mannequin, it is surprisingly profitable.
