It feels even thinner while you’re utilizing the system itself. When all you have got underneath your palms is that skinny keyboard cowl, and also you’re not seeing how thick the again of the system is, it is type of magical, particularly whereas gaming.
That brings me to a different enormous benefit of one of these design—the thermals. This factor by no means acquired 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 Movement Z13 does a terrific job of holding quiet and funky when it ought to, which may’t be mentioned for a lot of gaming laptops. That makes it a fair higher hybrid work/gaming system.
The superb 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 positioned proper throughout the highest of the pill, as distant from the keyboard and your palms as bodily attainable. That is one other large change over gaming laptops, which regularly spew sizzling air at your mouse hand.
A Powerful Promote?
{Photograph}: Luke Larsen
I don’t love the restricted configurations for the Movement Z13. Asus sells solely costly configurations with a minimum of 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 worth down. Not everybody wants that a lot reminiscence and storage. If the beginning worth had been nearer to $1,500, I may see it attracting a bigger viewers. That’s very true because the Movement Z13 isn’t essentially a performance-first machine.
I additionally want the audio system and webcam had 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 fair 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 once they do, they could make the comparability to the Movement Z13 much less favorable.
The worth-to-performance comparability with comparable gaming laptops doesn’t play out within the Movement Z13’s favor. It should 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 Movement Z13 continues to problem the standard concept of gaming laptops, and with the 2025 mannequin, it is surprisingly profitable.