ASUS makes 1.3kg 13″ gaming laptop and optional 1kg RTX 3080 compact GPUeg

ASUS releases a thin 13.4″ gaming laptop containing a GTX 1650. ASUS has also made an accompanying external RTX 3080 video card, in a compact housing and with a proprietary connection that offers eight PCIe lanes. The combination costs 3299 euros. .

ASUS ROG Flow X13 is a convertible with a 13.4″ display mounted on a 360-degree hinge. The display has a 16:10 ratio and a resolution of 1920×1200 pixels, at a refresh rate of 120Hz. The device is 15.8mm thick and weighs 1.3kg. In that small housing ASUS puts an AMD Ryzen 9 5800HS processor with a TDP of 35W. There is also a GeForce GTX 1650 video card in the laptop itself. There is 16GB of Lpddr4x memory soldered to the motherboard and for storage there is a 512GB NVMe SSD.

ASUS is going to sell this configuration of the ROG Flow X13 for 1599 euros, but for those looking for more mobile graphics power, there will also be an optional external mobile RTX 3080 graphics card: the ROG XG Mobile eGPU. This is a completely custom design from ASUS, in an external box that weighs 1kg and has dimensions of 155x208x29mm. This makes the external GPU much smaller than regular EGPU housings, which fit a desktop video card.

For the XG Mobile eGPU, ASUS uses a proprietary connector; so the external RTX 3080 can only be connected to the ASUS Flow X13. ASUS chooses to get access to eight PCIe 3.0 lanes, for a bandwidth of 63GB/s. That’s higher than what Thunderbolt 4 can offer. The connector also includes a USB 3.2 Gen2 interface and both are combined in a wide plug with a lock. The mobile RTX 3080 in the external housing consumes up to 150W and is clocked at 1810MHz according to ASUS.

A power supply for the video card is also integrated in the compact housing of the external GPU. The ROG Flow X13 laptop weighs 1.3kg, so the total weight with the XG Mobile eGPU is 2.3kg. ASUS will sell the combination of laptop and external video card for 3299 euros. In this version, the laptop has a faster processor, more memory and storage and a higher screen resolution.