ROG FLOW Z13 & X16: ASUS, How Did You Design Horrible Products, Aside From Their Specs?

[bimoadiprakoso]

I own 2 ROGs: Flow Z13 2022 (Core i9) & Flow X16 (Ryzen 9)

Using both for 2 years with such deep care. Before continuing, I have HP Zbook 17 G3 from 2017 and it's still working like a champ without issue while battery health is still at 99% after 7 years of use. The Z13 and X16 are completely different experience with all the reviews on the web, which I believe could be misleading as they were not testing it quite intensively in daily use with broad software categories.

For information, we use both Flow Z13 and X16 with software like Rhinoceros, Davinci Resolve Studio, BMD Fusion Studio, OpenFOAM, Krita, Inskcape, GIMP, Blender and many other engineering and design software, on daily basis. That should explain the workload.

FLOW Z13 ISSUES

• BATTERY
  Battery health drop 10% every year. And now, it's behaving strangely while enabling the RTX 3050 Ti when on battery. It only took 7 minutes to drain the battery from 72% and straight down to 3% in 6 minutes and goes turned off suddenly.
  
  
  
• PERFORMANCE
  Now this subject, is going to raise the eyebrows. Initially, the Z13 gave similar performance to Threadripper 1950x in Cinebench R23 which was very good.
  
  And now, it lost nearly 20% of its performance, down to around 13,000-ish in Cinebench R23, in Turbo Settings.
  
  Let me put this clear ASUS. I take care of every single device I use, carefully. Even my Zbook 17 is clearly looking like a brand new laptop without a single hair scratch. None of my laptop carries dust in the cooling system because I do regular maintenance to clear each one. So, this isn't a case where dust is stockpiling on the fan, heatsink or the whole heat dissipation system. No. This started to happen after some updates of the stupid Armoury Crate and MyAsus app.
  
  
• KEYBOARD
  Oh yes, many Z13 users are complaining when suddenly their keyboards went malfunctioning. ALL my friends' Z13s are encountering the same problem. And it seems, everyone on the web using Z13 experiencing the same issue: RIBBON CABLE INSIDE THE HINGE WENT SNAPPED AFTER A PERIOD OF USE, EVEN UNDER WARRANTY OR JUST MONTHS OF USE. An example of the situation can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/N19oobEweZE
  This shows how the design wasn't being tested is such a premium product should be designed.
  
  
• BAD RUBBER MATERIAL
  The red rubber tab material to help opening the stand, is made of bad material. 2 years after purchase it gets soft and would be easily torn apart.
  
  
• SD CARD DISCONNECTED
  SD Card intermittently got disconnected when in use or after booting. Okay, there's a workaround to avoid this by unchecking the TURN OF FAST STARTUP on Power Options settings.
  
  

FLOW X16 ISSUES

• KEYBOARD PROBLEM
  Oh yes, this didn't take too long to happen and ASUS seemed to miss this when designing and validating their X16 since the first place. The workaround is somehow a bit complicated, addressing how the keyboard goes to standby mode to save battery in just seconds (or millisecs), but when waking up, it doesn't do the process properly. Yes, cutting down the issue will impact the battery life but the issue could be avoided. Proof? Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04CBNCQ6FBI 
  
  
• USB 4 NOT FUNCTIONING BY DEFAULT
  Yes, every Ryzen 6000 series carry USB 4 by default, but it depends to manufacturer to apply it. On the datasheet, FLOW X16 displayed USB 3.2 Type C. However, ASUS provided BIOS patch that they said it would enable USB 4. Well, it didn't work for my X16 and any of my friends' X16s. It required us to go through AMD UEFI settings to enable the USB 4 settings and use it properly with Thunderbolt 3 devices like eGPUs. Yes, I do have RTX A4000 and A5000 as the eGPU.

So, those are the major issues of the Z13 and X16 we've encountering to date. There are still some minor issues but I think, it's not big enough to mention in this "honest" findings.

Hope this information is helpful to readers, to help them avoiding such problematic products.

#rog #z13 #x15 #flowz13 #flowx16 #problems #issues

[AlisonBlue]

Look at what they did now with the new PX serries, its like here is more performance in the flow products but reduce your refresh rate by over 100Hz like atleast give us 120hz as you all have done before with all of your oled displays. why asus i just wanted the z13, with a 2k mled or oled display and the new ryzen apu along side 32GB of ram minimum and a 4070 or better preferably more vram though, we have hit a point where 8GB of vram is not enough. also asus you better have a replacment for the xgmobile, make it usb 4 gen 2 and sell it for all devices. you would make money on it as many people would like to have a plug in play 4090 for there pc, laptop, handheld, ect. you all are really killing of what made your products cool...

[bimoadiprakoso]

ASUS really loses their focus on creating good and reliable products. They made many innovations for sure. But they  clearly leave in selecting good components/parts behind, for their new products. About 3 years ago, I put my eyes on ASUS products as I was looking for fresh competition to mobile workstations from HP, Dell and Lenovo. It was obvious ASUS wanted some slice of mobile workstation market by labeling some of their flagship products to be considered as "product for professionals". They also level up their pricing with hope that potential customers would see it as "true" professional products. Sure, they didn't place "mobile workstation" label to their flagships, but additional "for content creators" and sometimes "workload", successfully brought professional's attention to it. Another thing that paved this move smoother, was the initial release of Nvidia studio drivers. It confuses the mind for certain.

As for technical details, I had mentioned it in my first post on how my Z13 behaves now, compares to when it was being tested after unboxed. The updates have been messing all settings, resulting the performance to be much lower now. 

ASUS clearly has very wide range of products. But even their highest ones, it seems they sacrifice total quality for excellent products for some small margins. For a comparison, a full blown ROG Flow Z13 with Core i9 12900H (12th Gen), 16GB and 1TB SSD price was similar to a Dell Precision 5680 with Core i7 13700H (13th Gen), 32GB, 512GB SSD, FHD 100% DCI-P3 display at less than US$ 2,400.

My post was not about complaint, but more over, to let ASUS knows that they have huge potentials in competing with Dell, HP and Lenovo when they do it right. Myself personally, had been involved in well known brand for desktop and workstation product and market development for nearly 2 decades. 

Many friends of mine, are in question now, whether they continue with ASUS, or going back with any of those 3 big names in professional computing. This, isn't a good sign for ASUS when the consideration is somehow growing in many professional's minds.

[bimoadiprakoso]

Their problematic technical support is also happening everywhere. I experienced it myself when within warranty period, my Z13 keyboard was having issue, the same as every Z13 owners in the world. At that time (less than 1 year after purchase) the battery also dropped 10% of total capacity and would like for replacement. Went in to a local authorized ASUS service center, then it was confirmed that the keyboard failed to function and battery needed to be replaced as well. Next, the support assistant informed about ASUS  policy  that I needed to leave the whole Z13 unit to have both battery and keyboard replaced. Thinking that it was only required an hour or two to replace the battery, I was telling that I could wait for it since I use the Z13 for my dailies. She kept on insisting to leave the Z13 for 3-5 days telling some craps that they needed to check the unit thoroughly. This showed that they carry unnecessary policy of "don't fix the unbroken". Then I think I might just need to replace the keyboard and risking  battery losing its warranty in the next few months myself. But she kept telling that I needed to leave the Z13 for keyboard replacement. This truly is a nonsense policy as Z13 has detachable keyboard. So I left.

A Youtuber, Gamers Nexus, appeared to have higher level issue with ASUS support. Many ASUS support issues can be viewed in his Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pMrssIrKcY. Clearly typical unbelievable and ridiculous repair policy. He even stated it clearer as scam!

Clearly, many reviews on ASUS units were talking about its technical specifications, how OLED does this and that, etc., but none spoke about issues which clearly caused by simiilar situation, they are not daily users. Many of them were sent review units just to create blings and glams of their products. We can find real users using ASUS and ROG products having issues through posts and videos using web search, easily.

[bimoadiprakoso]

Updates: ASUS is among companies who are being investigated and warned by FTC.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-warns-companies-stop-warranty-practi...