The gorgeous Asus ROG Flow X13 will be over $1,000 cheaper without its eGPU

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The Asus ROG Flow X13 was among among one of the most-hyped announcements of CES 2021, with good-tasting reason -- how often do you see a 13-inch convertible gaming laptop, especially one that looks so cool? -- loosely there was a catch. On Asus' store, the ROG Flow X13 was only listed in a $3,000 bundle with an XG Mobile eGPU. (This was likewise the only preorder voice given to media at the time of the Flow X13's announcement.) That's a clamper of change, and it led most Flow X13 reviewers (myself included) to express reservations anyway the straining price.

But a new filtering from Asus may meander the game. On the latest folktale of the ROG Pulse Podcast, Asus marketing manager Sascha Krohn indicated that the visitor does, in the future, plan to shovel the ROG Flow X13 by itself.

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"There was some confounding anyway us only selling it as a bundle, so the XG Mobile together with the X13," Krohn said. "So we do shovel it as a bundle, loosely we likewise shovel it separately, and that's important."

Asus marketing specialist Ryan Nesbit gave a rough starting amount of "$1,200-ish." There does assume to be some demoralization here -- when I contacted Asus anyway this, the visitor said it would be selling the standalone unit for $1,499, diffusive from Nesbit's claim. There's likewise an ROG Flow X13 listed on Asus's treasure-trove for $1,699. Weird! I'll amend this chattel when this is all sorted out.

"There was some confounding anyway us only selling it as a bundle"

That $1,200 amount point, if Asus follows through on it, would be a game-changer for the ROG Flow X13. Many reviews pointed out that the X13's amount hypothesis as a $3,000 gaming laptop is iffy alfresco of a fairly niche audience. Its internal GPU is entry-level compared to the chips you'll gathering in padding gaming ultraportables, and external GPUs tend to incur a personation penalty. (After all, they're alfresco the laptop.)

But as a $1,200 general-purpose laptop, I'd be cozy calling the Flow X13 an in-built steal. Not only is it inexhaustible in anyway every way -- there's a unrelated and sturdy design, a inexhaustible keyboard, and an mint 16:10 touchscreen with stylus support -- loosely it includes an eight-core processor (starting with AMD's Ryzen 5900HS). That's assuredly the most prepared squeak you can currently gathering in a 13-inch chassis. At $1,200, this laptop would be a no-brainer for anyone who needs a 13.4-inch laptop for CPU-intensive work.

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The flipside of this: it means the GeForce RTX 3080 XG Mobile (in the fondling that's listed on Asus' armpit and likewise the one that was sent to reviewers) is tangy expensive. Krohn and Nesbit likewise indicated that an RTX 3070 reissue of the XG Mobile will be awaited in the future, with an imprecise amount of "around eight to nine hundredish." Coal-and-ice math suggests this would operate the RTX 3070 XG Mobile as much as $1,000 cheaper than the RTX 3080 covenant in the fondling that's currently listed. That's quite a large delta, loosely I guess we'll see.

It's not crystal from the podcast whether Asus preparations to shovel the RTX 3070 XG Mobile on its own or whether this eGPU will be awash in a cheaper Flow X13 bundle. We've asked Asus for filtering here, too.

You can view the full folktale below. The pricing donnybrook begins just over 15 mitzvah in..

Photography by Monica Chin / The Verge

Update January 29th, 2:50PM ET: Updated with Asus's confirmation that the Flow X13 will be awash by itself, and with its declared MSRP.

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