PC World - USA (2020-12)

DECEMBER 2020 PCWorld 59

battery dies.

The ZenBook Flip 13’s 8.5-hour battery

life may make you yawn, but remember

this is with a 4K screen. If you look at the

battery chart, laptops with higher-

resolution screens tend to cluster at the

bottom, while those at the top are all

1920x1080 (FHD) panels.

Asus compensates for the power

consumption of that 4K panel with a larger

battery. Typical laptops this size give you a

battery in the 50-Watt-hour range, but Asus

correctly ups the battery capacity to 67

Watt-hours. That larger battery tips the

ZenBook Flip 13’s life from what could have

been mediocre to decent, for a laptop with

a 4K screen.

BOTTOM LINE

The Asus ZenBook Flip 13 leaves us with

three strong impressions. The first two

are the spectacular OLED panel (which

we’ve already gushed over) and the CPU.

Intel’s 11th-gen chips are impressive,

even if they don’t knock out AMD’s Ryzen

4000. Multi-core performance could be
      better, but the single-core performance
      that represents most of what we’d do
      on a smaller laptop is strong. Throw in
      leading graphics performance and you
      can’t lose.
      The third thing is the headphone port.
      You may not think it’s a big deal, but many
      laptop makers are watching very carefully to

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

Lenovo Slim 7 Ryzen 7 4800 U

Dell XPS 13 9300 DefaultCore i7-1965G7

HP Envy x360 13 Ryzen 5 4500U

Acer Spin 5Core i7-8550U

Dell XPS 13 7390Core i7-10710U

Dell XPS 13 9380Core i7-8565U

Asus ZenBook Flip 13 UX371 Core i7-1165G7

Dell Inspiron 15 7000Core i7-8565U

Acer Swift 3 Ryzen 7 4700U

MSI Prestige 14 DefaultCore i7-10710U

Acer Swift 3Core i5-1035G1

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 15”Ryzen 7 3580U

Huawei Matebook X ProCore i7-8550U

833

568

629

537

758

543

571

500

490

445

471

435

464

4K Video Playback

Battery Life

Minutes

common tasks.
Moving on from CPU-focused tasks, we
use 3DMark Sky Diver to look at graphics
performance. The gaming chops of the
ZenBook Flip 13 may surprise you. Despite
being thinner, lighter and smaller than the
Lenovo Slim 7, it’s basically on a par with
this larger laptop when set to its
performance mode.
The last test is perhaps the most
important one, and that’s battery life. For
that, we put the laptop into Airplane mode,
with the display brightness set to 250 to 260
nits. Then we loop a 4K video file until the