40 TECH ADVISOR • MAY 2021REVIEWS
That combines an 11th-gen Intel i7 (the
i7-1165G7, to be precise) with 16GB
of DDR4 RAM and 1TB of storage, and
includes support for Wi-Fi 6 too.
Given the size of the laptop it
shouldn’t come as any great surprise that
there’s no discrete graphics card, though
the 11th-gen processor brings with it
Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics, which
should help things along.
In benchmarks, the Flip S gives solid,
but unremarkable, results. As we’ve seen
elsewhere, the jump to 11th-gen silicon
gives only modest performance boosts
over the previous tech, and lags behind
chips from AMD (seen in the Huawei
MateBook 14 below) and Apple (in the
new M1-powered MacBook Air).
More concerning, it lags behind the
11th-gen i5-powered Acer Swift 5 –
which on paper this should trounce. This
is the strongest suggestion that the issue
here isn’t in fact the internals, but the
fact that the laptop’s chassis design and
cooling solution are leading to throttling
that holds the CPU back.Geekbench 5 (multi-core)
Asus Zenbook Flip S UX371: 4,732
Acer Swift 5 (2020): 5,298
HP Envy 13 (2020): 3,685
Dell XPS 13 (2020): 4,772
Huawei MateBook 14 (2020): 6,612
Apple MacBook Air (M1): 7,5843DMark Sky Diver
Asus Zenbook Flip S UX371: 8,921
Acer Swift 5 (2020): 13,681
HP Envy 13 (2020): 8,285
Dell XPS 13 (2020): 9,248
Huawei MateBook 14 (2020): 10,576PCMark 10
Asus Zenbook Flip S UX371: 4,312
Acer Swift 5 (2020): 4,697
HP Envy 13 (2020): 4,156
Dell XPS 13 (2020): 3,934
Huawei MateBook 14 (2020): 5,095It’s a similar story on graphical
performance – the 3DMark Sky Diver
score is an improvement on most
10th-gen laptops, but not an especially
striking one, so you shouldn’t expect a
radical improvement in either gaming
performance or rendering. Once again,
it lags behind the i5 Acer Swift 5, which
also uses Xe graphics.
Cooling is always a challenge in a
chassis this small, and the Flip S does
run hot, which likely explains the slightly
underwhelming benchmark results –
push the laptop hard and you’ll notice,
and this leads to throttling that will limit
peak performance.
This isn’t the worst laptop I’ve tested
for heating – the early 2020 Dell XPS 13
takes that dubious prize – but it’s clear
that Asus’s slim design is holding the