I Turned the Most Powerful Tablet into a Steam OS Tablet! (Flow Z13 KJP)

What happens when you take the fastest Ryzen powered tablet and completely ditch Windows? Well, in this video, we're about to find out because recently I installed official Steam OS on the all-new ROG FlowZ13 KJP edition. If you're not familiar with this version of the Flow, I recently did a video on it. I'll leave a link in the description. But what we've got here is kind of a collaboration between ROG and Cojima Productions. And I'm a huge fan of this overall design. It's absolutely stunning in my opinion. And what we've got here is the AMD Ryzen AIAX Plus 395. So, we get that 8060SIG GPU and 128 GB of unified memory. And with the Flow Z13, we do have a detachable keyboard, but with my personal Z13 that I've been using for over a year now, I mainly use it in tablet mode with a Bluetooth keyboard connected. So, I do consider this a tablet or a laptop. really depends on how you're going to be using the device. With the KJP edition, we do get a totally redesigned rear on this thing. So, full milled aluminum. We've also got some carbon fiber here. Love the accents that they've put on this thing. Gold, black finishes here. I think it looks really, really good. And it's still packing the most powerful iGPU. Nobody's beat it just yet. It's the 8060S, so we've got 40 compute units. It's based on RDNA 3.5 and it'll clock up to 2900 MGHertz. 16 cores, 32 threads based on Zen 5. And the version that I have in my possession has 128 GB of unified memory running at 8,000 megat transfers per second. I've dedicated 64 gigs to the iGPU, but if you really wanted to get down to it, you could do up to 96. So, getting right in here, this is official Steam OS. I'm actually using Steam OS 3.9. It's a main branch and uh a few months ago it was updated to support stricks Halo so it'll boot right up on this unit. I can pull up my performance overlay here. Uh again we've got 16 cores 32 thread so it does take up quite a bit of space. 180 Hz IPS display here running at 2560 by600. We can enable VRR, half rate shading. Uh, systemwide FSR if you want to. And TDP control for this chipset is not included with official Steam OS, but you can always download a third party plugin like Simple Decki TDP control. And from here, we can do as low as 4 watts up to 120 watts with the Max Plus 395. I've been sitting at around 70 watts when I'm gaming. I think 120 is a bit high for the cooling system in this thing, but we could also disable our CPU boost SMT for lower-end indie games and save some battery. And we will take a look at battery life by the end of the video. So far, everything's been working great. You might notice this does look a bit different than regular Steam OS. And that's because I've got CSS loader here installed with Deki. So, we can totally customize the look and feel of Steam OS. So, here's kind of the stock look. I've just got a custom profile with a few different themes installed over top. And uh this is kind of how I like to set mine up. Now, one weird thing I noticed about this version versus the regular version is there's a command center button over on the side or an armory crate button on the side. With my original version of the Z13, when I press it, it actually brings up my performance menu. But on this one, it toggles Wi-Fi. So, I'm not sure what's going on with that. But getting into the settings, I'll show you that we are on official Steam OS 3.9. Again, it's a main branch and I'm on stable right now. AMD Ryzen Max Plus 395 up to 5.1 GHz. We've got 16 cores, 32 threads. I've got 64 gigs dedicated to system memory. This has a total of 128 GB of RAM. And of course, we've got that Radeon 8060SIG GPU. And like I mentioned, I've dedicated 64 gigs over there just for the iGPU. The APU here seems to be boosting properly on the CPU and the iGPU side. But with that out of the way, I do want to show off some gaming here. And I'm going to bring my overlay up so we can get a better look at everything. I'll run at least one game just, you know, recording the screen here. We'll do Doom: The Dark Ages. And then I want to move over to my game capture. It just makes it a lot easier to see everything. This one's always done pretty well with the 860S. And right now we're at 2560 by600. given these screens aspect ratio there. High settings with FSR set to quality. We can get more out of this. Obviously, it's got built-in frame generation. You take the settings down if you want, [snorts] but in my opinion, this is more than enough and it looks outstanding on this display. And by the way, I'm at that 70 watt TDP limit there. You can take it up a bit more and even then we may be able to get a little more out of it just like that. But I think 70 watts is a nice sweet spot here. Swapping over to my game capture. Unfortunately, I can't do 16x10, but we are at 16 by9. So, 2560 by uh 1440. Here's Arc Raiders at high settings with no FSR. And when I booted this game up for the first time, it automatically went to epic with FSR set to balanced. And I was getting over 100 FPS. So, I was like, this is pretty. And I was getting over 100 FPS. So, I went back and just kind of took a look at everything. I figured we'd disable FSR, take it down one notch, and we're still seeing averages over 80 FPS out of this one. Cyberpunk 2077. In my opinion, this does run a bit better over here in Linux than it does in Windows, which is really odd. It's kind of been the case across the board with a lot of these AMD iGPUs. 1440p ultra, and that ultra preset does take FSR to quality. We're seeing close to 12 more frames per second than we do in Windows running it in Steam OS. >> And getting better performance in Steam OS always isn't the case. Here's Death Stranding. And I'll tell you, in Windows with the same settings here, we're at 1440p, very high with no FSR, we're seeing averages of around 130 in Windows 11. But right here, we're seeing an average of around 110. So, there's a pretty big difference there, but it doesn't make the game unplayable at all. >> Here's Elden Ring, max settings, 1440p, and we don't have an option for FSR here. I mean, we could scale the screen using, you know, systemwide FSR with Steam OS, but nothing needs to happen here. It looks great like this. And usually on the channel, we're testing lower-end iGPUs, but every time I play this, you know, at those max settings, 1440 or even 4K, it amazes me how good this game looks. God of War Ragnarok 1440p, ultra settings with FSR set to quality. It does seem like uh with Steam OS here, going to 1440 with a bit of FSR is kind of a nice spot for 1440p gaming or even 1600p depending on what aspect ratio you're running at. And even if we were to just go over to the screen with this, we may lose a couple frames here and there going up to 1600p versus 1440, but all of this stuff is going to be really playable on that built-in display for sure. I also wanted to test out Marvel Rivals, and this is one that works good sometimes, doesn't work great the other times in Steam OS. Right now, we're seeing a pretty decent frame rate at 1440 high with no FSR. But there's a chance if I stopped this game and then got back into it, we'd see a lower frame rate. It's just kind of been that way with this one since it launched. But another thing to keep in mind is most of the games that we've tested do support FSR frame gen. And if you don't mind generating some fake frames, you can almost double the frame rate in everything. The last thing I wanted to talk about here was battery life with this. And it's definitely not optimized specifically for Steam OS, but we've got a 70Wh hour battery with the FlowZ13. Here's a quick 2D game, and I'm at an 8watt TDP. It doesn't need to quite pull 8 watts from the CPU to run this game. But if I was to take it down to 4 watts and then go back into the Steam OS interface, does get a bit laggy there because the Max Plus 395 does require a bit of power. It's got a lot of cores there that it needs to power up and get those clocks up on. But right now with this one, we're pulling a total of [music] 14 watts from the battery, 50% screen brightness. And I did go through I tested a couple other things here. So, for 8 watt indie and 2D gaming, we're looking at around five hours right now. 45 watt takes that down to an hour and 30 minutes. And at 70 watts, you're going to get under an hour run time. After all, we've got a 70watth battery. And all of this testing was done at 50% screen brightness. So, overall, yeah, I mean, Steam OS does perform really well on the Flow Z13 KJP edition, and we kind of thought it would. We've got the same specs as the original Flow Z13, but we've got a much cooler design in my opinion. This is definitely not for everybody, and if somebody buys this, chances are they're probably not going to just install Steam OS on it. They're going to be using it as a Windows 2in-1. But just note that, yeah, it's totally possible to run that operating system on here and get some really good performance out of gaming on this machine. But that's going to wrap it up for this one. I really appreciate you watching. If you're interested in learning a little more about this, I will leave a link in the description to the original video I created. Also leave links to ASUS's official website. If you've got any questions or you want to see anything else running on the Flow Z13, just let me know in the comments below. And like always, thanks for watching.

What happens when you install SteamOS on the most powerful gaming tablet ever made? I took the incredible ASUS ROG Flow Z13 KJP (Kojima Productions) Edition and completely ditched Windows 11 for official SteamOS 3.9! Powered by the massive AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395, the Radeon 8060S iGPU, and 128GB of unified memory, this might just be the ultimate high-end Steam Deck alternative. In this video, we push this hardware to the limit to see if games actually run BETTER on Linux and SteamOS than they do on Windows. Plus, I cover everything you need to know about TDP tuning on this APU, real-world battery life, and customizing the interface with CSS Loader. 🎮 Games Tested in this Video: • Doom: The Dark Ages • Cyberpunk 2077 • Elden Ring • God of War Ragnarok • Arc Raiders • Marvel Rivals Follow Me On Twitter: https://twitter.com/theetaprime Follow Me On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/etaprime/ Vip-URCDKey 25% code for software: ETA Windows 11 Pro Key($25): https://biitt.ly/RUZiX Windows 11 Home Key($23): https://biitt.ly/SQKqi Windows 10 Pro OEM Key($20): https://biitt.ly/KpEmf Windows 10 Home Key($17): https://biitt.ly/2tPi1 Windows 10 LTSC 2021 Key($15): https://biitt.ly/W564e Office 2019 pro key($63): https://biitt.ly/o0OQT 2016 pro key($32): https://biitt.ly/xWmvn Buy Windows 11 Pro Key at: https://www.vip-urcdkey.com DISCLAIMER: This video and description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a small commission at no extra cost to you! ⏱️ Video Chapters: 0:00 - Intro 0:25 - Z13 KJP Edition Overview 1:30 - SteamOS Setup & Settings 2:45 - Customizing SteamOS (Decky/CSS Loader) 3:15 - Doom: The Dark Ages 4:00 - Arc Raiders 4:19 - Double Take 4:35 - Cyberpunk 2077 5:15 - Death Stranding 5:50 - Elden Ring 6:25 - God of War Ragnarok 7:00 - Marvel Rivals 7:45 - Battery Life 9:15 - Final Thoughts Want to send me something? ETAPRIME 12400 Wake Union Church Rd PMB 239 Wake Forest, NC 27587 US THIS VIDEO IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY!