Asus ProArt PX13 review: a uniquely small and powerful laptop

Asus ProArt PX13

MSRP $2,000.00

Score Details

“Sporting discrete GPU options, the Asus ProArt PX13 is unlike anything else you can buy.”

Pros

• Excellent productivity performance
• Very good creative performance
• Solid build quality
• Very good keyboard
• Useful DialPad and apps
• Spectacular OLED display

Cons

• Battery life isn't the best
• Touchpad should be a haptic version
• A bit thick

Asus isn’t a stranger to introducing new technologies or making them available to more people. Consider OLED displays, where Asus has been a leader in pushing its brilliant colors and inky black to laptops under $1,000. So, now that AMD has introduced its latest and perhaps most important laptop chipset, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, it’s unsurprising that the Asus ProArt PX13 is one of the first machines to equip it.

The Ryzen AI 300 lineup introduces not just a faster CPU and integrated GPU with great efficiency, but also one of the fastest neural processing units (NPUs) on a laptop today. It’s no coincidence that “AI” is in the chipset’s branding. The ProArt PX13 leverages it for fast performance and reasonably long battery life, in a highly portable 13-inch laptop package.

Specs and configurations

Asus offers just two configurations of the ProArt PX13. My review unit is $1,700 with the Ryzen AI 9 chipset, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, an RTX 4050 GPU, and a 13.3-inch 3K OLED display. For $2,000, you get the same configuration with an RTX 4060 GPU. There is no RTX 4070 configuration, which is offered in the ROG Flow X13.

Hopefully there is some more customization available in the future. A cheaper, 16GB model model would be nice, for example, as would a 120Hz refresh rate option.

That’s expensive, but no more than the Dell XPS 13 and the MacBook Air M3 that are both around $1,900. Each of these machines is in the upper tier of premium 13-inch laptops, and the ProArt PX 13 is a new member.

Design

The ProArt PX13 is a laptop in its own class. There are plenty of 13-inch laptops out there, but they tend to be very thin and almost never support discrete graphics. In many ways, the ProArt PX13 is a non-gaming version of the ROG Flow X13, a convertible 2-in-1, with a display that swivels 360-degrees into four modes: clamshell, tent, media, and tablet. It was unusual enough for a tiny gaming laptop to have this kind of hinge, along with its glossy screen, so it makes a bit more sense on a straight mainstream device.

Asus doesn’t talk about an active pen, and there’s not one in the box, so this isn’t intended to be a used as a digital sketching tool. But the various 2-in-1 modes are great for sharing content and consuming media — especially since HDR content looks fantastic thanks to the OLED display.

Considering the ProArt PX13 against other 13-inch laptops, it’s a fairly mainstream machine. It’s not particularly thin at up to 0.70 inches — the MacBook Air M3 is just 0.44 inches thick and the XPS 13 is 0.60 inches — nor is it particularly light at 3.04 pounds compared to the XPS 13 at 2.6 pounds and the MacBook Air M3 at 2.7 pounds. It’s even thicker than the 16-inch MacBook Pro. As we’ll see, it’s easy to set aside a chassis that’s a little thicker and heavier given a ton of power packed away inside. For creators on the go, in particular, the ProArt PX13 is plenty small.

It’s also very well built, with an all-aluminum chassis that’s just a little less rigid in the lid than the XPS 13 and equal to the MacBook Air M3. Like those machines, the ProArt PX13 has a bottom chassis and keyboard deck that are both quite robust. The hinge is smooth in opening with one hand, and it remains in place during use.

I like the ProArt PX13’s design. It doesn’t have the sleek simplicity of either the Dell or the Apple, with more aggressive venting and a bit of a bolder aesthetic and with an all-black color way. Asus aimed for evoking power rather than elegance, and it’s fitting.

Keyboard, touchpad, and Asus DialPad

The keyboard has large keycaps and a spacious layout. The lettering is blocky and quite visible in any lighting, and for darker environments the backlighting is quite bright (maybe too bright at its highest setting). The switches are deep and springy, with a comfortable bottoming action. It might be just a little less snappy than I like and feels slightly less precise than the MacBook Air M3’s Magic Keyboard, but I like the Asus key feel better than the XPS 13’s. And the Dell’s zero-lattice layout is harder to get used to.

The touchpad is a mechanical version, and it’s fine. I would prefer all laptops at these prices to use haptic mechanisms, but at least this one is nice and large — very much like the Zenbook S 16 or ROG Zephyrus G16.

Still, the MacBook Air M3’s Force Touch haptic touchpad is a lot better, as is the XPS 13’s (except for its hidden nature).

Fortunately, the display is touch-enabled, which makes sense for a 2-in-1.

Interestingly, Asus included its virtual Asus DialPad feature on the touchpad. It’s a circular indentation with a button in the middle that’s supported by the ProArt Creator Hub software that provides a host of creative functionality. The Dial provides extra functionality in a variety in creative apps, as well as accessing various system settings.

The Creator Hub allows for enhanced color management, performance optimizations, and more. It’s a bit much to dig into, but creators will like its flexibility and customizability.

Connectivity and webcam

The ProArt PX13 has a lot more connectivity than most 13-inch machines. There are two USB4 USB-C connections, which have most of the functionality of Thunderbolt 4, along with a legacy USB-A port, an HDMI 2.1 connection, and a microSD card reader.

The XPS 13 and MacBook Air M3 both have just two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 (although the Apple also has a MagSafe 3 connection for power), and neither have SD card support. The XPS 13 doesn’t have a 3.5mm audio jack. Wireless connectivity is fully up to date with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

The webcam has a 1080p resolution, with an infrared camera for Windows 11 Hello facial recognition. That resolution is the new standard, and the ProArt PX13 can handle basic web conferencing well enough.

Performance

The biggest story here is the new AMD Ryzen AI 300 line of chipsets, which promises a significant uptick in performance. There are three versions, the Ryzen AI 9 365 with 10 CPU cores and 20 threads and 12 GPU cores in the Radeon 880M integrated graphics. The Ryzen AI 9 370 and 375 both have 12 CPU cores and 24 threads and 16 GPU cores. All use 28 watts of power by default and can be configured to run at between 15 and 54 watts. The new chipsets use a mix of Zen 5 and Zen 5c cores, with the latter being more compact but just as fast as the others.

The primary competition includes Intel Meteor Lake, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X, and the Apple Silicon M3. Meteor Lake has several versions, but the most common is the Core Ultra 7 155H with 16 cores (six Performance, eight Efficient, and two Low Power Efficient) and 22 threads, running at 28 watts with a minimum of 20 watts and up to 115 watts of Turbo power.

The Snapdragon X Elite has 12 cores (eight performance and four efficient) running at up to 3.8GHz. Both have moderately fast integrated graphics. Finally, the M3 chipset ranges in power from the base model with eight CPU cores and either eight or 10 GPU cores up to the M3 Max with 16 CPU cores and 40 GPU cores.

The ProArt PX13 uses the Ryzen AI 9 370 HX 370 chipset. My review unit used the RTX 4050, an entry-level GPU, with the faster RTX 4060 as an alternative. As we’ll see in our suite of benchmarks, it’s a very fast chipset for a 13-inch laptop, and when combined with the discrete graphics makes for a much faster machine. It does run a bit hot and loud under load, but not unusually so for (as we’ll see) a fast laptop.

When compared with the Dell XPS 13 9345 with the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 and running Windows on Arm, the ProArt PX13 is roughly as fast in CPU-intensive benchmarks like Cinebench 2024 and Geekbench 6. I can’t compare much more, because not many other benchmarks run natively the Dell. Looking at GPU performance, the ProArt PX13 is a lot faster. It would be even more faster with the RTX 4060. The Asus is also faster than the MacBook Air M3 in these benchmarks.

Overall, the ProArt PX13 is incredibly fast for productivity users, and will churn through the most demanding workflows. It will also serve as a good entry-level 1080p gaming laptop. Note that the Asus Zenbook S 16 uses the same AMD chipset but with the integrated Radeon 890M graphics. That GPU scored 3,207 in the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark compared to the ProArt PX13’s much faster 8,503.

But then we need to also need to consider how the ProArt PX13 performs for a creator, which as the name implies is the laptop’s primary target. And here, Asus did a great job of creating a powerful machine.

Looking at two creative benchmarks — Pugetbench Premiere Pro that runs in a live version of Adobe Premiere Pro and Pugetbench Photoshop, which also runs in the live Adobe app — the ProArt PX 13 does well.

In Premiere Pro, which can use a Windows laptop’s GPU to speed up certain creative processes, the ProArt PX13 is faster than several laptops with much faster GPUs. That includes the Acer Swift X 14 with the RTX 4070 and the Asus ROG Flow Z13 with the RTX 4060. It’s a lot faster than the Dell XPS 14 with the same RTX 4050, and the Zenbook S 16 with AMD’s Radeon 490M integrated graphics can’t keep up.

Apple’s M3 chipset has various CPU optimizations that speed up video encoding and decoding, and the MacBook Air M3 is reasonably fast here. I included the MacBook Pro 16 with the M3 Max chipset as a proxy for the MacBook Pro 14, which is about as fast. The M3 Max is a lot faster for video editing.

In Photoshop, the ProArt PX13 was again very fast, leading all but the MacBook Pro 16. This is down to the Ryzen AI 9’s performance and is less influenced by the GPU.

Overall, Asus has made a very fast and highly portable laptop for creators. As we’ll see, its performance is matched up well with its excellent OLED display.

AI performance

I’d love to say how the AMD AI 9 chipset’s very fast NPU performs relative to the competition. It’s rated at 50 tera operations per second (TOPS), compared to the Qualcomm Snapdragon X chipsets at 45 TOPS and the Intel Meteor Lake at 10 TOPS. The Apple M3’s Neural Engine (NE) has 18 tops. MacBook users will need to wait for the M4’s 38 TOPS to join those ranks.

The problem is that we don’t have good AI benchmarks that run across platform and directly test NPU and NE performance. Microsoft has set its Copilot+ PC NPU requirement at 40 TOPS or more, and Apple is supporting its upcoming Apple Intelligence features across all MacBooks going back to the M1 chipset — so, Apple is counting on CPU, GPU, and RAM to make up for earlier NE deficiencies.

Right now, it doesn’t matter much. There’s not a lot in Windows that will utilize fast NPUs. Microsoft is only supporting Qualcomm with its Copilot+ AI features, and even that’s limited. There are some apps that can use an NPU, and perhaps they’ll be sped up. And by running those apps on the NPU, they won’t be as fast as if they ran on discrete GPUs — which are a lot faster than NPUs — but they’ll be a lot more efficient. We just can’t test any of it without cross-platform benchmarks.

Asus includes several apps that tout AI support, including StoryCube for managing photos and videos and MuseTree for creating and managing creative workflows. Those likely benefit from the combined NPU and GPU AI performance, giving you at least a few easy ways to play with the new capabilities.

Battery life

The next challenge for the ProArt PX13 and its AMD chipset is battery life. After all, while Intel hasn’t caught up in efficiency, both Qualcomm and Apple run Arm chipsets that tend to lead the way. It’s one thing to pack in a lot of performance today. A laptop also needs to have great battery life to compete.

Asus packed in 73 watt-hours of battery, capacity which is a lot for a 13-inch laptop. The XPS 13, for example, has just 55 watt-hours, while the Zenbook S 16 has even more at 78 watt-hours. Notably, the MacBook Air M3 has just 52.6 watt-hours.

Looking at these results, the ProArt PX13 can’t come close to matching the most efficient laptops today. The two Intel Meteor Lake laptops here are deceiving — most running the same Core Ultra 7 155H chipset are closer to the ProArt PX13. While the Qualcomm laptops have very strong video looping battery life (the least-demanding test), the MacBook Air M3 lasts the longest when doing real work.

The ProArt PX13 has decent battery life for such a portable laptop that can handle reasonably demanding creative work. But you’ll need to carry your power adapter along with you.

Display and audio

The 13.3-inch 16:10 3K (2880 by 1800) OLED display is outstanding. It looks great out of the box, with bright, dynamic colors and inky blacks. That’s nothing new for OLED displays, and Asus does it as well as anyone.

My colorimeter validates the panel’s suitability for creators. Its color gamut is wide at 100% of sRGB, 97% of AdobeRGB, and 99% of DCI-P3. They’re also accurate at a Delta-E of 0.64 (less than 1.0 is considered excellent). Brightness was very good at 380 nits, although not the brightest I’ve seen for OLED, and contrast is 26,510:1 with the usual perfect blacks.

The display completes the package for creative work. Media consumers will also love the display. Audio was just OK, though, with dual speakers that are good enough for system sounds and YouTube videos. But music, TV shows, and movies beg for a good pair of headphones.

A special mobile laptop for demanding creators

If you’re looking for a laptop for video editing or high-end photography work, you’ll want fast performance and a display with excellent colors. The ProArt PX13 provides both. It’s not the fastest laptop we’ve reviewed for this work — not even close, really.

But few are so portable. No, battery life isn’t great, but that’s not to be expected. The ProArt PX13 will let you get your work done without lugging around a huge laptop. And that’s well worth the expensive price.