Asus ProArt PZ13 review: look out, Surface Pro

Asus ProArt PZ13

MSRP $1,100.00

Score Details

“The Asus ProArt PZ13 is fast, long-lasting, and surprisingly affordable.”

Pros

• Very attractive price
• Strong productivity performance
• Great battery life
• Excellent build quality
• Good, included detachable keyboard
• Spectacular OLED display

Cons

• Snap-on kickstand is a bit clunky
• Overall design not as elegant

One of the better early entries in Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC initiative, which is aimed at building on the AI hype of the last year or so, is Microsoft’s Surface Pro 11. It was the only detachable tablet 2-in-1 running Windows on Arm on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X chipset, and it’s a very strong machine. But the Asus ProArt PZ13 has stepped in to offer an alternative.

Right off the bat, the ProArt PZ13 competes with a very attractive price, which includes its detachable keyboard. It also offers good performance, great battery life, and an excellent OLED display. The Surface Pro 11 has a few standout features, but the ProArt PZ13 demonstrates that it belongs in the discussion.

Specs and configurations

Right now, there’s just one configuration of the ProArt PZ13 available. It offers up a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and a 13.3-inch 2.8K OLED display. It comes with a magnetically attached kickstand and a detachable keyboard, and there’s an optional Asus Pen 2.0 available for $100.

The most direct competitor is the Microsoft Surface Pro 11, which starts $1,000 for a Snapdragon X Plus, 16GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, and a 13.0-inch 2.8K IPS display. But if you want to match the Asus directly, with a 1TB SSD and an OLED display, you’ll spend $1,700 on a Surface Pro 11. That makes the ProArt PZ13 very attractive from a pure price perspective. The non-Windows competitor, Apple’s iPad Pro 13, starts at $1,300 and goes up from there. It’s a lot more expensive.

And then, consider that the ProArt PZ13 includes its detachable keyboard. That’s at least a $130 option with the Surface Pro 11, and prices vary for the many keyboard options for the iPad Pro 13 — including Apple’s excellent Magic Keyboard case combo that’s $299. Active pens are optional with each tablet, and cost around $100 for each manufacturer’s version.

Design

The ProArt PZ13 is a detachable tablet 2-in-1, and as mentioned above, its most important competition is the Surface Pro 11. There aren’t many of these tablets that merge into laptops being produced today, as the convertible 2-in-1 with a 360-degree hinge has taken over. The last detachable tablet 2-in-1 that I reviewed was the Asus ROG Flow Z13, a very different gaming-oriented laptop.

Probably the most important specification for a tablet is its size and weight. In that respect, the ProArt PZ13 is very closely matched with the Surface Pro 11. The Asus has a wider 13.3-inch 16:10 display compared to Microsoft’s tablet with a taller 13.0-inch 3:2 display, and their display bezels are about the same size. The Surface Pro 11 is slightly narrower and taller, while the ProArt PZ13 is just slightly thinner and lighter.

They’re both highly portable tablets that are reasonably comfortable to hold in hand. It’s relevant to compare to the most popular tablet overall, Apple’s iPad Pro, and the 13-inch model is around the same size in width and depth, but it’s insanely thin at just 0.20 inches and very light at 1.28 pounds. It’s the easiest to use with an active pencil.

However, it’s not exactly that simple. The ProArt PZ13 doesn’t have a kickstand built in like the Surface Pro 11. Instead, it includes a magnetic cover that doubles as a kickstand, which adds thickness and weight. So in that sense, Microsoft’s design is more convenient and elegant. The iPad Pro 13 also needs an attachment, but you can buy various options that are still equally thin and light as the Surface Pro 11.

Aesthetically, these tablets all look the same from the front — they’re simple black slates. The ProArt PZ13 comes in just one version that’s black all around, while the Surface Pro 11 comes in four colors with available matching keyboards. The iPad Pro 11 is available in silver and black.

Keyboard, touchpad, and pen

The ProArt PZ13 includes its detachable tablet, which makes its low price even more attractive. And it’s a pretty good keyboard, with a spacious layout, comfortable keycaps, and snappy, precise switches. It doesn’t prop up at an angle like the Surface Pro 11’s Flex Keyboard, and it doesn’t have a place to store and charge a pen like Microsoft’s version. And Apple’s Magic Keyboard that doubles as a stand and cover enjoys that company’s excellent switches. The Asus keyboard isn’t quite as good overall.

One problem I ran into is that the ProArt PZ13’s keyboard isn’t recognized by Windows. So, all the usual tablet features like selection checkboxes and a sliding taskbar remain even when the keyboard is connected. It’s a minor quibble and presumably Asus will get it sorted in a future firmware update.

Then, the Asus touchpad is mechanical, and while it’s large, it doesn’t have the same responsiveness as the haptic touchpads on the Microsoft and Apple keyboards. That’s another downside.

Asus didn’t include its Active Pen 2.0 with my review unit, so I couldn’t test it. I can say, though, that it doesn’t offer the haptic feedback that the Microsoft Pen 2 provides that makes writing and drawing on the display feel more natural. And it doesn’t have the haptic feedback when squeezing like Apple’s latest Pencil Pro. So, again, the Asus solution falls a bit short.

Connectivity and webcam

There are two cameras on the ProArt PZ13, which is common to tablets, including a front-facing 5MP webcam with an infrared camera for Windows 11 on Arm facial recognition and a 13MP rear camera. Like the Surface Pro 11, the ProArt PZ13 supports Microsoft’s enhanced Studio Effects software as part of the Copilot+ PC initiate, with a hardware assist by the Qualcomm chipset’s neural processing unit (NPU).

Like virtually all tablets, the ProArt PZ13’s connectivity is limited. There are two USB4 ports, which equals the Surface Pro 11 and doubles the number of Thunderbolt 4 ports on the iPad Pro 13. It lacks the NanoSIM slot and cellular connectivity option of Microsoft’s tablet, and the iPad Pro also has a 5G cellular version. But local wireless connectivity is fully up-to-date with Wi-Fi 7.

Performance

The ProArt PZ13 uses a version of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus, released in September and a couple of months after the original lineup. The X1P-42-100 has eight cores compared to the X1P-64-100 with 10 cores that we tested. Both chipsets run at up to 3.4GHz, while the X1P-42-100 has a significantly slower Adreno GPU rated at up to 1.7 teraflops (TFLOPS) compared to the faster version at 3.8 TFLOPS. The Snapdragon X Elite is a much faster chipset than all of the Plus versions. It’s important to note that these Qualcomm laptops run Windows on Arm, which will run applications in emulation when they’re not written natively for the chipset. Thus, your overall mileage may vary — and that includes potential incompatibility with both software and hardware.

Interestingly, though, the ProArt PZ13 wasn’t significantly slower at CPU-intensive tasks than the Surface Pro 11 with the 12-core Snapdragon X1E-80-100. The Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 was much slower with the faster Snapdragon X Plus, demonstrating a a chipset alone isn’t a guarantee of a given level of performance. In terms of its GPU performance, the ProArt PZ13 (and the Asus Vivobook S 15) was in line with expectations.

Ultimately, the ProArt PZ13 is a very fast laptop for demanding productivity users. Asus seems to have squeezed out better CPU performance than Microsoft did with the theoretically much faster Surface Pro 11. And none of these machines are good for gaming or for creative tasks that can utilized the GPU. And, the MacBook Air M3 holds its own, and it’s meaningfully faster for creative tasks like video editing thanks to various CPU optimizations.

I’d be remiss if I failed to mention AI performance. The Qualcomm chipsets were the first to support Microsoft’s AI-centric Copilot+ PC initiative, primarily due to their having a faster NPU than earlier Intel chipsets. It boasts up to 45 tera operations per second (TOPS) compared to Intel Meteor Lake’s 10 TOPS. Since the introduction of the Qualcomm chipsets, though, a couple of new competitors are making their way out to the market — AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 and Intel’s Lunar Lake, both of which exceed Microsoft’s CoPilot+ requirement of 40 TOPS and will receive updates to become official members of the platform.

But, we don’t have benchmarks to assess NPU performance, and it’s likely that they’ll be primarily aimed at efficiency rather than sheer performance, where discrete GPUs will continue to be faster. Asus includes several creative apps, like its StoryCube and Creator Hub utilities, that might benefit from the faster NPU.

Battery life

The Qualcomm chipsets and Windows on Arm are reasonably fast chipsets, but their greater claim to fame has been a promise of better efficiency. That’s to differentiate not only from Intel but perhaps more importantly from Apple’s very efficient M3 chipset.

In my testing, the ProArt PZ13 did well, lasting a little longer in our video looping test and not quite as long as the Surface Pro 11 in our web browsing test. We didn’t test the Microsoft tablet in running the demanding Cinebench 2024 multi-core test while on battery, but the ProArt PZ13 did better than we’ve seen from the Snapdragon X Elite chipsets. That promises better performance when doing work, where overall, the Qualcomm machines have done better with less-demanding tasks.

The MacBook Air M3 still leads, particularly when doing more than just looping video. But the ProArt PZ13 is still a long-lasting machine that will get you through a day’s work and then some.

Display and audio

Like pretty much every premium Asus laptop, the ProArt PZ13 features a high-quality OLED display. It’s a 13.3-inch panel at a 16:10 aspect ratio that’s not quite as close to a piece of paper’s dimension’s as the Surface Pro 11’s 13-inch 3:2 display. The iPad Pro 13’s display is also more comfortable for inking and drawing. Subjectively, the ProArt PZ13’s display is spectacular, with bright, dynamic colors and inky blacks. It’s easily as good as the Surface Pro 11’s OLED option, although Microsoft’s IPS option will likely get better battery life.

According to my colorimeter, the ProArt PZ13’s colors are wider at 100% of sRGB, 95% of AdobeRGB, and 100% of DCI-P3 compared to the Surface Pro 11’s 100%, 85%, and 97% at its best. Color accuracy is similar at a DeltaE of 0.98 versus 0.74, and both tablets are excellent. The Surface Pro 11’s display is brighter at 532 nits versus 394, and both have perfect blacks and insanely high contrast.

The iPad Pro 13 can’t be tested with our colorimeter, but it also has bright, accurate colors and it’s a tandem OLED panel with much higher brightness. That means it will provide better high dynamic range (HDR) performance than the Windows tablets.

Ultimately, you’ll find the ProArt PZ13’s display excellent for productivity use, creativity, and media consumption.

Audio is nothing special, with two side-firing speakers that provide just-OK audio. The Surface Pro 11 is similar, while the iPad Pro 13 has four speakers that provide louder and deeper sound.

The ProArt PZ13 is an excellent, long-lasting Windows tablet alternative

The Surface Pro 11 offers a more elegant design and some haptic feedback advantages. It’s easy to argue that overall, it’s a more refined Copilot+ detachable tablet. But that doesn’t mean the ProArt PZ13 isn’t also a great Windows on Arm tablet.

The Asus machine is just as fast, even when using a Qualcomm chipset that’s slower on paper, and it gets the same kind of battery life. The ProArt PZ13’s display is more colorful but not as bright. But for many people, its lower price will be the deciding factor.