Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition review: The only laptop to woo me away from Apple 

Quick Take

Engineering a compact laptop without too many functional compromises is hard. Making one that is targeted at content creation is harder. How do you balance firepower inside a small chassis? What about the battery uptake and thermals? And how do you make it appealing to the audience when there are plenty of options in the market, including the venerable MacBooks? Well, you go all-in. 

With the ProArt PX13, Asus went all-in and delivered a banger. 

Now, ideally, you shouldn’t care too much about a co-branded laptop. With the PX13 GoPro Edition, the situation is no different. But on its own merit, this laptop is no less appealing to creators. Whether it’s video editing, bulk image creation, or even local AI processes, this laptop can handle it well without breaking a sweat. Or crashing down to a sloth pace. 

When I first came across this machine, my eyes rolled. Co-branded laptops are usually the tech equivalent of a celebrity perfume. A gaudy logo slapped onto a chassis, a custom wallpaper, a hotkey nobody asked for, and a $400 markup for the privilege. I’ve reviewed those laptops. I’ve returned them quickly, and I’m tired, too.

So I’ll save you the suspense and admit I was wrong. The Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition is not a fan-service machine wearing a workstation costume. It’s a workstation wearing a fan-service costume, and after three weeks of cutting 4K timelines, running local LLMs, dragging it through four airports, and sketching on a couch in tablet mode, I’ve fallen in love with this compact beast.

It’s also a laptop of bizarre paradoxes. It costs $2,999 (yep), packs 128GB of unified RAM (more memory than my first three PCs combined), and has an integrated graphics card that can outrun a discrete RTX 4000 series while living in a chassis that fits in a sling bag. It also has a 60Hz screen in 2026, which is the kind of decision that makes you check blink twice, think thrice, and check the specs sheet one more time. Moreover, under load, the fans can quickly get vexing without earplugs.

Battery life is fine until you actually use it for what it’s built for, and then it isn’t. If you’re a video pro, an on-location creator, or a software developer who wants a real workstation that doesn’t require a rolling suitcase, this machine is quite a pleasant (read: practical) revelation. For everyone else, it might be a bit too extreme, and that’s coming from someone who likes extreme.

Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition design and build quality: It’s plain gorgeous

I’m a sucker for gear that feels like it can survive a drop without ending its life. I’ve scuffed and broken more laptops than I have the guts to admit (or tell my father, for that matter). The Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition can handle someone like me. A majority of creator-focused laptops feel like a single bumped corner away from a warranty claim, and that’s because they focus more on sleek aesthetics than practical durability.

The PX13 GoPro Edition is the opposite. It feels like a piece of equipment, not jewelry. Instead of the smooth, fingerprint-magnet finishes we usually see on high-end laptops, Asus went with a ribbed metal lid that mimics the textured front of a GoPro action cam. It’s bold, matte black, and unapologetically tactical. Run your thumb across it, and you can feel the grooves catch.

It’s not quite the same satisfying micro-resistance you get from the rubberized clamp of a real action cam, but it gets pretty close. It does, however, get grimy against oily fingers. The kit tips the scales at about 3.06 lbs (1.39kg), but I certainly didn’t feel the heft hurting me at all. It felt just barely heavier than the MacBook Air.

It’s not the lightest 13-incher out there. That distinction goes to the latest Zenbooks and MacBook Airs of the world. But where it loses by a few ounces, it makes up for it with other hardware perks. Pick it up by a corner, and there’s zero flex. The keyboard deck doesn’t bow under a palm rest, and the lid doesn’t ripple when you grab it.

Asus treated this machine to an MIL-STD-810H certification, which is the kind of certification you nod at on a spec sheet and then forget about until you actually slide a laptop off a passenger seat onto an airport floor. Brands like to market it as military-grade. That’s not fully accurate, but compared to an average laptop, these laptops can brush off drops and scuffs with ease.

The 360-degree hinge is the other unsung hero. It’s stiff, resistant, and predictably smooth without any mushy mid-travel or wobble. Tent mode is solid enough to use on a tray table without rocking. Tablet mode is where the form factor really earns its keep. At 13 inches and three pounds, this is one of the few hybrid workstations you can comfortably draw without your arms going numb in minutes.

The GoPro details are everywhere if you look for them, and Asus mostly stays on the right side of the brand integration. The embossed “GoProArt” logo on the lid is subtle. The keyboard backlight glows in that signature electric blue instead of white. The F8 key is a dedicated GoPro hotkey that summons the GoPro Player and can pull footage straight off a connected Hero.

There’s a thoughtfulness to the whole engineering endeavor here that I didn’t initially expect. This isn’t a regular ProArt PX13 with a different sticker. It’s a ProArt PX13 designed from the ground up to look and feel like it belongs in a gear bag with a tripod, a drone controller, and a GoPro camera. Whether or not you’re its target customer, you can tell that a true enthusiast made the design calls. It’s absolutely eye-catching and practically gorgeous.

Score: 9/10

Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition display: Vivid wins, vexing losses

The 13.3-inch 3K OLED panel is simultaneously this laptop’s greatest strength and its most infuriating flaw. I’ve gone back and forth on it more times than I want to admit. OLED is ideal for a reason, and this panel is a particularly good one. Blacks look lovely without any undue backlight bleeding or uniformity issues.

Color accuracy is essentially calibrated-monitor territory, with 100% DCI-P3 coverage and Pantone validation. Asus actually ships it tuned out of the box rather than leaving you to fiddle with profiles. For photo editing, color grading, and any kind of paint or design work, it is mesmerizing. Moreover, the touch response is snappy, and that applies to the bundled stylus as well as your fingertips.

The included Asus Pen 3.0 delivers the standard 4,096 levels of pressure detection and almost no perceivable lag. It’s not quite the Wacom territory, but it’s as good as it gets in the laptop territory. The 3K resolution (2880 x 1800) on a 13.3-inch panel is abundant in terms of pixel density, and you won’t be left yearning for a dash of extra sharpness.

This is where the happy tale ends.

This is a $2,999 laptop, and it’s a sin that the beautiful OLED screen is locked at 60Hz. Once you’ve tasted 120Hz on a Windows machine, or grown used to the ProMotion panel on a MacBook Pro, the 165Hz panels on mid-tier gaming rigs, or even the 90Hz screens on budget phones, a 60Hz panel feels visibly slow.

While dragging app windows across the desktop, I could easily feel the pixel-level stutters. Scroll through a long document, and you notice the frames are hurting your eyes. It’s not unusable by any stretch of the imagination, but if it were just a tad faster, every computing experience would be buttery smooth.

It’s a shame this machine is geared towards creators with GoPros, who routinely shoot 120fps, 240fps, even 400fps in slo-mo modes. Of course, you cannot preview any of that natively at full speed on this screen. You’ll get the data and all the color, but to truly enjoy them, you’ll be plugging into a faster external panel or resort to downsampling.

For a laptop sold to creators, I can’t quite wrap my head around this miss. If Asus had shipped a 120Hz version of this OLED panel, this experience would have been dramatically different. Another hiccup is the brightness levels, which max out at a paltry 400 nits. For comparison, the MacBook Pro can muster 1,000 nits sustained brightness on its mini-LED display, and the difference is noticeable.

Score: 8/10

Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition ports and connectivity: It’s fairly versatile here

Usually, when you compress a laptop down to a 13-inch form factor, the Port Apocalypse happens. I use a MacBook Air, so I know the pain well. You’re lucky if you get two USB-C ports, without any apology from the manufacturer. Asus, thankfully, did not go down that unholy computing route.

On the left, you get a dedicated DC jack, even though the laptop is happy to charge via USB-C if you’d rather travel light. Next, you’re also treated to a full-size HDMI 2.1 port, a USB-4 Type-C port pushing 40Gbps, and a 3.5mm audio jack. On the right, there’s another USB-4 Type-C, a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, and a microSD card reader.

That microSD slot is a small point of contention, but not much to fuss about. For the intended audience, it makes sense. Most GoPro-havers I know carry a microSD card, but if you’re a stills photographer who loves their SD cards, be prepared for the proverbial dongle life. Asus seems to have some unshakeable clarity of thought for this machine. It’s a video and motion-first machine, and traditional photographers are not the primary audience. Knowing the rest of the laptop, that’s the right call.

It still stings, though.

The HDMI 2.1 alone is worth a small parade of its own. Plugging directly into HDMI and watching the second screen pop up for the first time is a huge relief from digital anxiety. Overall, neat job with the I/O selection on this one, Asus!

Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition performance: A loud, fire-breathing dragon

Raw performance is where the Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition stops being a cutesy convertible and truly evolves into its intended form, emerging as a legitimate threat to desktop PCs. I do not say that lightly. The heart of this machine is the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, a sixteen-core silicon in AMD’s high-end Strix Halo portfolio. Then we have the integrated Radeon GPU that has no business performing the way it does.

And here’s the fun part. The actual headline isn’t the CPU. It’s the 128GB of LPDDR5X RAM, up to 96GB of which can be allocated to the Radeon 8060S integrated graphics as VRAM. In a world where Apple is still selling “Pro” laptops with 16GB of unified memory as a baseline and charging hand over fist for upgrades, the fact that you can spec a 13-inch Windows convertible with 128GB of unified memory is charmingly ridiculous.

In CPU-based benchmark tests, it rubs shoulders with Intel’s Core Ultra 9 silicon and leaps ahead of the base M5 at multi-core synthetic runs. Expectedly, single-core performance is where Apple still maintains a comfortable lead. In graphics capabilities, however, it smokes Apple and leaps into the gaming laptop category with discrete Nvidia GPUs.

3DMark TimeSpy benchmark put it slightly behind a Lenovo machine with an Nvidia RTX 5060 inside, in case you want to compare with the latest-gen mobile graphics cards. As far as games go, Cyberpunk 2077 managed over 60 FPS at FHD, and the situation was similar with Elden Ring. That’s pretty impressive, even when seen from the lens of a gaming laptop.

In real-world testing, this setup essentially matched the performance of an RTX 4070 mobile laptop in the workloads I care about, and absolutely smoked it in any task that’s memory-bound. I ran a local large language model entirely on this laptop and still had firepower to spare. That is not a sentence I expected to write about a 13-inch convertible in 2026.

Premiere Pro and DaVinci worked smoothly. I scrubbed through a 10-minute 4K timeline with three layers of effects and color grading, and didn’t run into sustained stutters or crashes. DaVinci Resolve was particularly snappy. In Adobe Lightroom, batch editing felt buttery smooth. Turning over to games, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, on high settings at native resolution, sat in the high 50s — a number that thicker, heavier, gamer-coded laptops sometimes can’t reach.

There’s a category of machines that exists between ultraportable and mobile workstation, and it usually involves making a tough compromise on one or the other. The Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition is the first laptop in a long time that feels like it has picked both. The catch, however, is the noise.

To keep the Strix Halo chip from melting through the chassis, the fans have to work, and when they work, you will hear it. In Performance mode, they’re loud, serving a high-pitched whir that deserves a pair of headphones to drown it. In quieter modes, they’re polite, but if you’re actually leaning on the silicon, you’re going to hear it.

This isn’t unique to Asus, and it isn’t disqualifying. Every performance-first machine in this size class makes the same trade, but it’s worth flagging. If you’re imagining a silent video editing session in a coffee shop, you might want to reset your expectations.

Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition keyboard, trackpad, and webcam: A mostly successful endeavor

In the obsession over silicon and chassis, the everyday surfaces of a laptop sometimes get overlooked. Asus skirted around that pitfall. The keyboard is fantastic. Key travel is on the deeper side for an ultraportable, with crisp tactile feedback and barely any mushy character to it. The layout is full-size, with no weirdly compressed arrow keys or sacrificed punctuation.

I wrote this whole review on it without a second thought. The trackpad is also generous for a 13-inch chassis, and it’s engineered fairly well. It’s not quite in the MacBook Pro territory, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to love.

The 1080p IR webcam is not embarrassing, which is a high bar these days. Image quality is usable for calls, and low-light performance is just about decent. It definitely could’ve been better. A sweet perk is Windows Hello, which logs you in faster than a fingerprint reader would with the IR face scan. The mic array is competent, while the speakers are sufficiently loud. Of course, they’re crammed in a thin and light chassis, so don’t expect any soul-pleasing bass or refined audio with the volume levels cranked to max.

The software story is mostly clean, which is a low bar Asus often manages to limbo under. The bundled MyAsus software is reasonable. Driver experience has been clean, and no random update has broken anything in weeks, which is nothing short of a miracle on a Windows machine.

Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition battery life and charging: It’s just passable, at best

The PX13 GoPro Edition packs a 73Wh battery, which is pretty generous for a 13-inch chassis but not record-breaking. In real-world use, the numbers split sharply along usage lines. For light office work spread across Microsoft Teams, Slack, a half-dozen Chrome tabs, and Spotify, I consistently saw around 12 hours.

That’s solid, but nothing extraordinary. The current crop of Panther Lake and Snapdragon X2 series machines is doing far better. For pro use, the numbers fall off a cliff. Render a 4K timeline, run a local LLM, or fire up a 3D workload, and you’re looking at 2.5 to 3 hours, at best.

That’s the unsurprising trade-off you sign up for when you ask a 13-inch chassis to behave like a workstation. Alas, there’s no clever workaround to bend the laws of electrochemistry when a tiny machine is pushing all the firepower. It’s good for a Windows workstation.

It is not going to touch the 15-plus hours you see on the latest Apple Silicon MacBooks, and pretending otherwise would be unwise. The included 200W charging brick is reasonably compact for the wattage, but it adds another pound to your bag. Unfortunately, you’ll need it for a quick top-up. Thankfully, USB-C PD charging works flawlessly, so a standard 100W fast charger will keep it ticking and juicing up, slowly.

Should you buy it?

The Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition is not a mainstream laptop. It isn’t trying to be, and treating it like one would be doing it a disservice. It’s an over-built, over-specced solution to a very specific problem. For the people who have that problem, it is one of the most exciting machines on the market.

It’s a 13-inch convertible powerhouse that tries to do everything at once and almost pulls it off. It’s built like a tank, and by that, I mean the kind of weight and density that can quietly survive the chaos of a backpack. The headline silicon is AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 paired with a frankly ludicrous 128GB of LPDDR5X memory and Radeon 8060S integrated graphics that punch comfortably above their weight class.

But it’s a device of sharp contrasts. The 3K OLED touchscreen is gorgeous, color-accurate, and yet locked at a 60Hz refresh rate. Battery life is respectable for what it is, but no Apple Silicon machine is sweating. On top of it, the fans get loud, and the price is utterly aspirational. At $2,999, this is a specialized tool for a very specific niche.

If you’re a video professional, a field-deployed AI engineer or researcher, or any kind of creator who actually works on location, feel blessed. The 128GB of RAM, the rugged convertible chassis, and the surprisingly well-considered port selection make this a one-of-a-kind tool for local AI inference, heavy video editing, and any workflow where being plugged into a desk for ten hours a day is not an option.

Skip it if you’re a student, a casual user, or someone whose hardest workload is a few dozen browser tabs and a Teams call. The $2,999 price tag is a hard barrier, and the 60Hz screen is a potent letdown for almost anyone. There are better, cheaper, and quieter options if your needs are mainstream. So, here’s the bottom line.

The Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition is an unapologetically weird laptop, and that’s exactly why it works. It picked a niche and built every decision around that user. The 60Hz panel and the loud fans keep it from being a slam-dunk, and at $2,999, it’s asking for a multi-year commitment. But for the right person, this is the most interesting 13-inch machine I’ve used in a long time.

Why not try

HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14 (roughly $3,000) — A head-to-head competitor on the market, packing the same AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 silicon, a different chassis, and a different audience. The ZBook Ultra is a traditional clamshell with HP’s mature workstation pedigree, ISV certifications, and enterprise manageability, but no convertible hinge, no GoPro flair, no MIL-STD bragging. With this one, you’ll trade the touchscreen, the stylus, and the rugged personality for slightly steadier sustained performance and a generic look.

MacBook Pro 14 (M5 Pro) (approximately $2,800) — The 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro chip, 48GB of unified memory, and a 1TB SSD is a beast. The trade-offs are obvious, though. You get easily 5–7 more hours of real-world battery life, a 120Hz ProMotion Mini-LED display that humiliates the PX13’s 60Hz panel, and the kind of fanless that makes the Asus sound like a leaf blower. You give up Windows compatibility, the convertible form factor, the stylus, and any chance at 128GB of memory short of a much pricier M5 Max configuration.

Razer Blade 14 (2026) (currently at $2,900) — The Blade 14 lands at almost exactly the same price as the PX13 GoPro Edition and approaches the same problem from the opposite direction. You get a discrete Nvidia RTX 50-series GPU, a crisp 240Hz QHD+ OLED display, and the kind of all-aluminum unibody build Razer has been refining for a decade. What you lose is the convertible form factor, the absurd 128GB memory ceiling, and the chassis toughness. This one is more gamer-friendly than a creative chum.

How we tested

For a spell of three weeks, I carried the Asus ProArt PX13 GoPro Edition as my primary laptop. In that duration, it served as my primary computing machine, handling 12-14 hours of Chrome usage across three windows with a dozen tabs in each one, Claude for app development, and Davinci Resolve for editing video clips.

My usage of Adobe’s suite was mostly restricted to daily image edits and some light work in Premiere Pro. The laptop was consistently used in Balanced mode when on the move, and when plugged in, it was pushed in Performance mode by default.

For testing display quality, I tested it outdoors in a park, a well-lit cafe, and a dark room without any specialized software. Basic quality tests were performed using the online EIZO and Blur Busters UFO Motion tests. Screen brightness usually hovered between 60-70% while working, with color profile set to standard.