ASUS ProArt GoPro Edition PX13 review: An incredible if pricy Windows creator laptop

With its ProArt lineup, ASUS has commendably addressed a glaring hole in the PC market by targeting video editors and other creative pros. Its latest model even uses a popular camera marque in its name: the ProArt GoPro Edition PX13. It’s a true co-branding exercise, with GoPro-like styling, a dedicated GoPro hotkey, mil-spec durability for extreme outdoor users and 12 months of GoPro’s Cloud Plus Premium.

It has a lot going for it on the inside, too. The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor offers 16 Zen 5 cores with integrated Radeon 8060S Graphics (40 cores) and AMD Ryzen AI with up to 50 NPU TOPS. It packs a relatively small but pixel-dense 13-inch 2,880 x 1,800 OLED convertible 360 touch display, 1TB of storage and an impressive 128GB of unified memory.

The rub, as you might expect with all that RAM, is the price. The ProArt GoPro Edition PX13 costs $3,000, while a version with the same processor but half the memory is $2,800. That’s high-end MacBook Pro money, and while the ProArt is a good PC creator machine, it falls short of its Apple counterpart in terms of performance and usability.

Design

In place of the ProArt P13’s smooth lines, the ProArt GoPro Edition comes with a ribbed metal back that’s designed to look like the front of a GoPro Hero 13. It also has GoPro-like ridges on the hinge and plastic above the keyboard, along with GoPro and ProArt branding. The rugged design may appeal to the extreme sports crowd, but I’d prefer something a bit sleeker.

The laptop is relatively light at 3.06 pounds, but the dedicated 200W power brick adds an extra pound of weight. Despite the small size, it offers MIL-STD 810H military-grade durability, so it can handle hot and humid conditions while surviving 500Hz vibrations and multiple four-inch drops while running. To help keep the laptop safe outside, ASUS includes a protective padded sleeve with a braided pouch to tuck a selfie stick or another accessory.

The 2,880 x 1,800 OLED touchscreen is nice but not super bright, with up to 400 nits of brightness or 500 nits in HDR mode. That’s the usual tradeoff for OLED compared to super bright MiniLED displays. However, it has deep blacks and very high color accuracy of Delta < 1 with 100 percent DCI-P3 coverage, along with Dolby Vision support, so it’s great for photo and video work or entertainment.

The ProArt is a 360-degree convertible model and ships with an ASUS Pen and Pen charger. That makes it a good option for graphic artists who want to tent the screen or fold it around to use in tablet mode for sketching or painting. The ASUS Pen works well, and though it’s not as accurate as Wacom or other dedicated pen devices, it has nice haptic feedback when you perform actions in the app.

The ProArt GoPro Edition’s keyboard is excellent, with a nice amount of travel for typing or gaming. The touchpad is also one of the better ones I’ve used on a PC thanks to the quality tactile feel. The top left of the touchpad contains ASUS’s control dial designed for jogging video footage or adjusting colors, but it’s a bit fussy and gimmicky.

For ports, you get HDMI, 3.5mm audio, USB-A 3.2 and two USB-C 4.0 with power delivery that allow up to 130 watts of charging. The laptop weirdly comes with a microSD slot to load GoPro footage straight from the camera, but it would be better to have a regular SD port and microSD adapter. As for wireless and audio, it offers Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 and Dolby Atmos support.

Performance

Built on TSMC’s 4nm line, the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is AMD’s most powerful APU designed to blend performance and low power consumption. It’s married to a Radeon 8060S GPU with 40 compute units (equivalent to an NVIDIA RTX 4060, AMD says) that makes it ideal for creative chores, AI processing and gaming. This unit also comes with 128GB of unified LPDDR5X RAM that’s soldered directly to the motherboard, shared between the CPU and GPU. Given today’s RAM prices, that amount of memory no doubt contributes to the ProArt GoPro Edition’s high price.

AMD finally got its act together for video encoding and decoding. The Ryzen AI Max+’s GPU supports most 8- and 10-bit MP4 codecs, including H.264, H.265, VP9 and AV1. That means you can play back nearly all MP4 or Quicktime camera video files in real time, including the 8K H.265 files recorded by a GoPro Hero 13. At the same time, the large number of cores and threads (16 and 32) helps the ProArt GoPro Edition render certain VFX and do color adjustments quickly. The 1TB of NVMe SSD storage is limited to PCIe 4.0, but it’s relatively speedy with 6.55 GB/s read and 5.86 GB/s write speeds — easily fast enough for 8K video playback.

All of that made video work a breeze in DaVinci Resolve 20, Adobe Premiere Pro or GoPro’s Player that can be activated by a special hotkey on the ASUS laptop. Actions like color correction work in real time as well, and 4K H.264 exports can also be performed quickly.

That said, some functions like OpenFX and stabilization would work better with a more powerful discrete GPU. Also, unlike my MacBook Pro, the ProArt GoPro Edition’s fans need to engage frequently under intense workloads, creating a lot of noise and killing the battery quickly if the unit isn’t plugged in.

For other apps, including Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom Classic, the ASUS ProArt is ideal. It’s very responsive and the touch display and pen support fine masking or drawing work, something you can’t do on a MacBook Pro.

The ProArt also handles synthetic benchmarks well for a PC with an integrated GPU. The single/multi Geekbench 6 CPU score of 2,219/19,088 shows the benefit of 16 processor cores. The 93,108 Geekbench 6 GPU mark isn’t that far behind Acer’s NVIDIA RTX 5070-equipped Predator Titan 14 AI. Geekbench AI scores were also up there with the best laptops. However, Handbrake video encoding was slower than several MacBook M4 laptops I’ve tested.

For gaming, it had some of the higher laptop scores I’ve seen on several 3DMark tests (Wildlife Extreme and Port Royal Ray Tracing). It also did pretty darn well on Cyberpunk 2077, hitting 82 fps at 1080p and 60 fps at 1440p in Ultra mode. Considering the machine’s small size, those framerates are really good. However, the laptop is held back gaming-wise by the OLED display that tops out at 500 nits and just 60Hz.

A big benefit of the 128GB of fast unified memory is that you can run AI models locally for improved privacy. While the ProArt GoPro Edition normally allocates 64GB of memory to the CPU and splits the rest between the CPU and iGPU, you can dedicate up to 96GB of memory to the GPU for extra large AI applications via the MyASUS app.

Another plus of this APU is the battery life. The ProArt GoPro Edition lasted a solid 11:31 hours on the PCMark 10 Modern Office battery rundown test, besting all rivals with similar performance. That tells me that AMD is narrowing the performance-per-watt gap with Apple’s silicon to improve gaming and content creation for PCs on battery power alone.

Wrap-up

ASUS is one of the few PC manufacturers trying to compete with Apple in the creator market, and with the ProArt GoPro Edition laptop, it has largely succeeded. This model offers excellent performance and battery life, a huge amount of memory, a very nice OLED HDR display, a nice range of ports and an excellent keyboard and trackpad.

It easily handled my typical video and photo editing chores, even on battery power alone, and the included GoPro features like the Storyblocks cloud storage are a nice option for action cam users. The convertible configuration and touchscreen with pen option are also useful to artists and photo editors.

However, this laptop is not cheap at $3,000, which is the same price as a high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro M4 Pro. The latter offers superior battery life, better overall performance on apps like DaVinci Resolve and a far better macOS user experience than the hot mess that is currently Windows 11. However, if you want a Windows PC with a touchscreen, I think the ASUS ProArt GoPro Edition laptop is the best creator model you can get right now.