23/06/2022
Design and build
At just £149, the RØDE NTH-100 offer a lot for the money. For example, the earpads are made from high-grade memory foam and upholstered with luxurious Alcantara material. This plush fabric is often used on luxury sports cars and is superbly soft to the touch as well as being highly breathable. Beneath the Alcantara skin, there’s a layer of CoolTech gel that absorbs and dissipates heat from the wearer’s ears efficiently. The effect is like putting on a pair of air-conditioned headphones.The dynamic drivers used in the RØDE NTH-100 have a custom voice coil made using four layers of ultra-high-tension aluminium alloy attached to an ultra-stiff and triple-layer Mylar diaphragm. Along with a rare-earth neodymium magnet, these three components ensure the optimum acoustic and electrical performance with low levels of distortion and an accurate response across the entire frequency range.
Competitor products include the evergreen Audio Technica ATH-M50 and Sennheiser’s HD25 headphones. The RØDE NTH-100 score well against both its competitors in terms of comfort and audio performance. The design makes these headphones ideally suited for podcasting or recording with an audio recorder or a video camera. They are certainly comfortable enough to wear all day long.
21/06/2022
Asus ROG Flow X13
Gaming laptops are usually big lumps that don’t do much travelling, but the Asus ROG Flow X13 flips that convention on its head: it has a 13.4in display inside a body that’s just 16mm thick and weighs 1.3kg.
Of course that restricts what hardware can fit inside, but Asus has thought of that too – because this machine is sold alongside a graphics dock with an RTX 3080. The laptop alone costs £1500, and the dock increases that price to £2600.
The X13 is tiny and impressive. Its RTX 3050 Ti graphics core can handle most games at decent framerates, and it has a brilliant AMD Ryzen 9 processor that slices through work tasks. It’s also got a fantastic display: the 16:10 aspect ratio adds height, it’s a touchscreen, and it has amazing contrast and accurate colours.
Impressively, this is a hybrid, so it can swing into tent and tablet modes. It even has good speakers and a crisp keyboard, and is robust thanks to aluminium and magnesium construction.
There are downsides, though. The X13 doesn’t have many ports, exterior surfaces can get hot, it’s sometimes just as loud as big gaming laptops, and battery life is only mediocre; and while the RTX 3050 Ti offers reasonable pace, it won’t run the top games at high quality levels.
But that’s where the XG dock comes in. That RTX 3080 has the power to handle any gaming task, even if you output to an external display with a higher resolution or refresh rate. The dock also provides loads of extra connectivity and is nice and easy to use – it just slots into a bespoke port on the laptop’s left-hand edge.
The dock weighs 1kg, so slinging that plus the laptop in a bag means you’ll be carrying as much weight as a conventional gaming notebook – but in a smaller and more versatile package. And that’s really what this combination is all about: flexibility for more than just gaming.
