Asus Zephyrus Duo Review – SO USEFUL but flawed..
This is the Zephyrus duo, a truly unique and innovative laptop that legitimately changed my feeling about using a laptop as my main machine. But, it’s got some first gen teething issues. Is it worth getting one anyway? Let’s find out. But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
The glaringly obvious talking point we have to start with is even in it’s name, “Duo”. Yes, it’s a dual screen laptop – and not the mythical (and impractical) Razer Project Valerie kind of way, no this works and it’s amazing. Up top you have a stunning 4K 60Hz panel that, believe it or not, covers OVER 100% of the AdobeRGB colour space. Seriously, this is one of the best panels I’ve seen, full stop. Not just on a laptop. Seriously, wow. Then, below that, above the keyboard is a 3840×1100 “ScreenPad”, which is both a touchscreen, and stylus capable display, which tilts up at a 13° angle with a beautifully designed hinge that lifts as you lift the main display.
Using the ScreenPad is pretty intuitive and you’ve got a few options. You can drag windows down and set them up in halves with the normal windows snap, you can also use it in thirds by lifting the window to the top of that display, or when you drag a window anywhere on the system, drop it on the pop up window to snap it to the bottom one.
Having a second display on a laptop, even a small-ish one like this, is game changing. Having explorer windows, system stats, discord open on it while editing or gaming, man. I can’t explain how much better it is. If you stream from a laptop, this is a complete must have. Seeing OBS open, if small and twitch chat, while playing games on the main display is just phenomenal. As a video editing machine, it’s perfect too. Having my timeline on the bottom, source and playback monitors, and footage bins on the top worked so, so much better than a single display.
It’s still a little clunky to use. The main display isn’t touchscreen which i think is a big missed opportunity and being forced to use the tiny, if intuitive, touchpad or a mouse instead of just dragging my finger around is annoying. The lower display is also a lot dimmer than the main screen, doesn’t have quite as good viewing angles, and thanks to being a stylus display has a bit of a haze to it. All of those are pretty minor compared to the benefit you get from having it and I imagine could be refined for a gen 2 model.
As for the rest of the machine, it’s pretty well suited to it’s goal of being the ultimate streamer/creator machine. It’s got the 10980HK 8 Core, an RTX 2080 Super Max Q, 32GB of 3200MHz RAM, and 2TB of NVME SSD space from 2 RAID 0 SSDs. Yes, that CPU does thermal throttle, especially when playing games, even though the tilted up display gives top down ventilation for the fans and does run pretty loud, but man it’s fast. Here’s some productivity and gaming benchmarks.
| AVG FPS | 1% Low FPS | 1% Low ms | |
| BFV | 109.44 | 98.71668 | 10.13 |
| COD MW | 115.68 | 88.80995 | 11.26 |
| PUBG | 142 | 89.12656 | 11.22 |
| Fortnite | 117.79 | 75.4717 | 13.25 |
| Cinebench | Points |
| 1T | 467 |
| nT | 4105 |
| Seconds | |
| Premiere 10 min clip | 300 |
| Blender BMW | 230 |
| Blender Shop | 118 |
| Blender Gooseberry | 1213 |
As for a gaming machine, this exact model probably isn’t the one you’d want. They also offer it with a 300Hz 1080p 3ms panel with G-SYNC, which is better than the, get this, 34ms white to black response time this thing had. Seriously mad ghosting. Like, really, really bad. Oh, and like 50ms of input lag, which is only beaten for the slowest ever award by.. The MSI Bravo 15. Low bar, I know. I can only hope the 300Hz model is better.
Interestingly, that 300Hz model only seems to come with the lower spec trim, a 10875H, RTX 2070 Super Max-Q, and 1TB of storage space instead. Minus the storage, that is the spec I’d recommend you get anyway, but if you want the absolute max performance, especially for editing or rendering, this model might be a better bet.
Sadly, both of these models are hardly cheap. The 300Hz model will set you back a cool 3 grand, with this 4K one being, well, 4K. But, if you were the sort of person who was eyeing up a Razer Blade Pro Advanced with the 300Hz display and the 2080 super, I would very, very strongly recommend you take a look at this instead. Even if you were going for the 2070 model, the extra ~500 or so is really, really worth it.
Yes having the keyboard that far forward is a bit awkward, and the aggressively small track pad that doubles as a num pad takes some getting used to, but extra usability, combined with decent performance, makes this a legitimately game changing laptop, at least for me. Of course, that’s my thoughts, but I would love to hear yours in the comments below.
-
TechteamGB Score
