Asus ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED Review – Powerful Dual Screen Laptop!

This might just be my favourite non-gaming laptop – ok not this specific model because it’s spec’d… badly… but the Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED in general. It’s got some quirks for sure, but as a whole package it works pretty well for almost any use case. The stunning high res 120Hz OLED, the functional 120Hz ScreenPad Plus, and an impressive amount of horsepower in a tiny chassis all work really well together as an excellent package. So, let’s take a look.

Let’s start with the displays – the primary of which is this gorgeous 2880×1800 120Hz OLED panel. It’s rated at 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 spectrum, although in my testing it came out a little better – and with an average DeltaE of just 0.87! It only peaked at around 350 nits of brightness though, down from the 500 nits the ScreenPad is now rated for. Both displays are touchscreens with stylus support – more on that in a sec – although the ScreenPad is a matte display while the OLED is a glossy finish.

Content on the OLED is just stunning. It’s vibrant, crisp and those deep, deep blacks make every other display look like you have cataracts – I can’t emphasise just how much I enjoy using this panel. It is 16:10 which some prefer, although personally I’d rather have width not height here. Happily being an OLED the black bars at the top and bottom fade into nothing as they are completely off – a party trick relatively few machines can match.

The ScreenPad on the other hand isn’t an OLED – I believe it’s an IPS panel with a quoted 500 nit peak brightness across its 12.7” display. The resolution matches the primary at 2880 wide, although only 864 pixels tall, and the same 120Hz refresh rate. Sadly this is one of the more jarring aspects – you get the rich, vibrant colours and deep blacks from the OLED, then you get a hazzed bright IPS panel that especially when it drops into the screensaver mode in a darker room has really noticeable IPS glow, especially compared to the pitch-black OLED above it. They just don’t match all that well. Now it’s no massive problem, you soon forget about it in actual use but it is worth knowing before you buy.

Lastly for the display I have to mention the interesting and weird response time results. Much like many other OLEDs myself and others have tested, the panel dips to black during a display refresh. In fact, it actually does it twice per frame, and equally strangely decides to never fully transition in the first frame too. It always stops just short of the ‘correct’ final level, then settles in as you’d expect. It’s a strange one, but regardless since this is an OLED the actual ‘response time’ as it were is instant.

Ok, let’s talk about something other than the screens… The performance! Yes, so this is new for this Pro model. Gone are the low power EVO chips like the i7-1165G7, instead we get up to an i9-12900H with 14 total cores – 6P8E with up to an 85W power limit, up to 32GB of LPDDR5-4800 RAM, and up to 2TB of PCIe Gen 4×4 storage, oh and you can even option this with dedicated graphics! It’s only an RTX 3050 Ti, but that can make a significant difference to the usability – especially in productivity apps like Premiere Pro. Now I said “up to” a lot there, because I don’t have.. Well.. any of that. I have an i7-12700H with 16GB of RAM and just 500GB of SSD space – and no dGPU.

Regardless of that though, the 12700H in this is the single fastest laptop CPU I’ve tested. Seriously. In Cinebench R23 single-threaded it’s a good 200 points clear of even the 11900H, Apple’s M1 Pro 10 core, and more like 300 points clear of AMD’s 5000 series mobile chips. In multi-threaded it manages to monster everything else – even the insane 11900H in Turbo mode which chugged back 120W of power – and this is ‘only’ in its performance 80W mode, not the unbearable 85W mode.

In Blender things look even better, managing to even beat out the Ryzen 5900HX’s sub-200 second result with a healthy lead to boot. Taking just shy of 3 minutes, it’s the fastest chip I’ve had in – although switching to the Gooseberry scene it does lag behind the miracle 5900HX by 30 seconds. That is still miles ahead of the entire rest of the pack though so I can’t say I’d be worried.

And in the Puget Bench suite, Premiere Pro nets a pretty dreadful score, mostly thanks to the complete lack of dedicated graphics and shared RAM. Don’t get me wrong, you certain can still edit on this spec, but it’s a lacklustre experience for sure. After Effects is much the same, scoring around half of every other machine. Photoshop brings it back though – not quite the fastest, not by a long shot, but much closer to the rest of the pack.

Of course, a chip like this isn’t overly happy drawing up to 85W in a chassis this small, and even with Asus’ new Active Aerodynamic System Ultra setup with even more space for the fans to breath it still can sound a bit like a jet taking off with quite a whiny tone to it. In normal operation though it’s not bad, and often turns its fans off entirely too which is nice. I wouldn’t say it’s all that obnoxious if you are just web browsing or word processing while on the go – which brings us nicely onto the portability.

This weighs in at just 1.7KG, comes with a nice carry sleeve and is plenty small to fit in most backpacks, so I’d say it checks the “portability” box nicely. The downside is that you don’t use USB C for charging, instead it’s a standard barrel plug meaning you’ll need to bring the wall adapter – although with around 5 hours of web browsing battery life at medium brightness on both displays, maybe not. It’s not quite “all day battery life”, but especially for a machine with this much practicality I don’t think it’s too bad.

Sadly with the small size Asus have opted to put as few ports on this as they can, stretching for a single USB A port on the right side, next to two USB C/Thunderbolt 4 ports, a single HDMI port on the back along with DC in and a micro-SD card slot, and a 4 pole headphone jack on the left side. That sounds like a lot if a Macbook is your reference-frame, but the single Type A port just killed me – especially for a “Pro” device.

One seemingly genuine “pro” item here is the included stylus, the Asus Pen 2.0. This rechargeable, tip-interchangeable pen feels genuinely premium and works very well with either display. Frustratingly the primary display wobbles like mad when you try and actually use it with the stylus, but if you want to use the ScreenPad as your drawing surface that works a lot better.

As a package, assuming you can get your hands on a model with more storage than my camera’s SD card and a dedicated GPU, this is one hell of a package. It probably costs an arm, a leg, a kidney and an eye, but if you want to be a power user on the go I’m not sure I can think of a better machine to do that on. The dual displays, especially in this form factor, coupled with the horsepower on tap, add to more than the sum of their parts and make an excellent usage experience. The mismatch of the two displays is a little jarring, the limited I/O is, well, limited, but it’s hard to deny this isn’t an excellent machine.