Asus Zephyrus Duo 16 Review – A rather weird machine….

Man this is a weird machine – mostly in a good way. The spec I have is pretty weird, rocking a Ryzen 9 6900HX CPU with 64GB of DDR5-4800 RAM, two 2TB PCIe Gen 4 SSDs in RAID 0 making for an ultra-fast 4TB drive, and an RTX 3080 Ti. This spec is eye-wateringly expensive, coming in at an INSANE £4,300. But before you click off, you’ll be happy to know they sell a MUCH more reasonable spec with a 6800H and 3070 Ti instead, although a pretty megre 16GB of RAM, but with a healthy 2TB SSD still, all for a more reasonable £2,700. That’s…. Still a lot, I know, but this is one hell of a machine. Let’s take a look at how this insane spec performs!

I feel I need to preface these results with a bit of a warning. My testing on this didn’t exactly go to plan. I encountered what I can only assume are numerous bugs throughout the system, but specifically for gaming, some games seem to be running like absolute trash. I can’t work out if that’s because they are running on the iGPU instead of the 3080 Ti or what, and it didn’t help that my first set of results were run on the hottest day recorded in British history. I tried re-running my benchmarks on a cooler day, but I was getting significantly WORSE performance, consistently, so I’m out of time and energy to chase what’s wrong with this.

With that said, CSGO was the single most affected title, running at around 200FPS at 1080p low settings, which is about as good as a 5600H and 3060 in the Acer Nitro 5. Yeah, not great. Cyberpunk on the other hand had the best performance I’ve ever seen, over 10FPS clear of the Zephyrus M16 in their turbo modes. Lower 1% low figures though, meaning a less stable experience. Watchdogs Legion sits at a somewhat reasonable, if pretty low for the spec, 100 FPS average pretty much in both modes, and again suffering in the 1% low figures. Fortnite is again a pretty decent result, second only to the M16 Turbo result, and this time records a pretty decent 1% low set. Microsoft flight is again low for the spec but generally decent, running a touch behind the Aorus 17 XE4. Lastly in Shadow of the Tomb Raider it’s again pretty chart-topping performance, only behind the M16 Turbo result, and only by 2 FPS. Still hurting in the 1% low figures though.

Of course, those results were at 1080p for the sake of accurate comparison, but at the native 2560×1600 16:10 resolution you of course get a bit less out – still over 60 FPS everywhere with most titles pushing up to or past 100 FPS.

Now, that’s great and all, but one of the other benefits of a machine like this is for content creation too. For content creation, you’ll be happy to know that the 6900HX is a pretty decent option. In Cinebench it does end up running behind the 12700H and 12900H, but in blender it does a great job of catching up, and even overtaking all but the 135W 12900H in the M16. Premiere offers a compelling result, although After Effects is strangely lagging. Finally in Photoshop it scores reasonably well, if not the highest I’ve seen even from a Ryzen CPU.

Now we can get onto the fun bit, the display. This is a MiniLED backlit, I believe IPS style LCD, panel, that can hit as high as 1100 nits, and has 512 zone local dimming making for a rather impressive viewing experience. It came out-of-the-box calibrated to well under an average DeltaE of 2, with closing on 100% coverage of the DCI-P3 spectrum, which converts to a rather excellent viewing experience. The colours really pop, even with the measured SDR brightness at just shy of 700 nits it’s still a vibrant, rich look that genuinely makes the best of whatever content – or games – you happen to be viewing.

The local dimming can be a bit of an issue, as even with 512 zones you can see haloing on dark backgrounds. Asus seems to be doing some trickery here, where on small objects (like your mouse cursor), when over completely dark backgrounds it keeps the brightness as low as it can to reduce how visible the haloing is. If I’m being honest, I had no problems with the local dimming when in actual use. Sure, it isn’t technically perfect, but I think it’s good enough for you to not notice those technical limitations.

As for the response times, Asus claims this panel has a “3ms or less” response time – and with the overdrive setting enabled, the high speed footage I captured would generally agree. Being pedantic it’s more like 5 or 6 ms, but it is within the refresh rate window. But what happens if I change the shutter speed of my camera down to 1/10000? Oh, it’s flickering like mad! My estimates put this as pulsing the backlight on and off every 20us, or around 50,000Hz. While I don’t like PWM backlights, 50kHz is pretty decent. Sadly I can’t get usable measurements from my OSRTT unit, as, well, this is what the data looks like. My smoothing function works remarkably well to generate some data, but it’s just far far too noisy to get anything good from. Some rare transitions mostly work out so you get a somewhat clear 4ms result, but others are just too messy and end up reporting more like 60 ms which we can see from the highspeed shouldn’t be the case.

When not hampered by poor performance, the gaming experience is great. The screen feels snappy and decently smooth, and of course remarkably crisp being 1600p in a 16” form factor.

When it comes to the screenpad, the obvious benefit of having a second display is whether you are gaming and you want to have Discord or your stream and chat open, or you are editing videos and can make use of the extra screen real estate for a smoother editing experience, either way more space is more better. Asus has redesigned the hinge again though, this time having the ScreenPad sliding backwards towards the main screen, and tilting up even further, giving even more space between the space and the air intakes. It’s an all-round win really! The only catch is that the matte finish for the touchscreen is a little off-putting – as is the brightness difference with the ScreenPad maxing out at around 500 nits.

I/O wise I wouldn’t say this was jam-packed. You get two USB A ports, one on the back and one on the left which if you happen to need to have the right angle charger pointed towards the front of the laptop means it tries to snap your USB A cables constantly. On top of the Type A you have two type C ports, HDMI, a MicroSD card reader, RJ45 ethernet, a headphone jack, and DC in. Battery wise you get a 90Whr unit which isn’t bad, although with the MiniLED backlight and a second display, the battery life isn’t exactly mind blowing.

So, for £4,300, or the more reasonable £2,700, is it worth picking this thing up? My experience with it actually somewhat leads me away from saying yes. The mix of bugs, both performance, the touchscreen glitching out, their “Asus Dial” software inconsistently launching, and plenty more little things just make it a frustrating experience for me. The 3080 Ti seems like an utterly pointless choice, as even when it was on-form I was still getting less performance than a 3070 Ti, for well over a thousand pounds less cash. I still do like the concept of their dual screen design, although I’m still not quite sure how practical it is – having the keyboard right at the edge and the touchpad crushed into a small, albeit fairly ergonomic, corner just doesn’t seem great unless you can use this on a desk 24/7 – in which case why not just use a desktop? The massive power brick definitely hampers portability, so I’m not sure. It’s definitely not bad, and if you end up with one I think you’ll have a great time, but this model just isn’t screaming “amazing” to me.