Asus Zenbook Duo review: a dual-screen laptop worth buying

Asus has two configurations of the Zenbook Duo. The $1,500 base configuration includes an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and two 14.0-inch FHD+ OLED panels running at 60Hz. Spend just $200 more, and you get a Core i9 185H, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and two 14.0-inch 3K OLED panels at 120Hz.

Foldable PCs have smaller virtual top and bottom displays that create smaller clamshell laptops. The Zenbook Duo isn’t so limited. It sports two 14.0-inch 16:10 OLED panels in one of two resolution choices, Full HD+ (1920 x 1200) and 2.8K (2880 x 1800). The higher-resolution panels add the benefit of running at up to 120Hz, while the lower-resolution screens are limited to 60Hz. Subjectively, both display options provided bright, colorful images with OLED’s usual inky blacks. But the FHD+ panels weren’t as sharp, with noticeable pixelation in text. If, like me, you prefer the sharpest text possible, you’ll want to opt for the higher-resolution display.

According to my colorimeter, all displays are excellent. The FHD+ version had slightly better colors on its primary panel, at 100% of both sRGB and AdobeRGB and 99% of DCI-P3 versus 96% of AdobeRGB and 100% of DCI-P3 for the secondary panel. Accuracy was lower than some OLED panels at a DeltaE of 1.37 and 1.07 (1.0 or less is considered excellent), respectively, and brightness was good, but not great at 371 and 365 nits. Blacks were perfect on both, with incredibly high contrast. The 2.8K panels had similar brightness, slightly wider colors, and greater accuracy at a DeltaE of 1.01 and 0.67.

Regardless of your chosen model, you’ll get spectacular colors and awesome contrast that will please productivity users, creators, and media consumers alike. High dynamic range (HDR) content will look great, although brightness isn’t high enough to do it full justice. Only Mini-LED displays, like those on Apple’s MacBook Pros, offer enough brightness for the best HDR performance.

I reviewed the Zenbook Duo’s entry-level and high-level configurations, which use Intel Meteor Lake 14th-gen chipsets. I measured performance of the 28-watt Core Ultra 7 155H with 16 cores (six Performance, eight Efficient, and two Low Power Efficient) and 22 threads running at up to 4.8 GHz, with 16GB of RAM. I also tested the Core Ultra 9 185H that has the same core and thread count, runs up to 5.1GHz, and consumes 45 watts and has 32GB of RAM.  The Zenbook Duo is the first laptop we’ve tested with the Core Ultra 9 185H.

It’s not often that we have a chance to test different chipsets in otherwise identical laptops. The Zenbook Duo is, at heart, a thin-and-light laptop, which means it has limited space to move air and keep things cool. That means a higher-power chip like the Core Ultra 9 185H won’t necessarily perform that much better than the lower-power Core Ultra 7 155H. In our suite of benchmarks, the Zenbook Duo yielded some unsurprising and inconsistent results.

In our CPU-intensive benchmarks, the Core Ultra 9 was faster than the Core Ultra 7, but not by much. Strangely, its score in the PCMark 10 Complete benchmark was considerably lower. Either the chipset’s just not much faster or the Zenbook Duo can’t take advantage of it, as thermal throttling happens earlier and more often.

When I ran the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark, the Core Ultra 9’s Intel Arc graphics scored very poorly. In both balanced and performance modes, the ostensibly faster chipset scored roughly half that of the slower chipset, coming in at the same scores as the previous Intel Iris Xe graphics. That indicates some serious and troubling throttling (or an issue with the firmware). While neither model got overly warm on the chassis bottom, the high-end model’s fans spun up more often and ran longer. Neither was ever annoyingly loud, however, even in performance mode that was significantly faster.

Compared to the other dual-screen laptops we’ve tested, the Zenbook Duo is consistently faster with the Core Ultra 7. That’s particularly true when compared to the two foldable PCs. It’s important to note that the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i has recently been updated to Meteor Lake, so it’s likely to be more competitive.

The Zenbook Duo is fast enough for very demanding productivity workflows when in performance mode. However, like all laptops with integrated graphics, it won’t please creators who use apps that can leverage a discrete GPU. Intel Arc graphics are faster than the older Intel Iris Xe graphics (with the Core Ultra 7), but they still fall short of entry-level discrete graphics. It’s not a gaming laptop.

Battery life was surprisingly good with the Core Ultra 7, with the 75 watt-hour battery powering one of the FHD+ OLED panels for 8.5 hours in our web-browsing test and 13 hours in our video-looping test. With both displays running, the Zenbook Duo lasted for about a half hour less in each test. The Core Ultra 9 model, on the other hand, managed just 4.75 hours of web browsing and around eight hours looping our test video with just one display active. I didn’t bother running the tests with both displays turned on.

The low-end model achieved average results comparable to single-display laptops even with both displays active, making that Zenbook Duo model a very good performer. There’s no significant battery life penalty from running both displays. While the laptop may not last for a full day’s work, that’s true of most Windows laptops. Only Apple’s highly efficient MacBooks managed a lot more.

The Zenbook Duo is an extremely well-built dual-screen laptop with some key advantages. It’s a better dual-screen clamshell laptop than the competitors and a great clamshell laptop in general. It’s also the best at stacking its dual displays in a vertical orientation, thanks to a simple, yet effective built-in kickstand. But it’s not as good in desktop mode.

At the same time, the low-end model’s performance is superior to those we’ve tested, with surprisingly good battery life. The high-end configuration, on the other hand, demonstrated inconsistent performance and much worse battery life. So, I can strongly recommend the entry-level model (which is also the best value), with the only caveat being that the OLED displays aren’t quite as sharp. The high-end model, while enjoying higher-resolution displays, doesn’t offer much else to justify its higher price.

Editors’ Recommendations