Asus ZenBook Pro Duo 15 Review: Dual Screens, If You Need It

Close the ZenBook Pro Duo’s lid, and it looks like a chunky 15-inch laptop with a slightly industrial design in a Celestial Blue color scheme and the usual Asus concentric swirl on the lid. The edges are angled for aesthetic and functional purposes, particularly the rear edge that accommodates the new ErgoLift AAS (Active Aerodynamic System) hinge that props the lower chassis up for better airflow and more comfortable typing.

My review unit was configured with a 10th-gen Intel Core i9-10980HK eight-core/16 thread CPU, a fast CPU when thermals allow it to stretch its legs. Asus paid a great deal of attention to thermal performance, with plenty of airflow as mentioned above, two fans with 97 blades, and a whopping six heat pipes, including one dedicated to the power supply module. There’s also a G-sensor that notes when the display is closed at less than an 80-degree angle, at which point the power is reduced to limit consumption and increase battery life.

Asus provides a performance tuning utility that switches between standard and performance modes. I found the utility to be inconsistent — it increased the Cinebench R23 multi-core score to 9968, putting it among the fastest laptops we’ve tested, but it didn’t have any impact on our Handbrake test that converts a 420MB video to H.265.

It also increased the Geekbench 5 multi-core result to 7542, placing it higher among our comparison group. In our gaming benchmarks, the utility either had a minimal positive impact or reduced performance; I’ll discuss that more below. The utility didn’t impact the PCMark 10 score, which was particularly strong in the Content Creation portion and among the fastest machines.

Overall, the ZenBook Pro Duo was a speedy laptop but perhaps not quite as fast as one might expect given the Core i9 CPU. I imagine that even with all the efforts Asus put into managing thermals, the CPU still struggled to maintain full speed. Certainly, the fans would spin up, particularly in performance mode, and plenty of heat was blown out the side vents. Generally speaking, it can churn through CPU-intensive tasks and it managed to keep up with or outperform the latest Ryzen 7 CPUs — something we haven’t seen with many Intel-based laptops.

The ZenBook Pro Duo’s primary display is a 4K OLED panel with DisplayHDR 500 support that looks simply brilliant. OLED is special in that it typically makes colors pop without being oversaturated and generates blacks that look incredibly deep, and the panel that Asus chose for the ZenBook Pro Duo does both.

The ZenBook Pro Duo’s second display, called the ScreenPad+, is also OLED, running at 3840 x 1100. Like the primary display, it’s bright and colorful with deep blacks. I couldn’t quite position my colorimeter to get a formal reading of its quality, but it appears to be the equal of its larger sibling. Speaking of size, the second display is large enough to be useful, although the extreme widescreen format does mean that any maximized apps on it can look a little funky.

Asus packed a ton of functionality into the second display, all of which is accessible via a ScreenXpert Control Center menu that can be pinned to the left, right, or bottom of the display or allowed to float. The menu provides access to brightness, an App Navigator utility that makes it easy to move windows from one display to the other, a button to lock or unlock the keyboard, a button to show the ScreenPad+ desktop, a button to open the MyAsus app, a button to open the Launcher app that provides access to ScreenPad+ apps, and setup.

Useful ScreenPad+ apps include a Quick Key utility that provides quick access to functions like copy and paste, a Handwriting app that converts ink to text, a virtual numeric keypad, a Spotify control center, and a Corel Multicam utility. There are also buttons to open an AppDeals app and the MyASUS app and a button to open the Asus Control Panel app (see below).

There are several ways to use the ScreenPad+. You can turn it into a massive touchpad, which is less useful than it seems given that it’s positioned above the keyboard and so not very comfortable to use. It can host app windows and thus can function as a typical external display. Asus has created a new Control Panel app that supports Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, and Lightroom Classic and provides several commonly used functions for each app.

The app is fully customizable and looks to streamline the use of the supported applications. A final way to use the secondary display is to drag control windows out of the way in apps like Premiere and Photoshop, allowing for more room to view and edit a video or photo. Note that the Control Panel app can automatically launch, and it takes away this functionality.

Overall, I found the ScreenPad+ to be a useful addition, but mainly for specific users who can use the app-specific functionality. That’s fine because this laptop is designed for creators, and it’s those users who will get the most use out of the second display. Personally, I probably wouldn’t use it for much more than dragging windows down that I don’t want cluttering my main display or that I want to see separately, like the Netflix app or a YouTube window. That might make the ScreenPad+ a niche component, but a useful one, nonetheless.

Taken by itself, the ZenBook Pro Duo’s 3-step backlit keyboard is a good one. It has plenty of travel and comfortable key spacing, and the switches provide precise action with a nice click. My only complaint is that the bottoming action is a little abrupt and so it has a jarring effect that might be fatiguing over long typing sessions. I’d rate it a step or two behind the great keyboards on the HP Spectre x360 15 and the Dell XPS 15. The keyboard’s biggest problem is that there’s no palm rest.

If you’re using the laptop by itself, then your wrists rest on the desktop and your fingers are at an uncomfortable typing angle. As mentioned above, Asus provides a palm rest extension that solves that problem, but it makes the ZenBook Pro Duo extend farther back on a desktop and it’s another piece to carry around. Also, as mentioned above, you can attach the ErgoLift Stand and that also helps, but again, it’s another piece to mess with.

The touchpad, on the other hand, is just terrible. I hate to be so negative, but it’s tiny, vertically oriented (which is strange to use), and mounted to the right of the keyboard where its use is disruptive. It includes the Asus virtual LED numeric keypad functionality, which is great for those who would use such a thing, but that doesn’t make up for its size and placement. It’s a Microsoft Precision touchpad, and so it works well enough. It’s just terribly uncomfortable.

Both displays are touch-enabled, of course, and both support the included Asus active pen that can attach magnetically to the lid. The pen works well, providing for smooth and precise inking and control on both displays.

Finally, Windows 10 Hello password-less login support is provided by an infrared camera and facial recognition. It’s fast and accurate, and I had no problems logging in. The webcam is a disappointing 720p, when some vendors are starting to configure 1080p webcams in response to the pandemic-inspired surge in videoconferencing.

Asus increased the ZenBook Pro Duo’s battery by 29.5% over the previous generation, up to 92 watt-hours of capacity. That’s a lot of battery, but this is a lot of machine, so I didn’t have extremely high expectations.

I was on the right track. The ZenBook Pro Duo didn’t do well on any of our battery benchmarks. For example, in our web browsing test, it couldn’t quite make it to four hours, a meager score that even gaming laptops tend to exceed. The previous version managed about 5.5 hours, but that was with the second screen turned off. I did my testing with the second screen turned on, assuming that most users would want that functionality on battery life as much as when plugged in. According to Asus, the second screen should reduce battery life by about 1.5 hours, which is what I saw and which indicates that at least in this test, the updated version doesn’t demonstrate better longevity despite the larger battery.

Note that the Dell XPS 15 4K went for seven hours and the HP Spectre x360 15 for just over six hours. I realize that I picked a couple of comparison machines that aren’t that much better than the ZenBook Pro Duo. Most recent laptops last for around 10 hours in this test, but of course, most don’t have OLED displays and such high-powered components.

In our video looping test that repeats a Full HD Avengers trailer, the ZenBook Pro Duo hit six hours, compared to the XPS 15 at 20 minutes more and the Spectre x360 15 at 6.5 hours. Again, other modern machines last for much longer, typically exceeding 13 hours or so. I also ran the PCMark 10 Gaming test where the Asus lasted for less than two hours; this isn’t such a bad result, and the test itself probably measures how aggressively a laptop runs under battery life rather than how long its battery lasts.

In the PCMark 10 Applications test, which is the best indication of productivity battery life, the ZenBook Pro Duo hit 5.5 hours, and that’s about half of what most other laptops manage. We didn’t test either the XPS 15 with these benchmarks, but the Spectre x360 15 lasted for three minutes less on the Gaming test and two minutes less on the Applications test.

So, in short, the ZenBook Pro Duo has awful battery life. That’s not unexpected, of course, given the machine’s design. It does mean that if you’re going on the road for a full day of work, then you’ll have to carry the hefty 240-watt power brick along with you. Add that to the palm rest extension and the ErgoLift Stand, and your backpack is going to feel pretty full.

The ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED UX582 (whew!) is a great laptop for anyone who will truly benefit from having a second display attached to the machine, not to mention a high-powered CPU and GPU that can burn through demanding tasks. That includes creative types who use their laptops with apps like Adobe Premiere Pro and Photoshop, which makes sense because that’s exactly who Asus is aiming at. In that respect, the company has succeeded in making a laptop that can fit particular needs.

For most other users, though, the ZenBook Pro Duo is too heavy, too complicated, and suffers from too-short battery life. It’s also expensive at $3,000, when you can get laptops that are just as powerful and far more portable for the same or less money.

Are there are any alternatives?