The ASUS Zephyrus Duo 16 has two screens, but as they say, more screens more problems. There’s at least one major problem with this laptop that can really hurt gaming performance. But first, we really need to talk about these two screens. The smaller second screen lifts up when you open the lid, giving you extra space to view content in a way that no other laptop currently offers. Not only that, but by lifting up the internal fans underneath are able to pull in cooler air in more easily, resulting in surprisingly good thermals. The hinge mechanism feels nice and smooth, seriously I could just sit here all day opening and closing it. Overall build quality feels great. The second screen is held up by metal pieces towards the corners, so there’s a bit more flex to the screen in the middle, but I’m pushing way too hard here. It feels sturdy when you’re just using it like a normal touch screen. ASUS says they tested it by resting 20kg or 44lb on the screen without issue, and they’ve also opened and closed the hinge 60,000 times without problems, so the mechanism sounds fairly robust. There’s a little flex to the keyboard if you’re pushing hard, but it feels perfectly fine during normal use. The screen has a little more flex to it compared to other laptops, but the hinges felt sturdy and there wasn’t much wobble when typing. The laptop has an all-black design with an aluminum alloy finish, and the lid has subtle dark metallic purple accenting. The middle of the lid sticks out slightly which makes it easy to open, and the main screen goes back around 125 degrees while the bottom second screen lifts up by 13 degrees. Not only that, but the secondary screen now also slides back when you open it, something it didn’t used to do in previous Duo 15 versions, and this helps make the gap between the two screens even smaller. This also reveals some of the motherboard underneath a glass cover with some RGB lighting. It’s not that much bigger than a 15 inch laptop, and although it sounds fairly thin from the dimensions provided by ASUS, I actually found that the back was closer to 1.4 inches or 3.5cm high when sitting on a table, as the rear feet raise the back quite a bit. The laptop weighs 2.6kg or 5.7lb, then increases to 3.6kg or 8lb with the 280 watt power brick and cables included. I’ve got the maxed out configuration, but you can check out other cheaper options with the link below the video. My main screen is a 2560 by 1600 165Hz Mini-LED panel, so it's 16:10 which means there’s more vertical screen resolution compared to the Duo 15 last year, and this also helps reduce the gap between the main screen and second screen. ASUS also sells the Duo 16 with their new 4K 120Hz panel that you can change to 1080p 240Hz after a reboot, so the best of both worlds for gamers and creators, and the first screen I’ve seen that lets you change both resolution and refresh rate like this. The Duo 16 has a MUX switch, so you can disable the integrated graphics by setting the GPU mode to ultimate to get a speed boost in games, but it requires a reboot as there’s no advanced optimus. The Radeon integrated graphics gives us FreeSync Premium pro, but FreeSync cannot be enabled if we use the MUX switch to disable optimus and the iGPU. The Mini-LED screen doesn’t support G-Sync, so screen tearing with optimus off is possible unless you use something else like V-Sync. The contrast and color gamut of the Mini-LED display are quite good. It’s only really beaten by OLED panels, and the secondary screen wasn’t too bad for a bonus screen. ASUS claims the Mini-LED panel has a peak brightness of 1100 nits, which is very bright for a laptop. I was able to get close to this, but only with HDR enabled, as shown by the purple bar. With HDR off it still gets above 800 nits and is still quite bright, just not as bright, though HDR off was brighter than HDR on at 70% or lower brightness. HDR could only be enabled with optimus on. The second screen doesn’t get anywhere near as bright, still above 300 nits so not too bad and similar to most laptops out there. I thought it looked fine even with the main screen just above it being brighter, the top screen being super bright didn’t really make the bottom one feel dim. Screen response time can be boosted by turning on the overdrive mode through the Armory Crate software, it’s on by default. ASUS are claiming a 3ms response time for the Mini-LED panel, and I suppose if they’re basing this off of the fastest transition time then it’s accurate, but any time we went from a darker to lighter transition, response times were significantly higher. This was with overdrive on, I didn’t find overdrive off to be much different. We can see what’s going on if we look at the raw output from my oscilloscope. This transition took over 20ms to complete, but we can see it starts off slow before finally completing in the last quarter. I’ve never seen this before when measuring response time, so showed it to Tim at Hardware Unboxed who mentioned that one of the rises will be the LCD layer and the other being the backlight. Ideally both transitions would be synchronized, but often they aren’t which is what we’re seeing here. Just for quick reference, here’s how a transition on the secondary screen looks. It’s still slow at 28ms, but it’s a consistent rise compared to what we saw before, which is how most laptop screens behave, just faster. That’s a bit technical, but here’s how the average grey-to-grey response time of the Duo 16’s main screen compares against other gaming laptops. It’s not amazing, but I would expect faster results from the other 4K 120Hz / 1080p 240Hz screen as it’s not Mini-LED, and don’t forget going from light to darker shades still performed quite well. The total system latency is the amount of time between a mouse click and when a gunshot fire appears on the screen in CS:GO. The result isn’t that bad considering the lower screen response time. This test goes from a dark to light scene, so I was expecting worse. There’s more variance, as shown by the higher standard deviation, but it’s close to other gaming laptops from ASUS. The main panel didn’t have any backlight bleed. I had to leave the mouse cursor on screen, otherwise the backlight would turn off to give you complete blackness, but that said we don’t see much of a halo around it as there are 512 dimming zones. The secondary screen had some bleed patches, but I never noticed them during normal use with actual content on the screen. Let’s go a bit deeper on the second screen. The ASUS Screen Xpert software is installed out of the box, which helps you get the most out of it. There are simple shortcuts, like when you start dragging a window you get the option to move it to the opposite screen, or to completely fill both screens. If dragging to the bottom, then you can also pick a layout for where the window should go. There’s also window snapping on the second screen for this too. There’s a bar on the left side of the touchscreen which you can use for changing settings. The first option at the top lets you adjust the brightness of the second screen, as you can’t do it in Windows. The second is app navigator, which lets you move multiple apps between the screens. The third one requires you to pair your phone to make calls from the screenpad or mirror the phone to the screen, while the 4th button locks the keyboard, so you can lean on it if you’re using a stylus to draw on the touchscreen. Just in case it wasn’t clear, the main screen isn’t a touchscreen, only the smaller one is. Next there’s a shortcut to minimize everything on the second screen, followed by a shortcut panel where you can put different apps that you might want to access quickly. The last one gives you more settings. You can change the brightness in here too, but now you get to see the brightness level. You can change the wallpaper for the second screen, or change the resolution here too. You can also change where the software bar sits, it can instead go on the right or down the bottom. If you select drag to reposition it seems to only let you drag it to the same points rather than wherever you want, and you can also auto hide the bar so it’s not always taking up screen space. Otherwise there are quite a few more options to choose from here to get the most out of the 2nd screen. As far as game support goes, ASUS acknowledges that many games will need to be run in borderless window mode so that Windows doesn’t have issues swapping to content in the second display. If you're playing a game in full screen mode, touching the screenpad could be equivalent to alt tab. The duo works best with games that have proper support for ScreenPad Plus, one of which is Dying Light 2. In this example there’s an option in the menu for the ASUS Zephyrus Duo, and this lets you easily access things like the inventory and quest log from the second screen without interfering with the main game on the main screen. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a list of more games with official support. Where the second screen really shines is for multitasking. For example you could run Discord on it while gaming on the main screen. More space would also be useful for content creation, dev work, and of course streaming, as you could just run OBS on the second screen. There’s a 720p camera above the screen in the middle, and it has IR for Windows Hello face unlock. Here’s how the camera and microphone look and sound, and here’s how it sounds while I’m typing on the keyboard. Now in order to fit the second screen, the keyboard is right down the front of the laptop. I didn’t have any problems typing with it though, but it also comes with an optional rubber wrist rest if you need it. The wrist rest definitely isn’t needed, I can type fine without it, but that said, I did like typing more with it. The keys have 1.7mm of travel, more compared to the 1.4 in last year’s Duo 15. The keyboard placement creates an issue for the touchpad, which is squeezed over to the right hand side. My partner really hated using it here. She’s left handed, but uses her right hand for a mouse. Honestly the layout kind of grew on me over time. If I have my left hand on the keyboard pressing keys, it just felt easier to have my right hand on the right for the touchpad compared to in the middle and cramped closer to my left hand. Gamers will definitely want to use a mouse anyway, and the touchpad is a little narrow, so it was awkward to use with two hands like for dragging stuff around. To be fair though, it is larger compared to last year’s Duo 15. You can convert the touchpad into a numpad by holding down on the top left corner for about a second, but you can’t move the mouse cursor like a regular touchpad in this mode. The keyboard has per-key RGB backlighting, and although all keys and secondary functions get lit up, the keys aren’t evenly lit, some parts of the same key just look dimmer than others. Key brightness can be adjusted between 3 levels or turned off with the F11 shortcut key, and by default the lighting turns off after 60 seconds. I couldn’t find a way of changing the timeout period or turning it off through software, but the Aura Creator software lets you customize lighting effects. The left side has an air exhaust vent towards the back, then the ports closer to the front, including the power input, USB 3.2 gen 2 Type-A and Type-C ports, a MicroSD card reader and a 3.5mm audio combo jack. The right has an air exhaust vent too, and there’s a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port on this side too, but that’s it, so although the side ports are closer to the front, at least cables probably won’t get in the way of right handed mouse users. Bad luck for lefties though. The rest of the ports are on the back in between air exhaust vents. From left to right there’s a 2.5 gigabit ethernet port facing the preferred way so you can unplug without lifting the laptop, a second USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, and HDMI 2.1 output. You can charge the laptop with 100 watts using the left Type-C port, but you can not charge with the right type-C port. The right Type-C port is meant to support USB 4, though that’s not coming until a future update, and there’s no ETA on that. The left Type-A port was also just kind of difficult to actually plug anything into, and this is something that we’ve noticed in a few laptops from ASUS this year. I don’t know what the deal is, the ports do work, it’s just that they’re harder to actually get things in. Now whether optimus is on or off, the right Type-C port always connects directly to the integrated Radeon graphics, while the left Type-C port and rear HDMI ports always connect directly to the Nvidia discrete graphics. We also confirmed the HDMI port could run a 4K external screen at up to 120Hz 12-bit with G-Sync, so variable refresh rate. There are 13 TR6 screws to undo to get inside. For some reason there’s one in the middle under a rubber cover, and that along with the two towards the back in the middle are longer than the rest, so keep track of them. The one down the front right corner doesn’t come out of the panel, which helps with opening. I found it very easy to pry open from this point with my usual pry tools, I’ll leave a link to them below the video. Inside we’ve got the battery down the front, two DDR5 memory slots stacked on top of each other just above, 2 PCIe Gen 4 M.2 SSD storage slots to the left and right of that, and the Wi-Fi 6E card is hiding underneath the installed SSD. The speeds from the 1TB SSD were excellent, some of the highest results out of any laptop tested. The MicroSD slot was quite fast too, and the card clicks in and sits the whole way into the laptop, so no chance of accidentally bumping it, but you need fingernails to get it out. The Wi-Fi performance was decent for a MediaTek card. The same newer Wi-Fi 6E card is also used in the Zephyrus G14 and Zephyrus G15 this year, and it’s competitive with some close by Intel and Killer options. It’s worth mentioning that last year’s Zephyrus duo 15 only had one slot of memory, it had some soldered to the motherboard like other laptops in the Zephyrus lineup, but this is not the case in the new Duo 16 as we now get access to two memory slots for more upgradeability than before. I took off half a point from the upgradeability score because of the uncommon screw type, but otherwise we’ve got what most laptops this size offer, including 2 memory slots, 2 M.2 storage slots and a removable Wi-Fi card. Speakers are found underneath the second screen, and underneath the laptop towards the front left and right sides for 6 in total. They sound above average and have some bass, but they’re a bit muffled at higher volume levels and less clear. Definitely acceptable, just not amazing. The latencymon results were looking alright. By default it plays this sound on boot. You can turn it off through either the BIOS or Armory Crate software though. The Duo 16 is powered by a 4-cell 90Wh battery, and there are some software options to help increase battery life. The first is panel power saver, which is enabled by default. This will lower the main screen’s refresh rate to 60Hz and turn off the overdrive mode when you unplug the charger. It automatically reverses this when you plug back in, and this is why the screen briefly flashes black as it changes. There's also a default option on the screenpad to lower its brightness on battery power. If optimus is enabled, you’ve also got the option of enabling Eco mode. This basically disables the Nvidia graphics and only uses the integrated graphics to further increase battery life. You can instead set Optimized mode which will automatically do this when you unplug the charger. There’s also a button just above the touchpad which can be used to turn off the second screen easily, so I’ve tested with both screens on and also just one screen to see the difference. I’ve tested both gaming and just watching a video on YouTube with both screens, and also with the secondary screen turned off. The second screen being on only lowered run time by 5 minutes with a game running, but it lasted almost 2 hours less in the video playback test, quite a big difference. When it comes time to compare against other laptops, I think it’s fair to use the result with both screens on. I mean if you’re buying this laptop, presumably you want to use both of the screens. The battery life wasn’t that great when compared to other AMD Ryzen based laptops, most of which are towards the top of the graph. Unfortunately I didn’t get last year’s Duo to test, but it’s lasting longer compared to the Intel based Duo 15 from a couple of years ago. Let’s check out thermals next. The CPU is covered with Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut Extreme liquid metal, but I think the GPU uses standard paste. There are a few heatpipes shared between the CPU and GPU with 2 fans. Not only does air come in underneath the second screen, but there are also some intake holes directly above the fans on the bottom. Air is then exhausted out of the left and right sides, and out of the vents on the back. The Armory Crate software lets us change between different performance modes. From lowest to highest we’ve got silent, performance, turbo and manual mode. Manual is the only one that gives us customization. We can change the fan curve for the CPU or GPU, adjust power limits, and optionally lower the thermal throttle limit for the GPU if you’re paranoid about heat. Both Turbo and manual modes overclock the GPU, but only manual mode gives us the option to customize it. You can also hold function and press F5, the key with the fan icon, to change between silent, performance and turbo modes. For some reason it doesn’t let you change to manual mode though. The internal temperatures were fine when just sitting there idle. The rest of the results are from combined CPU and GPU stress tests which aim to represent a worst case full load scenario. It doesn’t seem like you need to worry about temps at all here, even the highest turbo mode was reaching 83 degrees Celsius worst case, much lower compared to most other laptops with this level of hardware inside that I’ve tested. Increasing the fans to max speed lowers the CPU by 12 degrees though, and the cooling pad I test with, linked below the video, was able to lower temps a bit more. We can see why the temperatures are so low when looking at the power levels being reached. In manual mode the CPU seems to be limited to 25 watts, which is quite low. Turbo mode was able to boost the CPU higher, however it’s at the expense of GPU power. Given this laptop has a 2560 by 1600 screen resolution before even factoring in the second screen, more GPU power will probably be beneficial for most games. These are the clock speeds for the same tests just shown. We can see that turbo mode runs the CPU the highest as a result of the higher power limit, while manual mode runs the GPU higher because the GPU could run above 160 watts. Nvidia’s dynamic boost allows the 3080 Ti in the Duo 16 to max out at 165 watts, so it doesn’t lose much performance with the CPU also under load. Here’s how an actual game performs with the different performance modes in use. Manual mode was still giving the best result in terms of frames per second, but we’ll check out 1080p and 1440p games a bit later, and spoiler, the lower CPU performance can hurt the Duo 16 in some games. The CPU power limits are able to go much higher when the GPU isn’t being used. In a CPU only workload like Cinebench, we’re seeing 95 to 96 watts in turbo and manual modes, which is quite high for an AMD processor. This is the best result we’ve ever had from an AMD Ryzen based gaming laptop, though it’s not actually that far ahead of XMG’s Neo 15 with Ryzen 7 6800H just below it, granted that one did also have water cooling. The multicore score is ahead of some Intel 12th gen laptops, though most of them are better than the 6900HX, both in terms of multi core and single core performance. Performance drops back when we unplug the charger and instead run purely off of battery power. The Duo 16 is now the second best scoring machine on battery power out of all laptops tested, a great result. AMD Ryzen laptops generally seem to do quite well here, granted the best result is from an Intel 12th gen machine. Most laptops I test are in the low 30 degrees Celsius range on the keyboard at idle, and the Duo 16 was similar, which wasn’t too surprising given the heat generating components are further down the back. It’s similar with the stress tests running, only starting to get warm closer to the back of the keyboard, but the keys themselves felt fine. Stepping up to balanced mode was a little warmer. The gap between the keyboard and the second screen does get quite warm, but you don’t need to touch there so it’s not a problem in practice. The story is the same in the higher turbo mode as well, cool keys and cool second touch screen, and then manual mode was much the same, though the fans are also quite loud now too, let’s have a listen. I couldn’t hear the fans when it’s just sitting there idle, but there was some subtle coil whine. The fans get louder in the higher modes, as you’d expect, with manual mode and the fans maxed out being very loud. I’d definitely want headphones, and not just due to the volume, they also sound higher pitched compared to others. Also one of the fans would randomly go quiet in the middle of a workload. Now let’s find out how the Zephyrus Duo 16 actually performs in games and see how it compares against other laptops. Although this is a taller 16:10 screen, all of these comparisons have been done with 16:9 resolutions, as this is just what we have data for for the purposes of comparing. Cyberpunk 2077 was tested the same on all laptops, and I’ve got the Zephyrus shown by the red highlight. The average FPS looks decent, fitting right in with a number of other high powered 3080 Ti laptops, but check out the 1% low, it’s one of the worst results out of this selection of laptops. This seems to be a result of the lower CPU power limit, and although my laptop doesn’t actually have a 1080p screen, you can get it with a 1920 by 1200 screen, so I’d expect similar dips to 1% lows there. Interestingly the 1% low was actually better at the higher 1440p resolution, while the average FPS is basically tied with those larger and thicker desktop replacement style machines just above it. Given my Duo 16 has a 2560 by 1600 resolution, this result is closer to what we’d expect if we were playing at the native resolution of the screen. Red Dead Redemption 2 was tested with the games benchmark tool, and at 1080p the performance was extremely low. This was the same whether we used manual or turbo modes, the 3080 Ti was coming in behind a couple of far cheaper 3060 results. This could potentially be an issue if you’re running this laptop with the 1920 by 1200 screen. It’s not quite as bad at the higher 1440p resolution though. 1080p was around 69 FPS, which definitely was not nice, but its running way better despite having to produce more pixels now. It’s still not an amazing result though, a couple of other lower wattage 3080 Ti laptops are nearby, but otherwise even lower wattage 3070 Ti laptops were able to beat it. Control is a GPU heavy game, and even at 1080p the result is looking good, much better compared to the last two games. Even the 1% low is fine here, unlike Cyberpunk. It’s still the third best result at the higher 1440p resolution too, so for GPU heavy games there isn’t really a problem. It just seems to be titles that need more CPU power, particularly at lower resolutions, see worse results. That poor gaming performance is the main problem that I alluded to at the start of this video. I think most people that get that 4K 120Hz screen would only probably run it at 1080p 240Hz if they’re playing eSports games. But if the CPU only runs at 25 watts, what’s the point? After talking with ASUS, it sounds like this behavior might be a bug or some other problem with Nvidia’s dynamic boost. But they’re looking into it. With dynamic boost, manual mode is only meant to be able to boost the RTX 3080 Ti up to 165 watts if the CPU isn’t also loaded up. But what seems to be happening here is the CPU doesn’t go beyond 25 watts no matter what. The GPUs just always prioritized. That’s exactly what we saw earlier in the thermal testing. The problem seems to be that this is also happening in games too, regardless of whether or not the game would actually end up performing better if it could only get its hands on some more CPU power. Which is generally going to help out a lot of games at lower resolutions and lower game setting levels. So basically, any eSports game ever. Here are the 3DMark results, and I want to note that all of these were higher than what Asus measured on the same configuration of duo 16, so it doesn't appear that ours is performing below baseline. Now for some content creator tests. Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark tool. This test likes CPU performance, and generally seems to do better with Intel, which may explain why the Duo is behind other 12th gen machines from the same generation, and even behind a last gen option. Though I suppose Intel has the advantage of Quicksync. Adobe Photoshop likes single threaded performance, and the 6900HX wasn’t too bad here as we saw earlier in the Cinebench tests, but again it still can’t compete with Intel 12th gen in this regard. I mean, some current gen Ryzen machines are ahead of other 12th gen laptops, but generally speaking there are more 12th gen laptops with bigger leads over AMD. GPU power matters more in DaVinci Resolve, but despite the RTX 3080 Ti with high power limit a number of other lower tier GPUs with lower power limits were scoring better here. CPU power is still a factor here, just not usually as much compared to the GPU. That said, in a completely GPU bound workload like Blender, the Duo 16 is the highest scoring result we’ve ever recorded, though to be fair it’s basically tied with the Scar 15 and 17 SE, also from ASUS. We’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads. The BIOS looks nice and modern, but there’s nothing special in terms of customizations or tweaks, you can only change the most basic settings here. Linux support was tested with an Ubuntu 22.04 live CD. By default the keyboard, touchpad, speakers, camera, Wi-Fi and ethernet all worked. Keyboard shortcuts for adjusting screen brightness and volume worked fine, but keyboard brightness and the numpad shortcut did not work. The second screen doesn’t have the sidebar to change settings, as that’s Windows software. Linux just sees it as a second display, by default it was over to the right of the main one, but you can just move it into position below. Let’s discuss pricing and availability next. This will change over time, so refer to the link below the video for updates and sales. At the time of recording, the lowest spec RTX 3060 configuration starts at $2500 USD, so definitely not cheap in terms of 3060 performance, what you’re paying for here is the unique design with two screens. $1000 more gets you to the 3070 Ti and doubles your RAM, while the configuration I’ve tested here is $4000, so quite expensive, but it’s a similar price to other expensive machines like say Razer’s Blade 17. At least with the Duo you can check your negative bank account on two screens instead of one. So is it worth spending more money to get the Duo 16? Let’s find out by summarizing the good and bad parts. This is clearly a very unique solution, so ultimately it’s going to depend on how much you would actually benefit from having two screens in the same portable unit. Obviously you can carry a laptop and external monitor, but that’s extra stuff that you have to carry around. And despite this being I think the third year that ASUS has done the Duo, no other companies are really doing dual screen laptops well. So definitely expect to pay a premium for the Duo based on that alone. Overall, I thought that the Duo 16 was a pretty good machine, as long as you’re playing games at say 4K or 1440p. As we’ve seen, things do start to fall apart at the lower 1080p resolution as it seems like the CPU just can’t get enough power. This might be something that they can fix in a future update. I mean you have to reboot in order to swap from 4K 120Hz to 1080p 240Hz, so when it's in that 1080p 240Hz mode, maybe they can just boost the CPU power or something. Otherwise if it’s some kind of bug with dynamic boost then I would expect that to get fixed in a future update. If they really can only give the CPU 25 watts for whatever reason, then I guess it makes sense that they went AMD instead of Intel. I’ve shown in my 6800H vs 12700H comparison that Ryzen outperforms Intel at a 35 watt TDP or below. Intel’s additional cores only start offering better performance once they’re able to get more power. Outside of gaming, raw CPU performance was the best that we’ve ever seen from any AMD gaming laptop so far. And pure GPU performance was also right up there too. It’s only when you combine those two together that we start seeing problems, so like in games. And given this in the Zephyrus lineup, which is meant for gaming, that’s kind of a big deal. I guess at least the lower CPU power limit does mean that this machine does not run hot, even when under heavy load, and that’s likely thanks to this unique cooling design. But I’d argue that they could make much better use out of this cooling design by allowing the CPU to run with a higher power limit. I mean it’s clearly got the thermal headroom, might as well use it. And with that fairly large 280 watt power brick, it’s not as if it’s running low on power. Battery life wasn’t amazing despite the Ryzen CPU, but I mean it is powering 2 screens, and as we saw it was possible to boost the performance up on battery if we just turn off that screen. So that’s always an option too, but I figure most people are probably actually going to want to use that second screen given that’s what you’re paying the money for. Otherwise it was great to see the upgradeability improve, we can now install 2 memory sticks and there’s no soldered memory like with last year’s Duo 15. That’s always something that I can get behind. Honestly, if you’re considering buying the Duo 16, then it’s probably not worth spending more money to get the RTX 3080 Ti that I’ve got in this model. You can find out why in this video next. I think it will surprise you to find out just how close the 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti are when it comes to laptops. In most cases it's not worth spending more to get the 3080 Ti, so I’ll see you in that video next.