ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo review
ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo is an innovative laptop that looks impressive, and feels well built. Its two screens are gorgeous, and they allow people to do things that weren't possible on previous generations of laptops. The performance you get is excellent, no matter what you do, from running Office apps, video editing, software development to gaming. If you do not mind the premium price, and the weak battery life, ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo is one of the best laptops that you can buy.
Design and hardware specifications
As soon as you take the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo out of the box, you are impressed by its sleek design. The only clunky aspect that you won't like is the huge 230W power adapter that is required to power this beast of a laptop. It is both large and heavy.
ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo is constructed from aluminium, and it has a beautiful Celestial Blue color. When you open the lid, the ErgoLift hinge raises the keyboard deck to a 4.5-degree angle, offering you a pleasant viewing experience and a more comfortable typing experience, while helping with the cooling of the laptop.
On the bottom of the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo you find the air vents that allow the cool air to enter and the warm air to exit the laptop, as well as the speakers, which are certified by Harman Kardon.
One of the unique features of this laptop is the fact that the keyboard is placed in the space where you would typically find the palmrest and touchpad. Also, the touchpad can be used as NumPad, when you need one.
The keyboard and the NumberPad are LED-illuminated, so that you can see them with ease during the night.
The brightness can be adjusted to make the keyboard as visible as you want. On the bottom of the front edge of the laptop, you can also find the Alexa light bar, which signals when you are interacting with the virtual assistant.
In terms of ports, the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo offers the basics you would expect. On the left side you have the power input, an HDMI 2.0 port, and a USB 3.1 Gen 2 port.
On the right side, there is a USB 3.1 Gen 2 port, a Thunderbolt 3 port, and an audio jack.
What truly sets the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo apart from other laptops is the dual-screen setup. The main touch display uses a 15.6" OLED panel, and 4K resolution (3840x2160). The bezel is 5mm-thin, and the screen-to-body ratio is 89%. The screen is Pantone Validated, and it can reproduce 100% of the DCI-P3 color space used by the American film industry. The second touch display is named ScreenPad Plus. It has a size of 14", and a resolution of 3840x1100 pixels.
The hardware inside the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo is a beast. This laptop can be equipped with an eight-core Intel Core i9-9980HK or a six-core Intel Core i7-9750H processor. Our test unit had the Core i7-9750H processor seen below. The laptop can also be equipped with 8 GB, 16 GB or 32 GB of DDR4 memory, and an SSD drive with a storage capacity of 256 GB, 512 GB or 1 TB.
There are two graphics cards on this laptop: the onboard Intel UHD Graphics 630 that is built into the processor, and a discrete NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory. You can see its hardware specifications in the screenshot below.
to this promise
Last but not least, ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo meets the MIL-STD 810G military standard for reliability and durability, undergoing a test regime that includes extended tests for operation in harsh environments, including extreme altitudes, temperatures and humidity. This is quite a feat for a laptop that is so innovative.
You can get the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo with Windows 10 Pro or Windows 10 Home. However, considering its target audience, Windows 10 Pro should be the default choice for you.
If you want to know more details about the technical specifications of this laptop, visit: ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo Tech Specs.
Using the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo
ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo is the most elegant dual-screen laptop on the market today. This being such a futuristic device, that tries to innovate, I was not expecting it to be this solid and well built. Luckily, ASUS has used high-quality materials and excellent engineering for the ZenBook Pro Duo, and the end-result is a laptop that feels sturdy and looks great at the same time. The military-grade toughness touted by ASUS does not feel like a marketing gimmick, but like the real deal. However, an immediate downside to all this high-quality engineering is the heaviness of the ZenBook Pro Duo: it weighs 5.51 pounds or 2.5 kg.
The main screen on the ZenBook Pro Duo uses an OLED panel, and it is gorgeous to watch. The colors look amazing, the blacks are stunning, and watching 4K movies on this laptop is a treat. This is one of those laptops where Windows 10's Dark Mode is a must use, because it showcases how great the screen is. However, the speakers do not sound as good as you would expect from a device certified by Harman Kardon. The audio does not sound bad, but it is not as loud as you would expect, and it doesn't seem to have any real weight.
The second screen, called the ScreenPad Plus is a pleasure to use too. The only downside to it is that it's not as bright as the main display. However, that does not make it less useful. You can drag apps to it, switch apps between the main and the secondary display, save groups of programs in a specific layout, change the resolution from 3840 x 1100 pixels to 1920 x 550, set its battery saver settings, etc.
The ScreenPad Plus is useful for both productivity and gaming. When editing video or creating artistic content, it might be useful to take the ASUS Pen out of the box, and use it on either of the two screens. Artists might appreciate it when fine-tuning their digital creations, while other users may prefer to use it for handwriting. The only problem with the ASUS Pen is that there is no place for storing it with your laptop, so you need to make sure that you do not forget to carry it with you.
The keyboard is pleasant to type on, especially when using the ZenBook Pro Duo on a desk. The keys have a short travel distance and they promptly register your keypresses. However, when holding the ZenBook Pro Duo in your lap, the keyboard is very close to your body, and you may tend to press the wrong keys for a
while, until you adapt to the typing position and figure out where all the keys are. The precision trackpad is excellent. It has support for three-finger and four-finger gestures that can be personalized with ease, the sensitivity is spot on, and it can also be transformed into a NumberPad, with the press of a button. Most users are going to love it. However, for maximum productivity, a portable Bluetooth mouse remains your best option.
while, until you adapt to the typing position and figure out where all the keys are. The precision trackpad is excellent. It has support for three-finger and four-finger gestures that can be personalized with ease, the sensitivity is spot on, and it can also be transformed into a NumberPad, with the press of a button. Most users are going to love it. However, for maximum productivity, a portable Bluetooth mouse remains your best option.
Considering the powerful hardware found inside the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo, it is not surprising that performance is top notch on this laptop no matter what you do, from Office work, to software development, video and photo editing, or gaming. This laptop can run all modern games in 1080p with no problems, on high quality settings. This performance and the two screens come at a cost: the autonomy is not anywhere close to the 7.5 hours promised by ASUS. In real life, you get around 3 hours of use, depending on what you do. If you play games on the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo, do not expect the battery to last more than two hours.
If you perform resource-intensive tasks on this laptop, the laptop heats up, and the cooling system kicks in. I noticed that the ZenBook Pro Duo tends get hot in the middle, around the top of the keyboard. If you keep it in your lap while the laptop heats up, it may become uncomfortable to use. However, when the laptop is getting too warm, you can press the Turbo button to increase the fan speed.
The webcam on the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo offers support for Windows Hello authentication with face recognition. It is useful for video calls, but don't expect it to impress you. It has a 720p resolution, and it is good enough for chatting with friends, family, and co-workers.
Another impressive fact about the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo is that it has an Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 wireless network card, that works well with Wi-Fi 6 wireless routers. When we connected the laptop to the wireless network, broadcast by the ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AX11000 router, we reached a maximum download speed on WiFi of 762.03 Mbps. Impressive by most standards.
Overall, we were satisfied with the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo. It is an innovative laptop, with excellent performance, and interesting ideas.
Performance in benchmarks
We ran several benchmarks on the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo to get a more realistic perspective on its performance. First, we measured how fast it boots, using BootRacer. As you can see in the screenshot below, this laptop starts in about 28 seconds.
To check the performance of the SSD inside the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo, we ran a tool called CrystalDiskMark. In the screenshot below, you see the results: the speeds are good both when reading and when writing data to the disk. However, other laptops offer even faster SSD drives.
We then ran the default Time Spy test from 3DMark, which showed that this laptop is capable of running modern games well. The score it obtained is 5809 points.
We also wanted to check how well you can run VR experiences on the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo, and we ran the SuperPosition VR benchmark developed by Unigine. The score it got was 9794 points, which shows that this laptop is capable of delivering VR experiences at optimum quality.
We also tested the cooling system of this laptop, using the FurMark app. After a few dozen minutes, running at maximum load, the video card reached a temperature of 172.4 degrees Fahrenheit or 78 degrees Celsius, while the processor ran at 203 degrees Fahrenheit or 95 degrees Celsius. It is quite hot, and you should really switch the ventilation to Turbo, when running resource-intensive tasks.
We also used Powermark to see how long the laptop's battery lasts. On the Balanced tests, which measures the battery time while browsing the web, working with Word, editing video, and gaming casually, ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo lasted just 2 hours and 29 minutes, when both of its screens were turned on.
When we turned off the second screen, ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo lasted about 3 hours and 2 minutes, which is not a lot.
The benchmarks we ran show that the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo is a capable device that can run anything you wish and deliver a satisfying performance.
Apps bundled with the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo
The ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo that we received for testing had surprisingly little bloatware. Except for the default apps, that are bundled by Microsoft with Windows 10, and all the necessary drivers, we also found the following apps:
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- McAfee Personal Security - a trial version of a security product that includes antivirus protection, web protection, and a password manager. Most users are going to uninstall it, as other security products tend to offer better protection.
- MyASUS - a useful app that you can use to access the Customer Support service, tools for System Diagnosis, and software updates for your laptop, to configure the fans, the charging mode, or the screen and its color temperature.
- Realtek Audio Console - a basic app that you can use to configure the speakers and the microphone on your laptop. It doesn't offer any special options compared to Windows 10, so you may want to uninstall it and save some storage space.
- ScreenXpert - a Windows app used to control the secondary screen on the ZenBook Pro Duo and how it works.
- Thunderbolt Control Center - helpful to configure the Thunderboltdevices that you
- connect to the ZenBook Pro Duo.
On the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo there was little in terms of bloatware included by ASUS. This is a nice surprise, and we were glad to see that most of the bundled apps are useful to users.
What do you think about the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo?
Now you know what we like and do not like about the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo and its many innovations. Before closing this review, tell us your opinion about this product, and whether you consider buying it, despite its premium price. Comment below, and let's discuss.
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