Special productivity hardware has come in high demand ever since creative pursuits have found their way into technology. Touch screens, dual screens and the like have found their way into more homes and offices to help you get the job done. However, sometimes you need a laptop that looks like a laptop and functions like one. The ASUS Zenbook Duo is the best of all of those worlds. It is a dual-screen laptop with touchscreen capabilities, featuring a keyboard and touchpad, making it a standard laptop. But the Zenbook Duo is anything but standard.
The ASUS Zenbook Duo that we reviewed came in Inkwell Gray, a nice laptop colour, but the surface isn’t very resistant to fingerprints, if that’s something that bothers you. In terms of I/O, you have two Thunderbolt 4 ports that support display and power, and an HDMI Output. A 3.5mm headphone jack and a USB 3.2 Type A port. On the bottom, you’ll find a sturdy fold-out stand to hold the laptop upright, ideal for using the dual screens, each of which has a 14” Lumina OLED display with 2880×1800 resolution and 120Hz refresh rates. The Zenbook Duo sports an Intel Core Ultra 9 285H processor with an Intel Arc 140T GPU, codenamed Arrow Lake.
The build quality of the ASUS Zenbook Duo is impeccable. It meets military standards for durability, and although I hope you won’t have to put it to that kind of test, it will perform well in fairly rough conditions. The Zenbook Duo features a 75Wh battery, providing all-day use with up to 10.5 hours of video playback in dual-screen mode.
The keyboard and touchpad secure tightly to the laptop and don’t move around. They feel like part of the laptop when in place. It’s also worth noting that they do not have to be attached to the screen to function. If you are using the ASUS ZenBook Duo in dual-screen mode, you can simply place the accessory in front of you and use it as you usually would.
“The build quality of the ASUS Zenbook Duo is impeccable.”
The laptop’s AiSense camera is also an impressive addition to the Zenbook Duo’s toolkit. In addition to being a high-quality 1080p camera, it also functions as an IR webcam, enabling quick facial recognition for logins. It features a number of AI tools, including AI background blur, which works well with a crisp border between your body and the background, and eye contact, which locks your virtual eyes on the camera while your actual eyes look at the monitor — a useful tool for Zoom presentations.
The ASUS Zenbook Duo is fairly bulky with the keyboard in place. At 3.64lbs, there are certainly lighter laptops out there, but there are certainly heavier ones as well. Given how much the Zenbook Duo has going on inside it, it’s a reasonable weight. The speakers on the laptop are decent, but since they are downward-facing, you need to turn them up a little extra to hear them the way you want to. The good news is that the sound is not distorting no matter how high the volume is.
While the ASUS Zenbook Duo is a more chunky laptop like a gaming laptop would be, I wouldn’t expect the same high-end gaming experience. It can run games, but you won’t be able to push the graphics settings without negatively impacting your gaming experience. The GPU doesn’t pack the punch that you’d find in a two-generation-old RTX GPU. A casual gamer can still have some fun on this laptop as long as they can live without some of the fidelity.
“Use of the dual screens on the ASUS Zenbook Duo was great in many day-to-day scenarios for me.”
Use of the dual screens on the ASUS Zenbook Duo was great in many day-to-day scenarios for me. I have a three-monitor setup at home and use the screens to reference one thing while working on something else. It is capable of supporting dual screens for editing software, but I found the processing power insufficient for the type of editing I do, at least not in the way my MacBook or PC with a high-end GPU can handle. You can run a decent “just chatting” stream with your streaming software on one screen and your chat on the other. Without a game consuming your computer’s processing power, you should be able to maintain a fairly robust stream.
What excites me most about using the ASUS Zenbook Duo is its versatility from moment to moment. The moment that excited me most was thinking about using it on a plane, where space isn’t always my friend when it comes to using a laptop. I’d love to get more writing done on planes, and I enjoy watching movies to pass the time. Being able to stand the Zenbook Duo up either horizontally or vertically and position the keyboard however I please empowers me to do whatever I want on a plane — in a way my regular laptop just doesn’t.
But the ASUS Zenbook Duo is for more than just people on a plane. It’s for the digital artist who will love the responsive touchscreen. It’s for the office worker who wants to take advantage of the webcam’s ability to maintain eye contact while reading presentation notes — and who values the productivity boost that comes from using multiple screens. Most importantly, it’s for anyone who sometimes needs their laptop to be more than just a laptop. The Zenbook Duo can be what you need it to be, and being limited to a traditional laptop with only a keyboard and screen, even occasionally, can prove frustrating.
“What excites me most about using the ASUS Zenbook Duo is its versatility from moment to moment.”
We ran benchmarks for the ASUS Zenbook Duo, using both Geekbench 6 and Cinebench. The Geekbench CPU score was 2210 for single-core and 14627 for Multi-core, and the GPU score was 34403. On Cinebench, the multi-core CPU score was 754, sitting between the Apple M1 Max and the Intel Core i9-9880H, ranking 7th in its category. The single-core score ranked #4 beneath the Apple M1 and the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core processor.
I’d argue that the trade-off between its features and performance is virtually non-existent. To suggest that the inclusion of dual screens and touchscreens is the reason there isn’t a more powerful GPU in the device would be disingenuous. There are plenty of great creative laptops that weren’t designed to be graphics-heavy machines. I’d say the Zenbook Duo is an upgrade from a standard laptop rather than a downgrade from a gaming laptop.
When pricing out the ASUS Zenbook Duo with the specs I tested, you’re looking at a price tag of $1,799.99 US. As a laptop that emphasizes physical features, I expected a high price, but for what you can do with it, it may come across as fairly niche. For productivity, it has a lot to offer. It’s also incredibly adaptable to most people’s needs. It’s not for someone whose priorities are all about having a powerful GPU for gaming, editing and the like, but it checks nearly every other box. Whether it’s worth the price really depends on whether you see it as a novelty or a tool.
- Multi-Screen Versatility — Find the mode that best suits your task and seamlessly switch between them. Expand your workspace with Dual Screen or Desktop Mode, share content effortlessly in Sharing Mode, or snap everything back into one for Laptop Mode
- Everything-Built-In Portability — At 3.64 lb and a mere 0.57” thin, the DUO elevates portable dual-screen setups to the next level. With a detachable Bluetooth keyboard and built-in kickstand, you can take the Zenbook DUO just as you would with any laptop — plus a FHD IR front camera
