Asus ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED review
Our Verdict
Asus' ambitious dual-screen laptop delivers lots of power and a vibrant OLED display, but poor ergonomics and disappointing battery life keep it from greatness.
For
- Powerful hardware in a relatively thin package
- Sturdy, attractive chassis
- Cleverly-implemented secondary display
Against
- Dual-display design compromises ergonomics
- A paucity of ports
- Middling battery life
Tom's Guide Verdict
Asus' aggressive dual-screen laptop delivers lots of power and a vibrant OLED brandish, simply poor ergonomics and disappointing battery life go on it from greatness.
Pros
- +
Powerful hardware in a relatively thin package
- +
Sturdy, attractive chassis
- +
Cleverly-implemented secondary display
Cons
- -
Dual-brandish blueprint compromises ergonomics
- -
A paucity of ports
- -
Middling battery life
The Asus ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED is the latest iteration of a dual-screened experiment that aims to offer an unmatched content cosmos and multitasking experience. And in that location's a lot to like here: an attractive master display is coupled with capable hardware, and the novel, eye-catching design stands out in a sea of nigh-identical machines. Simply bog standard works, and the ZenBook's novelty doesn't make up for the flaws in the organisation.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED review: Price and configuration options
The model I reviewed, equipped with a Core i9-10980HK CPU, 32GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, and a 1TB 1000.2 NVMe SSD, will fix y'all back $ii,999.99. Other variants dial down the CPU to a Core i7-10870H and offer either 16 or 32GB of RAM. All models are bundled with a stylus and and a palm residual, but only the variants with 32GB of RAM come arranged with an ergonomic stand and a backpack, if that sounds appealing to you lot.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo fifteen OLED review: Blueprint
The ZenBook Pro Duo fifteen OLED is hitting, to say the least. Information technology's large, but sleek, with an angular silhouette that hints at the powerful parts packed into its magnesium-blend shell. When you lot elevator the lid the 2d display — or, "ScreenPad Plus" — tilts upward, improving the viewing angle and exposing an boosted pair of fans to help air and rut circulate through the chassis.
And the hinge is sturdy, remaining absolutely rigid as I printing against it while scribbling on the displays with the arranged stylus. It'southward a singular design, and a clear evolution over its predecessor, the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo — admitting with many of the same drawbacks.
Y'all're sacrificing a lot for the ScreenPad Plus' potential utility. To fit the display and maintain a reasonable footprint, they keyboard has been shunted downwardly to the lower edge of the device, with the trackpad kicked out to the right side; as a lefty, this took a moment to wrap my head effectually.
The layout is decidedly uncomfortable if y'all're the sort who uses a laptop in their lap, equally your hands need to move farther down the body of the machine to become any typing done. If yous're willing to take being deskbound, Asus has bundled a palm rest and a folding stand up to help mankind out the ergonomic experience; these chip away at the inherent portability of a laptop, but given this machine's size (and battery life) that was never actually in the cards.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo fifteen OLED review: Ports
There are a pair of Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports on the right side of the machine, paired with a unmarried USB 3.1 Gen 2 port.
On the left, you'll discover the DC-in jack, an HDMI 2.i port, and the 3.5mm audio jack. The selection feels a bit lackluster on a automobile this large, just much of the available infinite is ceded to ventilation, to keep things cool.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo fifteen OLED review: Brandish
Let's start upwards tiptop with the 15.six-inch, 3,840 x ii,160 pixel resolution OLED HDR display. It delivers on all fronts, serving up deep blacks, vibrant color (rated at 100% DCI-P3 color gamut, and Pantone validated), and appreciable effulgence that makes for a great viewing experience, even at awkard angles or while working exterior. I did a flake of gaming, but the bulk of my fourth dimension was spent in Adobe Lightroom Archetype, culling and editing photos, where the display does an splendid task of rendering truthful-to-life images.
The secondary brandish takes a bit more effort to wrap ane's head around. The ScreenPad Plus offers a 3,840 x one,140 pixel resolution, but it'south an "IPS-level" display, and not an OLED, and the difference in quality is jarring given its proximity to a much nicer screen. Colors feel flatter and duller past comparision, which might be disappointing for someone hoping to use it for inking.
The ScreenPad Plus actually shines if you utilize one of the limited listing of apps supported past Asus' "Control Panel" software. I use 2 of them — Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom Classic — regularly, and having a dedicated selection of buttons and sliders at manus is a promising prospect, fifty-fifty if the execution leaves something to be desired. It'due south also handy as a general spot to park browser windows or documents, with clever UI touches like shortcuts for moving things from one display to another.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo xv OLED review: Keyboard, Touchpad, and Stylus
On a table or desk, the elevated bending makes for comfortable typing, and makes the second brandish piece of cake to read. The palm residual is however another thing to toss into my backpack, but it makes typing far more than bearable. The keyboard is otherwise cracking, with a spacious layout and keys that offer a off-white amount of travel with every press.
The trackpad is taller than it is broad, which makes some gestures in Windows 10 a little tricky for my large hands. You can also turn the trackpad into a number pad by pressing a small calculator symbol on the top right corner, a pocket-sized touch on that's libation than information technology has whatever right to be. Given the full general difficulty in using this machine without a total desk-bound to prop it upwardly onto, you'd do well to toss a mouse into your backpack as well. Asus also included a stylus. There's no user-friendly place to put it when it's not in utilise, and unless you lot're especially corking on drawing on either of the two displays, it doesn't offer any novel functionality.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED review: Audio
The Harmon Kardon speakers sound a niggling flat out of the box, and so I spent a few minutes with the equalizer in the DTS Audio Processing ap to go things balanced to my liking; there's enough flexibility there to really unlock what the speakers are capable of.
They're loud and reasonably well-rounded, easily filling a room with audio, though there's some baloney if you crank the volume up too far. And while I'thousand no audiophile, I found it strangely attracting to make subtle adjustements to the EQ on the secondary brandish while writing upwards summit; your mileage may vary.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo fifteen OLED review: Performance
The Asus ZenBook Pro Duo fifteen OLED earned a score of seven,028 on the Geekbench 5.4 multicore benchmark. Information technology cruises past many of the other machines on our lists, like Microsoft's AMD-powered Surface Laptop iv (6,748), and the Razer Bract 15 Avant-garde (half-dozen,662), but lags behind Dell's XPS 15 OLED (vii,477).
The machine completed our Handbrake video encoding test in eight minutes and 18 seconds, once again edged out by Dell's XPS 15 OLED (eight:10). Its 1TB NVMe SSD striking a transfer rate of 950.1 MBps, outpacing the competition: the Dell XPS xv OLED earned a transfer rate of 825.6 MBps, and the Razer Blade 15 Advanced a rate of 890MBps.
The ZenBook Pro Duo met or exceeded the 60 frames per second sweet spot at 1080p resolutions on but nigh everything nosotros tested, including Assassin'southward Creed Valhalla (62 fps), Borderlands 3 (67 fps), and Shadow of the Tomb Raider (71). Information technology's bested by machines built with gaming in mind, like the Razer Blade 15 Advanced, which is powered by an Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080. The ZenBook Pro Duo failed to striking 30 frames per second when we cranked the settings up to 4K on just about all of our gaming benchmarks, eking out a mere 36 fps in Clay five.
Anecdotally, Cyberpunk 2077 hovered at 26 to thirty frames per 2nd on the Ultra preset, with Ray Tracing dialed up at the 4K resolution, but judicious tweaking of the settings brought me closer to a frame rate I'd really be willing to play at. No Human being's Heaven fared better, hovering effectually 35 to 40 frames per 2nd at maximum settings. In both cases the machine's fans roared to go on temperatures in cheque, so you'll desire to clothing headphones or crank the speakers up if you're dandy on gaming undisturbed.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED review: Battery Life
The ZenBook Pro Duo xv OLED gave up the ghost after v hours and one minute on our Web Surfing battery test when both displays were on. Shutting off the secondary display nets a fleck more time, at 6 hours and 50 minutes. On the PCMark 10 gaming criterion, it eked out 1 hour and 46 minutes of life with both displays on, and lasted for 1 60 minutes and 54 minutes when the 2nd display was turned off.
These numbers are wholly unsurprising, given the hardware at work here. In my own anecdotal testing I by and large saw about iv to five hours before I had to reach for the power adapter, simply given the inherent difficulty in using this auto without a dedicated surface to rest it on, it wasn't all that problematic.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED review: Webcam
The 720p infrared camera is compatible with Windows Hi for an effortless login experience, which is the best that can be said virtually it. Ho-hum, desaturated colors and grainy video brand for and underwhelming video conferencing experience. Teleconferencing doesn't seem to be a focus point for this machine and so this isn't surprising, but it's always a piddling disappointing at this pricepoint.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED review: Heat
The temperatures start to climb when the machine is under duress, primarily flowing out of the bottom and sides of the chassis as the ventilation organisation works to keep the innards in cheque. We recorded the hottest temperatures underneath the machine, where it peaked at 139.five degrees Farenheit.
It can get uncomfortable while the car is perched on my legs, only it'due south too cumbersome to ever spend much time in my lap, and heavy workloads sap the bombardment, which brought me back to a desk-bound and charger anyway; information technology's a self-correcting problem.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo fifteen OLED review: Software
There isn't much in the fashion of pre-installed software: the MyAsus hub keeps track of organization updates and some display settings, including the ability to choose distinct color profiles, or manually set the white residue. Of detail interest is Command Panel, which turns the ScreenPad plus into a dedicated brandish that offers customizable shortcuts for a select grouping of apps; fortunately for me, Adobe'southward Lightroom Classic and Photoshop are on the listing.
Control Console is a dandy concept, just in that location are also some idiosyncracies to work out. I tested Control Middle primarily in Lightroom, using the sliders to tweak the images I'd shot. It's responsive, suitable for broad strokes or fine adjustments, but the tool doesn't really receive any data from Lightroom: if I fabricated adjustments directly in the app, or switched to a unlike image, the secondary display still reflected whatever adjustments I final made. This is fine if I'thou spending a lot of time on a single image, merely gets frustrating when making subtle tweaks to a batch of images (for, say, a laptop review), and the adjustment I made on i image is all of a sudden carried over to a wildly different paradigm, considering the slider was no longer in a neutral position.
I ultimately swapped out the controls to inconsequential deportment like flagging or rating images, but the keyboard shortcuts for those are ingrained in my memory, and I concluded up rarely using the ScreenPad Plus at all, obviating the demand for a 2d display in the kickoff place. With an update to enable better communication between apps, I could meet some existent workflow benefits to having a dedicated panel for shortcuts correct at might fingertips, without needing external hardware.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED review: Verdict
I adore the novelty on brandish here. With a few software updates in the right direction, the ScreenPad Plus could make a novel complement to content creation workflows, while time to come iterations of the hardware could help span the functioning gap. But even and so, the ScreenPad Plus' potential utility doesn't overcome the ergonomic concessions required to make it fit, resulting in a deskbound laptop that delivers a lesser user experience to hooking a second monitor up to your run of the manufacturing plant machine.
Without some killer app or functionality, the 2nd brandish is more than hindrance than assist. Your funds would be better spent on something more traditional, like Dell's XPS 15 OLED, and using the money you salve on a full-sized screen.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/asus-zenbook-pro-duo-15-oled
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