Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 Review

The Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 (starts at $2,499.99; $3,999.99 as tested) is a cutting-edge gaming laptop for enthusiasts who want the latest, greatest technology—and we do mean, all of it. It’s a refinement of the existing Duo 15, bumping up the screen size while scooting the innovative secondary screen back a bit, to create a closer-to-seamless dual-display setup. It’s an effective design, bolstered by an AMD Ryzen 9 CPU and an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti GPU powering top-end gaming performance. All of this is achieved within a thin, elegant chassis packed with advanced features. You can easily see where the sky-high price comes from, so while it isn’t for most shoppers, the Duo 16 does deliver for deep-pocketed early adopters.

Taking Dual-Screen Design to the Next Level

We reviewed the first 15.6-inch Zephyrus Duo in 2020 and an updated version in February 2021, and the system’s engineering has always impressed. Fitting two screens into a shockingly slim chassis is a feat, and the angled secondary display really does provide effective additional real estate. While the main concept remains the same, this model brings a larger main display, some design tweaks, and new refresh rates that change with the resolution.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Let’s start with that thin design, which remains in place here despite the changes. Personally, if I were told a gaming laptop includes two displays, I would picture a thick hulk of a machine. But the Asus Duos have always been slim laptops. Even now, with the main screen bumped to 16 inches (more on that below), the laptop is trim: It measures 0.81 by 13.98 by 10.47 inches (HWD) and 5.63 pounds.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

That’s good for any 16-inch gaming laptop, let alone one with two screens, with the smaller display neatly packed into the frame. It’s fair to say that the high price is indicative of what’s needed to accomplish this design. Still, props to Asus for keeping the Duo 16 to a relatively compact size while making room for a bigger 16-inch, 16:10-aspect-ratio main display.

If you’re unfamiliar with the ScreenPad Plus (the name for the second display on this system), here’s the idea. It works as a fully usable second display, complete with touch capability. It rises out of the laptop deck as you pull the screen open, angled at the user. It’s a power move that feels very high tech.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

You can drag and drop any windows from the main display onto the second screen as you would with an external monitor (though doing so is slightly more difficult, as app windows and the cursor appear fairly small once you move them onto the ScreenPad Plus). The ScreenPad Plus is a good place for your persistent applications like music players, reference files, or maps while gaming. There’s even enough room to split windows within the ScreenPad Plus, as long as you don’t need to close-read any small text.

It’s not essential, but like any second monitor, it is more useful, and additional display real estate is not otherwise available on a laptop unless you attach a portable monitor. Asus also includes surprisingly robust custom software to manage this display. It shows up as a toolbar aligned vertically on the left side of the ScreenPad. With it, you can easily adjust this screen’s brightness, lock the keyboard to reduce presses while using the screen, launch a variety of bespoke apps, and more.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The jump up from 15 inches is accomplished largely by an adjustment to the ScreenPad’s placement, and to the size of the main screen’s bezels. The two screens are placed slightly differently than the Duo 15’s, with the ScreenPad set further back and raised at a different angle. In this setup, the lower bezel of the main display is hidden behind its smaller sibling, in practice losing that bezel entirely.

This reduces how much of the total screen border you see, and it’s honestly a pretty clever layout. At times, it looks as if the ScreenPad is cutting off the bottom of the main screen, but it’s really exactly in line with the bottom bezel. The positioning is very precise, and it makes for a nice, clean look that also results in a more seamless two-display setup. It comes off more like thin-bezel desktop monitors placed edge-to-edge than the previous layout ever did (just aligned vertically instead of horizontally).

(Photo: Molly Flores)

There’s one somewhat hidden benefit to the new ScreenPad placement, too: The new positioning of the ScreenPad leaves an even bigger gap for airflow to the components, the hottest of which rest right under the lifted panel. With its dual-screen laptops (there are other Duo systems outside of the Zephyrus gaming line), Asus uses the area beneath the raised display to draw air down into the chassis, cooling the components inside. This is especially relevant in gaming laptops, which run very hot during gaming sessions, and every bit helps.

Those Twin Screens: Double the Panel Specs

The bigger main screen is also more advanced than before. First, Asus offers two panel options for the display: QHD, and a dynamic resolution “dual spec” option (more on that in a moment). Since the display is in a 16:10 aspect ratio, the actual resolutions are not the standard 16:9 resolutions you may be used to, but the taller equivalent. That means the QHD panel in our review unit bears a 2,560-by-1,600-pixel native resolution, along with a 165Hz refresh rate.

The dual spec panel, meanwhile, is something different. While the resolution and refresh rate in our QHD-screen unit is static, this screen allows for variable combinations at 4K and full HD, meaning it can alter the refresh rates alongside the resolutions to suit different use cases. With this panel, you can run full HD at 240Hz, or 4K at 120Hz depending on your needs of the moment.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Combining 4K resolution and a 240Hz refresh rate would put a lot of extra strain on the GPU, and almost no games are played this way, so Asus has tied the higher refresh rate to the lower resolution. Our unit doesn’t include this kind of panel, though, so we can only speculate. Automatic adaptation sounds useful, though when you need to shift down to 120Hz and 4K, you could mimic the effect on any laptop by manually capping the frame rate and changing resolution in game settings. The reverse doesn’t work, though: If a 4K panel maxes out at 120Hz (as many would, since going as high as 240Hz isn’t practical at 4K), you can’t alter a screen’s hardware limit in game settings.

As for the ScreenPad Plus, it’s a mini LED touch panel with an extremely high contrast ratio. The Duo 16’s ScreenPad measures 14.1 inches diagonally, unsurprisingly an uncommon size given the panel’s unique elongated shape, and is much wider than it is tall.

The default resolution of the ScreenPad Plus on our model is a “4K equivalent” (3,840 by 1,110 pixels) with a 60Hz refresh rate, but you can also get a full HD 60Hz model instead. The size of this panel is genuinely useful, and roomier than similar concepts. It is very bright, large enough to move past being just a novelty, and useful thanks to the software options.

Keyboard Compromises and Extras

With these twin-screen laptops, Asus had to change up the time-tested traditional laptop layout. Given that the second screen takes up part of the space a keyboard normally occupies, the keyboard is down-shifted to the bottom edge of the deck.

As a result, there’s no empty space for a palm or wrist rest (your wrists have to float or sit on the edge of the chassis, which is somewhat uncomfortable), and the touch pad is still relocated east of the keyboard.

The latter definitely takes some getting used to; even after spending time with several Duo laptops, I often reach toward the center for the touch pad first, before remembering it’s on the right side. I also imagine this location is not friendly to lefties. The touch pad can double as a virtual LED numeric keypad at the press of a button, which is nice given no physical space for a real one.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

As for the typing experience with this keyboard location, it’s serviceable. The keys have been improved with more travel (Asus says it’s now 1.7mm), giving a little more movement to the pretty shallow keys on the Duo 15, but it’s still not a standout. With the key feel and keyboard placement together, the input scheme here is not a high point, but it is ideally less of an issue for gaming while using a mouse.

The Duo 16 has a webcam embedded in the top bezel, which doesn’t sound like a noteworthy inclusion, but a camera was actually missing from the last Duo 15. A camera was deemed an discretionary external addition and superfluous design choice at some point, but given the massive surge in remote work and video calling, Asus wisely brought one back. It is only a 720p camera, though, lackluster at this price when 1080p is expected among premium options. The picture quality is, in fact, just okay as a result.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The webcam is joined by solid connectivity, including two USB Type-C ports, two USB Type-A ports, an HDMI out, and an Ethernet jack. The wireless-connectivity support comprises Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Pricing and Components

As mentioned, this is an extremely expensive laptop. That can hardly be a surprise given all of the design elements and high-end components mentioned above, but even so, it’s a price tier only for shoppers with very beefy budgets.

The Duo 16 starts at $2,499.99, but the review tester we were sent is configured much higher than even that. Our unit costs $3,999.99, which includes an AMD Ryzen 9 6980HX processor, 32GB of memory, an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti GPU, a 2TB SSD, and of course the QHD display and the ScreenPad Plus. This is an eye-watering combination of cost and power, truly the cutting edge for enthusiasts. It’s available at a variety of online retailers including Amazon, Adorama, B&H, and Office Depot.

Nvidia allows manufacturers to configure its GeForce mobile GPUs at a range of wattages to suit the needs and limits of different laptop designs. We’ve found that this has quite a measurable impact on graphics performance—a GPU configured at a high wattage can perform at or above the level of the GPU above it in the hierarchy—so the on-paper GPU model on its own means less than it used to. The Duo 16, despite its thinness, goes for broke with a 140-watt (plus 25-watt boost) RTX 3080 Ti. The CPU is configured at 45 watts.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

These high-end parts are cooled by some advanced thermal solutions. In addition to the under-screen vents, which Asus says increase the intake in that area by 30{5376dfc28cf0a7990a1dde1ec4d231557d3d9e6448247a9e5e61bb9e48b1de73}, the Duo 16 uses Thermal Grizzly(Opens in a new window)’s Conductonaut Extreme Liquid Metal thermal solution. The superior conductivity of this paste supposedly decreases temperatures by up to 15 degrees C versus what Asus terms “standard” pastes, though it’s unclear exactly what this comparison entails.

The fans, in addition, are super-slim and supported by four heatsinks and six heat pipes. These Arc Flow fans feature 84 blades and are custom-shaped to improve airflow. Again, these sorts of high-end inclusions are how the Duo 16 functions with its unique design, but also contributors to the big price tag.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The Duo 16 is also supported by Asus’ Armoury Crate software, which includes the usual component-monitoring and performance-mode options. The laptop is impressively quiet while gaming on the default Balanced mode, it must be said—for how thin and powerful it is, it would be easy to assume the fans would be loud by nature. Asus’ work here is a success, though bumping up to the Turbo setting certainly makes the fans audible (but even then, still not super-loud).

Next, we will finally see how these components and fancy features fared in our PC Labs suite of benchmark tests.

Testing the Zephyrus Duo 16: Both Substance and Style

In order to get a feel for how effective this machine is, we compared its results to those of the laptops in the table below…

This is an expensive and blistering-fast field of competitors, all equipped with high-end CPUs and GPUs. The Razer Blade 15 is a step below the others (i7 and an RTX 3070 Ti instead of the i9 and RTX 3080 Ti tier), but it represents the slickest premium 15-inch laptop around.

This group provides plenty of parity otherwise, with Intel’s latest 12th Generation “Alder Lake” Core i9 chips a good foil for the Ryzen 9. The Acer Predator Triton 500 SE and the Alienware x17 R2 are particularly fitting ones for gaming, while the Gigabyte Aero 16 appeals to the content-creator audience who also may be considering the Duo 16.

Productivity Tests

The main benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop’s storage.

Three further benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Our final productivity test is workstation maker Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop(Opens in a new window), which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

This is a blistering batch of competitor CPUs, so all of the results are impressive. The Duo 16 doesn’t top any test, but falls around the middle of the pack or into the top three most often. Intel’s latest Core i9 solutions outdo this Ryzen 9 processor on most occasions (which a generation ago, would have been surprising, but Alder Lake really stepped up), but this is still an extremely competent productivity and media editing machine.

An expensive laptop like this is likely to be your one main laptop, so content creators could seek this machine out for its power and the usefulness of the second screen. It’s slightly behind the best options at the very top end in raw CPU performance, but still extremely capable for media workloads.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We test Windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Two more tests from GFXBench 5.0, run offscreen to allow for different display resolutions, wring out OpenGL operations.

In addition, we run three real-world game tests using the built-in benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege. These represent simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive esports shooter games respectively. We run Valhalla and Siege twice at different image quality presets, and F1 twice at max settings with and without Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing.

The Duo 16 and its RTX 3080 Ti look strong on the synthetic tests, but it isn’t the leader on the real game tests. Note that the games were tested at full HD, not at the laptop’s native QHD resolution, so we can compare them to the others fairly.

These frame rates are great compared to the full range of gaming systems, and still hold up compared to these top-of-the-line competitors. At a base line, this is clearly a laptop capable of over 60fps gaming at maximum settings (and then some), and you can make use of the high refresh rate in competitive multiplayer games.

Obviously with this laptop, much of the price tag goes into the unique design, the display quality, the fancy features, and other components like the CPU, memory, and the 2TB SSD. But that doesn’t prevent top-end performance too, besting several more traditionally designed laptops. The Triton 500 and x17 R2, in particular, are CPU and GPU matches for this system, and it matches or bests both on these games. You can get more “pure dollars to frame rates” out of other systems, but this isn’t a performance compromise to get the design.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender short movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50{5376dfc28cf0a7990a1dde1ec4d231557d3d9e6448247a9e5e61bb9e48b1de73} and audio volume at 100{5376dfc28cf0a7990a1dde1ec4d231557d3d9e6448247a9e5e61bb9e48b1de73} until the system quits. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

Unsurprisingly, the battery life is not great on this laptop. The powerful components and two high-resolution screens are battery drainers, and you’ll be lucky to get a few good hours off the charger.

The displays are great quality, though the measurements only show the main screen. The main display is extremely bright, though even that high result falls short of the claimed 1,100 nits peak brightness. Over 700 nits is still more than enough for most use cases, while color coverage is strong, but not complete. I can only attest that the ScreenPad also looks sharp and bright by the ol’ anecdotal eye test.

The Verdict: An Absolute Laptop Marvel…for Enthusiasts Only

The Zephryus Duo 16, like its smaller predecessors, is an impressive machine for a rare few shoppers. Even setting aside price, the dual-screen design is useful and interesting, but not essential. Add in the enormous price tag, and it’s a machine only for early adopters and enthusiasts who want to have the latest, most powerful gadget.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

But no denying it: It is very, very cool. From the elegant design to the sharp twin displays to the leading-edge-powerful components, this is a classy laptop that will play your games at the highest settings while also turning every head in its viewing radius. It’s the same idea as the Duo 15, just better executed and more powerful. You can find better raw-speed values for high-end gaming laptops, of course. But if you have an unlimited budget and this seems like a system you must have, it delivers.