Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550LXS
Terrifyingly expens expensive, but Asus’ twin-screene twin-screened gaming machine is a force t to be reckoned with
SCORE
PRICE £3,333 (£4,000 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk
The ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 is a strange beast. On the outside, it’s a regular gaming laptop, all angles, vents and cryptic glyphs. Open it up, however, and a weird hybrid of a machine emerges: an ultrawide, second display rising majestically, like a phoenix from the ashes of common sense, just to the rear of an RGB backlit keyboard.
It’s matched with one of the most powerful specifications you can squeeze into a modern laptop: a tenthgeneration octa-core Intel Core i9-10980HK processor, 32GB of RAM, a pair of 1TB SSDs arranged in a RAID0 configuration, all accompanied by an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super GPU and 4K main screen. (You can buy a configuration with a Core i7-10875H, RTX 2070 Super and 300Hz 1080p screen, but that still costs £3,000.)
What lies on top
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the ScreenPad grace an Asus machine; that honour falls on the shoulders of the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo ( see issue 304, p50). But the design has been significantly refined for 2020.
As before, that second display stretches the width of the chassis and occupies the full space behind the keyboard. It’s the same width as the main 4K screen, but with a letterbox 3,840 x 1,100 resolution and measuring 14in across the diagonal.
The new part of the design is that, instead of being integrated into the base of the laptop, this ScreenPad tilts up from the rear on struts, lifting out of the chassis as you open the lid.
Apart from being a neat piece of engineering, this has a couple of major benefits: first, it means the second screen is easier to read and interact with; and second, it exposes the system’s two main cooling fans, making for more efficient air intake and cooling of those beefy internals. Despite the mechanicals, the laptop measures a relatively sleek 360 x 268 x 20.9mm and weighs 2.4kg.
Otherwise, Asus followers will recognise the characteristic Zephyrus touches. It’s housed in a sturdy, matte metal chassis, with the ROG logo inset in chrome on the lid, and there’s plenty of connectivity. The HDMI 2.0b and Gigabit Ethernet ports are housed, alongside a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 port at the rear, between twin exhaust vents. There are two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports plus a Thunderbolt 3 port on the right, while the power input, headset and a separate mic jack are situated on the left. Wireless connectivity is delivered via a 2x2 MIMO Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 adapter.
Touch of class
The ScreenPad isn’t the Zephyrus’ only novel feature: the position of the keyboard also raises an eyebrow.
This is shunted down to the front edge of the chassis, which means there’s no at area to rest your palms on while typing (a rubber wedge-shaped wrist rest comes in the box). This does have benefits. For one thing, it makes it easier to tap the spacebar with your thumb while gaming. It also means your hands stay cooler, as your palms aren’t heated by the warming laptop chassis.
The touchpad is out of position too, shunted over to the right-hand side, and is narrow by modern standards. Asus believes most people will use a mouse most of the time. You can even tap your finger in the pad’s top-left corner to turn it into a numberpad, complete with backlit keys stencilled in red beneath its smooth, matte surface. I can’t see this getting much use, though, since it’s actually more fiddly to use than the number keys on the top row of the keyboard.
Aside from its Marmite positioning, the keyboard is a joy to type on. Its square, Scrabble-style keys have a solid, well-damped action and there’s fully customisable RGB backlighting on offer. The layout is largely sensible, although I’d have preferred a doubleheight Enter key and wider left-Shift key. Two extra buttons are supplied just above the touchpad: a shortcut key for activating Asus’ Armoury
Crate settings application and one for enabling and disabling the second screen – if you want to extend your battery life, for instance. There’s also a fan shortcut on the F5 key for toggling between “Silent”, “Performance” and “Turbo” fan modes.
Double display
The ScreenPad is what makes this laptop different but, despite the fancy name, this is no voodoo. Windows 10 treats it exactly as it would if you plugged in an external monitor: you can drag app windows and desktop shortcuts onto it in the same way.
Nevertheless, Asus preinstalls extra ScreenPad software to make managing what’s what’ on the pad “easier”. Tap the small arr arrow on the left edge of the ScreenPad an and up pops a number of quick-launch icons; you can drag Windows shortcuts shortc onto this space from the desktop and then tap them with a finger to launch l them.
There’s also a screen switch button for swapping app apps instantly from the main screen to the th ScreenPad and vice versa, plus a brightness brig slider and a handwriting-recognition handwriting-rec app. You can use the latter to scrawl text with your finger or a stylus, s but it’s not as good as Window Windows 10’s built-in handwriting input inp tool.
Alas, the ScreenPad Scre software doesn’t always work w perfectly. In particular, launc launching apps this way frequently ended up moving apps around and minimising the game I was playing at the time. I found it more reliable to launch the apps I wanted before playing, then arranging them on the ScreenPad with Windows’ own snapping tools.
More useful, potentially, is the ability to use the ScreenPad as a space for tool palettes and the like while editing photos in Photoshop or videos – it’s also a handy space for approving documents that need an old-school signature.
When it comes to the main screen, the Zephyrus 15 Duo is available with two choices. The higher-specification machine I tested comes with a 60Hz 4K (3,840 x 2,160) display calibrated to the Adobe RGB colour gamut, while the lower-spec variant comes with a 300Hz Full HD display. Both are non-touch IPS panels.
Technically, the 4K panel is spot on. I measured Adobe RGB gamut coverage at a near-faultless 98.3% and a volume of 100.9%, while colour accuracy within Adobe RGB was excellent, with an average Delta E of 1.44. It’s a superb display for editing photos, although that 60Hz refresh rate means it’s not great for fast-paced first-person shooters.
Double power
That’s a shame as this Zephyrus is one heck of a machine. In our 4K media benchmarks, which mainly focus on CPU-bound image and videoconversion tasks and video playback, it proved to be the fourth-fastest laptop we’ve ever tested, most notably lagging behind the Alienware Area-51m ( pcpro.link/312alien) and AMD Ryzen-powered Asus TUF Gaming A15 ( pcpro.link/312asus). That bodes well for CPU-intensive tasks such as high-resolution g video editing g and rendering. g
The SSD RAID array is snappy too, returning a sequential read speed of 2,691MB/sec in the AS SSD tests. However, it’s disappointingly gy slower for writes, at 1,498MB/sec.
For g games, it’s a beast. In the Metro: Last Light 1080p benchmark with High g settings g enabled, the ROG returned an average g frame rate of 186fps, beating everything but the Alienware Area-51m. And in the tough g Hitman 2 benchmark at 1080p p (and High settings in everything), it reached an average 51.4fps. That’s a fraction behind the Razer Blade Pro 17 7 2020 ( see issue 311, p54) and well above the Gigabyte Aero 17 ( see p50).
As expected, enabling ray tracing in the Wolfenstein:
Youngblood tests at 1080p hits frame rates hard, dropping from 154fps to 94fps, but I clawed it back up to 122fps by enabling Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). In short, the Zephyrus will play any current game you throw at it at the 60fps limit of its display.
The only area where the Asus struggles is battery life. To give it a fair chance, I disabled the ScreenPad and switched to integrated graphics, but even then the Zephyrus Duo 15 only lasted for 4hrs 9mins in our video-rundown test, lagging behind both the Gigabyte Aero 17 and Razer Blade Pro 17. I hoped for more given there’s a four-cell 90Wh battery inside.
Two to tango
Disappointing battery life aside, there’s no doubting the performance capabilities of the Zephyrus Duo. It sits comfortably among the fastest laptops we’ve ever tested and will cope with any game or demanding application you put in its path.
While the 60Hz display certainly doesn’t help with this laptop’s gaming credentials, its impeccable colour accuracy and wide colour gamut means it’s brilliant for creative tasks such as professional photo and video editing or rendering.
The big question is this: if you want a gaming laptop, do you really need to spend £4,000 on this machine? Do you want the second screen that badly? Wouldn’t you rather pick up a Gigabyte Aero 17, which is less exotic and slightly less speedy but £1,500 cheaper? That’s a decision that, ultimately, y rests with y you and your y bank balance. I know, however, where I’d put my money.
SPECIFICATIONS
Hexa-core 2.4GHz 2 Core i9-10980HK 9 0980 p processor 32GB DDR4-3200 RAM 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics 15.6in non-touch IPS display, 3,840 x 2,160 resolution eso ut o secondary 14.1in IPS touchscreen, 3,840 , x 1,100 , resolution 2 x 1TB M.2 PCIe SSDs 2x2 802.11ax Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5 USB-C Thunderbolt 3 HDMI 2 x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 Ethernet port 3.5mm jack j 90Wh battery Windows 10 Home 360 x 268 x 20mm (WDH) 2.4kg 1yr limited warranty
“The ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 sits comfortably among the fastest laptops we’ve ever tested and will cope with any game you put in its path”