Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 SE GX551QS
The pinnacle of mobile gaming but make sure you’ll use the dual screens before spending this much
SCORE
PRICE £2,916 (£3,499 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk
If you bought the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550LXS we reviewed a few months ago ( see issue 312, p52), it’s best if you look away now. Not only is this update faster in every way, it’s also £500 cheaper.
Still, this is the literal price we all pay for living at the cutting edge of technology, and the GX551QS skates so close you can hear the ice crack. Asus pairs AMD’s most powerful and most recent Ryzen 9 5900HX 590 processor with the fastest mobile graphics chip in existence: Nvidia’s all-new RTX 3080.
With all the power inside, the ice should be melting and it’s tru true that this laptop isn’t going to last long when gaming on the move. We squeezed 5hrs 32mins out of it in our undemanding videorundown test, which you can slice in half if you start gaming without the power supply.
Beef and brawn
That power supply weighs 1.05kg, which is 100g more than the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Nano ( see p48), and the Nano will fit rather more comfortably in your bag. This chunky beast of a PSU measures 35mm thick, but in return it injects 280W of power into the Zephyrus Duo’s veins. And with tremendous results.
I’ll start with its non-gaming performance, because Asus and AMD have greatly inconvenienced us: we’ve been forced to redraw our benchmarks graphic for laptops as its previous limit of 330 has been vaporised. An overall result of 347 is simply staggering; a level we’d expect from £6,000 workstations of two years ago.
Credit for this goes to AMD’s MD’s eightcore/16-thread /16-thread processor, ocessor, with the Zen n 3 architecture yet et again showing its s power. Bear in mind that Intel sent us its current speed champion mpion in the previous Zephyrus Duo, the eight-core/16-thread Core i9-10980HK, and that could only muster 265 in our benchmarks.
The CPU benchmark Geekbench 5 makes slightly kinder reading for Intel. AMD still out-punched its rival, but by a smaller margin: 1,466 versus 1,304 in its single-core test, 8,814 versus 8,027 in the multicore part. The knockout blow comes for storage speed. Both machines benefit from two NVMe SSDs in a RAID0 array, but because AMD supports PCIe 4 it raced through sequential write and read tests at 4,506MB/sec and 3,216MB/sec. That’s a boost of 67% and 115% respectively over its predecessor.
Gaming grunt
Then we come to gaming skills, and once again the new Zephyrus Duo delivers a huge upgrade to its predecessor with a RTX 2080 Super inside. To see how much of ake a look at the posite: in we saw a 19fps 080p to 141fps. Hitman 2 also saw an increase, pronounced, with a m 51fps to 56fps. hose graphs also at the RTX 3080 Zephyrus Duo rovide a huge lift over 070 in the ROG Strix ested last month ( see at 1080p. e the mobile RTX 0 being technically perior – it has 6,144 CUDA cores to the 5,120 in the mobile RTX 3070 – they both draw up to 130W of power and have a similar boost clock.
Those extra CUDA cores and 16GB of GDDR6 memory (double that of the RTX 3070) will make their presence felt at higher resolutions, which is why Asus includes a 4K screen here. Manage your expectations, however. Less demanding games such as F1 2020 will fly at that resolution – it averaged 100fps – but when we switched to Metro: Exodus the result dropped to 46fps. Playable but not fluid. Wolfenstein averaged 76fps and Shadow of the Tomb Raider 67fps. These are excellent scores, but to take advantage of the screen’s 120Hz refresh rate you’ll need to drop down to a lower resolution in most cases.
Dynamic displays
The 4K screen I refer to is the main 15.6in IPS panel, and it’s safe to describe it as “punchy”. It covers
100% of the Adobe RGB gamut and 91% of DCI-P3, so there are few colours it can’t display. It’s accurate too, with a maximum Delta E of 1.03. It’s even pleasing to the eye, with bright whites and an excellent peak brightness of 416cd/m2 .
The secondary panel is less extraordinary, but then you’re not going to be watching films on it. It covers 94% of the conservative sRGB gamut and 69% of DCI-P3, which leaves it looking drab compared to its big brother. However, push its brightness to full and you’ll enjoy peaks of 359cd/m2, and overall its colour accuracy is strong with an average Delta E of 0.79.
Really, though, the question isn’t about this panel’s accuracy but its usefulness. Unlike the ZenBook Duo UX482EG ( see issue 318, p44), where the two screens almost blend together as you look at them, there is a big gap between the Zephyrus Duo 15 SE’s two screens. I’d never expand
“We’ve been forced to redraw our benchmarks graphic for laptops as its previous limit of 330 has been vaporised”
windows across them. Instead, think of the second panel as a turbocharged version of the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar. For example, Asus supplies a calculator app, or use it for a Twitter feed, or draw on it. As that last use gives away, the smaller display supports touch (unlike the main screen).
Key question
By shunting the keyboard to the bottom of the chassis, you lose the familiar rest area for your palms when typing.
Despite the excellent
“feel” of the keys, this inevitably has an impact on speed and comfort.
That’s why I would never recommend this laptop to writers, but if you’re bashing out the occasional email or only using it to play games, it works well. On that note,
Asus delivers individual
RGB backlighting on the keys, while grouping the function keys together to make them easy to find in fast-moving games.
Then there’s the cramped touchpad, which again is top quality thanks to its glass surface. I also enjoyed having two physical left/right mouse buttons to click rather than the diving board approach of modern laptops.
Still, few gamers will rely on the touchpad rather than a mouse, and there are two USB-A ports on the right along with a USB-C 3.2 port. Left-handed users may curse Asus for not adding one on the left, but consolation comes from a trio of rear-mounted ports: HDMI, USB-A and Ethernet. This leaves the left side with the DC input, a 3.5mm combo jack and a microSD card reader.
Final thoughts
Much thought and design work has gone into this ROG Zephyrus Duo. It’s an achievement to pack so much into a 2.5kg chassis that measures 20.9mm thick, and while the outer design is conservative that’s the only aspect of the machine that doesn’t push at the limits of what’s possible.
It falls short of a recommendation, however, for two reasons. First, the price: at £3,500, it’s almost twice that of the Strix G17 and you have to search for scenarios where you’ll spot the difference in their power. Plus, Asus is selling the ROG Strix Scar 17 G733
– which includes a 166Hz 17.3in display with a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution – in a range of configurations for friendlier prices.
This brings me to the second reason: the screen setup. Buy the ROG Strix Scar 17 G733 and you’ll benefit from detailed gaming and cavernous amounts of working space. While the Zephyrus Duo’s two screens with their super-high resolutions sound great, most people will be better served by a single screen.
However, the glory of life is that we are all individuals, and this may prove to be the perfect machine for you. While I have my criticisms, none of them are for Asus’ execution. If you can swallow the price, and don’t mind its foibles, then game on.
Eight-core 3.3GHz (4.6GHz boost) AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX processor 32GB DDR4 3,200MHz RAM 16GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics 15.6in 120Hz non-touch IPS display, 3,840 x 2,160 resolution secondary 14.1in IPS touchscreen, 3,840 x 1,100 resolution 2 x 1TB M.2 PCIe SSDs 2x2 Wi-Fi 6 Bluetooth 5.1 HDMI USB-C 3.2 3 x USB-A 3.2 Ethernet port 3.5mm jack 90Wh battery Windows 10 Home 360 x 268 x 20.9mm (WDH) 2.5kg
1yr limited warranty