Ever since Asus debuted the dual-screen ZenBook Duo lineup earlier last year, I have been waiting for the company to bring the secondary screen over to its gaming lineup. We know how important multi-screen setups can be for gamers or professionals. And well, Asus has finally fulfilled this expectation of mine with the launch of the Zephyrus Duo 15, which features a secondary screen above the keyboard.
Zephyrus Duo 15: Specs and Features
Zephyrus Duo 15 comes with a Pantone-calibrated 15.6-inch primary display. You can choose between a 4K UHD panel with a 60Hz refresh rate or a Full-HD panel with a 300Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time. The highlight here, however, is the 14.1-inch UHD IPS secondary display (dubbed the ROG ScreenPad Plus) with 3840 x 1100 resolution and 60Hz refresh rate. It’s also a touchscreen, so quick and simpler interaction FTW!
Now, ZenBook Duo too has a secondary display, so what’s different about the Zephyrus Duo 15? The secondary display here isn’t glued (not literally!) to the chassis. Instead, it comes with a custom hinge to prop-up the display at a 13-degree angle to make it easy for you to interact with your Twitch chats, settings panes, and other content.
Asus is working with AAA game developers to further enhance the functionality of the secondary display. You can see real-time stats, build recommendations, and more for a variety of games including League of Legends, Fortnite, CS: Go, and more.
The slight angle is super helpful in two ways. One, you won’t have to force yourself to be able to view what’s on the second display. It will be right in front of you at all times. The second benefit is better airflow for cooling the laptop. In the official release, Asus states, “Tilting the touchscreen at an angle opens a larger 28.5 mm air intake [vent], and allows the fans to draw in cooler air from above the laptop [i.e under the raised secondary display] instead of warmer air from beneath it — [as is the case in most gaming laptops].”
Both the primary and secondary display also supports Nvidia’s G-SYNC technology. But, let’s talk about the internals now. The Zephyrus Duo 15 is powered by up to an 8-core 10th-Gen Comet Lake Intel Core-i9 CPU, clocked at up to 5.3GHz. It’s coupled with 16GB of DDR4 3200MHz RAM (expandable up to 48GB) and two M.2 NVME PCIe SSD slots with RAID 0 support (supports up to 2TB storage).
The graphics responsibilities aboard the Zephyrus Duo 15 are handled by the new top-of-the-line Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER graphics card. There’s also an RTX 2070 Super variant with 8GB VRAM available as well. This requires a stellar thermal solution and Asus has baked four heatsinks with ultrathin fins, along with five heat pipes on this laptop.
Zephyrus Duo 15 includes the same style keyboard as the previous Zephyrus laptops. It comes with per-key RGB lighting support with 1.4mm key travel and n-key rollover. The numpad is baked into the touchpad itself and can be activated with the touch of a button. As for I/O ports, you get a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, DisplayPort 1.4, 2x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, 1x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, 1x HDMI port, 1x RJ45 Ethernet port, and 3.5mm headphone jack.
Asus Zephyrus Duo 15 comes equipped with a 90Wh battery and a 240W adapter bundled inside the box. The laptop, however, also supports USB Power Delivery and can be juiced up using a 65W USB-C adapter.
The Taiwanese giant hasn’t offered any price and availability details just yet but we will keep you posted if we learn anything on this front. Zephyrus Duo 15 will find its way to India as well but there’s no ETA known at the moment.
