ASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo 15, Two Screens Are Better Than One

The Second Screen Literally Makes The Zephyrus 15 Duo Cooler

Over at Kitguru is an interesting product from ASUS ROG, the Zephyrus Duo 15 which is a powerful 15″ gaming laptop with a second keyboard sized 3,840×1,100 touchscreen just above the actual keyboard, called the ScreenPad.  The specifications should satisfy even demanding gamers, a Core i9-10980HK, with a GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q, 32GB of DDR4-3200MHz and a pair of 1TB Samsung PM981 M.2 NVMe SSD in RAID 0.  The main screen is 15.6″ in size, with a 3840×2,160 resolution, but the one drawback is that it is locked at a 60Hz refresh rate.

Those specifications give you a good idea as to how the laptop will perform, except that ASUS have more tricks up their sleeves.  There are three different profiles you can run the system under using ASUS Armoury Crate software.  Turbo mode increases not just the frequencies at which the GPU is run at but also provides more power to the CPU to allow it to sustain peak frequencies under heavy load.  As you might expect the fans also run at a higher RPM than the other two modes.  Performance Mode is similar but with slightly lower frequencies and voltages and the last is Silent mode, which may not truly be silent but is certainly quieter than the other two and will also be kinder to your battery.

The ScreenPad props up at a 13° angle when you open the laptop which allows air to flow through the chassis and in testing it does greatly help with controlling the thermals in this laptop.  The placement also pushed the keyboard forward on the chassis and required some interesting port placement as well.  As for it’s usefulness as a secondary screen, Kitguru found some interface issues.  Whenever you touch the secondary screen it will immediately switch focus to it which can be a problem if you are in the middle of a game.  The placement and size also limits the purposes you can put it to, as you can read about in the full review.