Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 – Design and Features

The Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 is a flagship gaming laptop if ever there was one, and comes in two configurations, both guaranteed to provide an impressive experience. We were sent the top configuration, which had the following specs:

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX (16-core/32-thread)
• Primary Display: 16-inch Mini-LED
• Primary Display Resolution: 2560×1600
• Primary Display Refresh Rate: 240Hz
• Secondary Display: 14-inch IPS (14 x 4.9 inches)
• Secondary Display Resolution: 3840 x 1100
• Refresh Rate: 60Hz
• Graphics: RTX 4090 (Mobile Version)
• Memory: 32GB DDR5, 4800 MHz, 64GB Maximum
• Storage: 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe
• Networking: Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), 2.5G LAN, Bluetooth 5.2
• I/O Ports:
  • 1x 3.5mm Combo Audio Jack
  • 1x HDMI 2.1 FRL
  • 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A
  • 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C support displayport / power delivery / G-SYNC
  • 1x RJ45 LAN port
  • 1x card reader (microSD)
• Camera: 1080p (FHD), 30 FPS
• Battery: 90WHrs
• Dimensions: 13.98″ x 10.47″ x 0.81″ – 1.17″
• Weight: 5.89lbs

This version (model number: GX650PY) is available for $3,999 but a cheaper model is available if you don’t mind stepping down in GPU power and total storage. The GX650PZ comes in at $3,499 and trades the RTX 4090 for the RTX 4080, dropping the total video memory to 12GB instead of 16GB, and cutting the 2TB SSD down to a single terabyte. Both are expensive, but the cheaper model feels like the better value overall, especially if you’re comfortable opening it and upgrading your own SSD.

The Duo 16 is a sleeper. From the outside, it looks like any other gaming laptop and even eschews external RGB in favor of an iridescent slash and ROG eye logo across its lid. It’s not exceptionally big or thick (the design is virtually identical to last generation’s Duo), and even the surface is designed to avoid fingerprint smudges, so you won’t be getting any looks, good or bad when the laptop is closed or viewed from behind.

Open it up and any semblance of being understated goes out the window. Instead of opening to a usual keyboard and trackpad, the Duo 16 features an entire second screen that runs edge to edge across the deck, 4.9 inches tall. It raises on a hinge with the lid, angling it to 13 degrees, visually bringing it in line with the bottom of the main display and making it easier to interact with. The screen is bright and vibrant, with a 3840×1440 resolution. It’s also touch sensitive, so you can tap in commands, but is finished with Gorilla Glass DXC for scratch and fingerprint resistance.

The second screen, which Asus calls the ROG ScreenPad Plus, is a combination of control center and genuine second screen for monitoring multiple windows. It’s perfect if you’re streaming a game and want to keep an eye on chat, and also gives you quick access to configuration settings and toggles for the microphone and camera. The usefulness of this screen really depends on how much you need a second monitor on the go. If you’re already using two screens on your desktop, you’ll probably love it. If not, then you may be paying for something you’ll ultimately not use very much.

Adding a second screen into the keyboard space demands some major changes to the design of the keyboard deck. The keys (RGB backlit) have been pushed down to make room for the screen, right down to the bottom edge of the keyboard deck. The touchpad has been moved to the right, where you would usually expect to find a numpad, and it in fact can turn into one with the touch of a button that illuminates number keys behind its glass surface. Despite less size overall, the keyboard features a full function row, arrow keys, and even a few extra keys above the trackpad to call up Armoury Crate or disable touch tracking.

Fitting all of these keys means that the entire keyboard and touchpad had to be shrunk down. Despite the slightly compressed design, I didn’t find it hard to type on. After an hour or so of normal use, I had reigned in my typos and was back to typing around my average of 110 WPM. The keys don’t feel particularly special – they’re slightly mushy, but with a nice tactile bump.

The bigger issue is that without any kind of palm rest, it feels a bit awkward to use. It sits low enough on a desk that it wasn’t a big deal for that use case, but when I actually used it as a laptop, I had to adopt a weird hovering typing style. Asus seems to know this because it includes a rubber palm rest in the box, which was also awkward to use unless I was at a desk where it wasn’t really needed anyway.

The main display is a stunning 16-inch Mini LED panel. It uses a 16:10 aspect ratio and the equivalent of 1440p resolution (2560×1600), so images are crisp and oh-so vibrant. It’s rated for HDR 1000 (1,100 nits of peak brightness), certified for Dolby Vision, and features 1,024 local dimming zones, making it one of the only laptops that can offer a true HDR gaming experience. Asus ships the display pre-calibrated, so there’s no need to calibrate it yourself for professional content creation.

The exterior design is one thing, but the components the Duo 16 packs are nothing short of top-of-the line. Its AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX processor is incredibly powerful. With 16 cores and 32 threads, it’s absolutely overkill for pure gaming and makes it an excellent choice for content creation. I edited a pair of short, four-minute, 4K videos in Adobe Premiere Pro, including rendered motion graphics and animations, and didn’t experience any slowdown whatsoever. Likewise, Photoshop didn’t experience slowdowns or crashes even with a dozen projects left open in background tabs and neural filters being applied where needed.

For pure gaming, the graphics card is even more important, and the Duo 16 GX650PY features Nvidia’s flagship RTX 4090 mobile version. While not a 1:1 with the desktop RTX 4090, it’s still the most powerful graphics card you can find in a laptop at this point and is the most likely to push high refresh rate screens like the Duo 16’s to their max. It features 16GB of video memory to store high res textures and is fast enough to present them without pop-in. It also opens the door to ray tracing and Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling and frame generation technologies, giving frame rates in supported games a substantial boost (and boosting the theoretical lifespan of the laptop before you’ll be shopping for a replacement to maintain those playable, max settings frame rates).

Asus didn’t spare any expense elsewhere in the PC either. The RTX 4090 version comes with 32GB of DDR5 memory and 2TB of NVMe storage. That’s enough to run any game with memory to spare (perfect for streaming to YouTube) and enough storage space for a large Steam library. Both are also user upgradeable by removing the back panel. There’s a second M.2 slot for easy storage expansion up to 4TB and two memory slots accepting a total of 64GB of DDR5.

The laptop comes equipped with six speakers and two-way noise canceling microphones. They’re not thin and grating like most laptops and are instead surprisingly full-bodied and spacious. I’ve yet to encounter a laptop that can offer better sound than a gaming headset, but the Duo 16 does an admirable job and works perfectly fine for gaming or Netflixing on the go. The microphones work in tandem, filtering out the sound coming from the speakers and your environment so your teammates can hear you clearly. There’s a bit of noticeable compression, but it keeps its promises of making you audible even in challenging environments.

It also offers an upgraded webcam with a 1080p resolution, but it’s terrible. Even in proper lighting, colors are blocky and unrealistic. Details are smudgy and undefined. I would never consider streaming with it, but for basic meetings where your appearance doesn’t matter, it works. It’s also functional enough to work with Windows Hello for facial login, but for anything more, you’ll want to invest in a standalone webcam.

For port selection, the laptop offers one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C, a microSD card reader, and an audio combo jack on the left; one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C on the right; and, one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, one full-size HDMI 2.1, and an RJ45 jack for wired ethernet on the back. The left USB Type-C port can be used for charging the laptop, though you’ll be limited to low power modes in PD charging mode.

Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 – Battery Life

As a high-powered gaming laptop, it should come as no surprise that the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 uses a lot of power. It ships with a massive 330-watt power brick, and without it, you can’t count on all day battery life. The internal battery is rated at 90WHrs, which is quite large, but even so, couldn’t make five hours of uptime. With the screen at half brightness, it clocked in at four hours and twenty-one minutes in PCMark’s Modern Office battery test. Actual gaming on battery is less than two hours.

Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 – Software

The Duo 16 uses Asus’s ROG Armoury Crate software for all of its configuration options. It’s a full-featured software suite that provides immediate access to performance presets and hardware information on its main screen. Digging a little deeper reveals even more options to customize the backlighting on the keyboard, adjust the microphone’s noise canceling mode, and to choose between the laptop’s integrated graphics to save on power, the RTX 4090 for maximum performance, or to let the system choose for you depending on how it’s being used.

Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 – Armoury Crate Software

Armoury Crate is feature-rich to a fault. There are so many options that it’s easy to become confused or lose track of where a certain setting might be. Asus also includes superfluous tabs for Asus news and game deals as a form of embedded advertising. It provides plenty of options to dial in the machine, but would seriously benefit from streamlining and getting rid of needless extras.

Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 – Performance

With such great specs and halo-tier pricing, the Duo 16 must perform at the top of the pack, right? Not quite. For starters, just because it uses the most powerful graphics card doesn’t mean it’s going to offer the same apex performance that you might expect from a desktop graphics card. Likewise, just because two laptops both have an RTX 4090, that doesn’t mean they’ll perform identically with the same games and settings.

That’s because heat plays a much more important role in laptops than it does in desktops (where it’s still important). When you have a high performance processor with an equally high caliber GPU, like we do here, you have a lot of heat that needs to be dissipated in order for those components to perform their best. At the same time, manufacturers need to be cognizant of how much noise their system is making. It’s a balancing act between noise, thermals, and performance that has existed for as long as there have been gaming laptops.

In the case of the Duo 16, Asus has opted to have its fans run a bit quieter and its components closer to the redline in Performance Mode. Across my testing in this mode, the CPU peaked at 96C while the GPU pegged out at 80C. In game temperatures were slightly less, but not much: 87-90C for the CPU and 77-80C for the GPU. Even with these high temps, fan noise was always tolerable and didn’t elicit side-eye from my wife watching TV on the couch next to me. This design choice increases its usability if you’re on campus or home around other people, but does decrease its overall performance.

If you don’t mind the noise, you can kick things up to Turbo Mode which maxes out the fans and gives the Duo 16 enough headroom to stretch its legs. Here’s how it performed in Turbo Mode.

In the chart above, I’ve compared the Duo 16 against the Razer Blade 16, which also has an RTX 4090, and the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, which has an RTX 4080. In synthetic tests, the Duo 16 beat Razer in all but Port Royal, but surprisingly also lost to the lower-spec Legion Pro 7i in Time Spy and Night Raid. It’s worth noting, however, that both the Razer Blade and the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i utilize Intel Core i9-13900HX processors while the Duo 16 is the only one of the bunch with AMD’s flagship part.

For gaming tests, it often beat out the Razer Blade 16 which also had an RTX 4090. Even more interesting, however, is that both machines routinely fell behind the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i, despite having the more powerful graphics card in each. Every game we tested was playable at max settings (as they should be at this price), but given how close or even behind it was to a laptop with a cheaper RTX 4080, it really hurts its overall value.

The Duo 16 also showed strange behavior when trying to play games at lower than native resolution. Forza 5 would confirm 1080p resolution and yet the results between 1080p and 1600p were identical, so it was clearly failing to make the change. I tried everything: changing the desktop resolution, disabling Windows scaling, turning off the second screen, and nothing made a difference. Given this, it just doesn’t make much sense to pay extra for the RTX 4090 version of this laptop.

For an average gamer like myself, the second screen was a neat addition but not a necessity. I could see how it could be useful, however, and interacting with it was easy thanks to its reliable touch input. At the same time, it caused a number of problems running games and updates. When I updated my graphics driver, for example, it disabled the main display and forced everything onto the ScreenPad. Games would sometimes launch spread across the screens. And I wonder if some of the oddities I ran into with benchmarking at different resolutions weren’t a result of having the second display connected (though turning it off didn’t make a difference either, so I’m not sure).

It was nice being able to have more than one window up at a time, though. Running benchmarks, I could keep an active eye on temperatures and clock speeds by having Armoury Crate and MSI Afterburner active down below. Since it functions the same as any secondary screen (plus the control features Asus has built in), you can drag any window onto it, allowing you to monitor Discord or even stream HBO Max in the background.

Ultimately, though, I just don’t think the sacrifices are worth it, especially when a full-size portable monitor can be had for less than $100. Having to hover type when using it on my lap and contend with a smaller than average touchpad were daily nuisances while the screen really just felt like a “nice to have” feature.