ROG Zephyrus Duo review: Unlimited power
The ROG Zephyrus Duo might just be the absolute best gaming laptop money can buy, and boy will you need a lot of money to buy it.
Priced at a jaw dropping RM36,999, the ROG Zephyrus Duo costs as much as an entry level car. That being said, when you consider the sheer amount of engineering packed into this in the first place, it’s easier to understand why it costs so much.
Two screens is better than one
Where do we even start with the ROG Zephyrus Duo? That’s honestly what I’ve asked myself multiple times when writing this review, because there’s just so much going on that it’s hard to pinpoint what is its standout feature.
At first glance, it’s of course going to those two 16-inch, ROG Nebula HDR OLED displays. Each of them comes with a 3K resolution in a 16:10 aspect ratio, along with a 120Hz refresh rate, a 0.2ms response time, full coverage of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, touchscreen support and a peak brightness of 1100nits.
Having just one of these displays on a traditional laptop would already make it a premium offering, but two of these displays makes it a phenomenal productivity machine. You can of course use it like a traditional laptop, with the removable keyboard attached over the second display. Simply popping out the keyboard though will reveal the gorgeous second display, and it’s an easy task to just prop up the laptop with the built-in kickstand to get a stacked dual screen layout.
This gives you perhaps the most similar setup you’d have to a true gaming desktop PC most users have at home, and I can then comfortably play my games on the main display with the lower panel available for my Discord, WhatsApp, YouTube video or any other window I want open. Playing TFT and needing to look up the current meta comps? No need to minimise my game just to Google it. Hopping on a call after joining your friends in Marvel Rivals? Just move your mouse down and click on Discord. The Zephyrus Duo just makes all of this too easy.
While that’s the most common setup that I found myself using, it is also possible to get a dual vertical display layout by turning it 90 degrees. This layout isn’t exactly optimal for gaming of course, but I can see programmers or coders appreciating this setup more. Asus also claims that you can set it up in tent mode with one of your friends using the back half, but it’s a little tedious to set up and more of a party trick than a real use case.
Even when used as a traditional laptop, I have to say that the experience is 95% the same as when you’re using a, well, traditional laptop. The keyboard is much better than Asus’ previous dual screen laptops, and doesn’t wobble around thanks to the magnets keeping it in place. One thing to note is that it’s a Bluetooth keyboard, and to charge it you’ll need to place it back over the second display, though you can also power it via USB-C if needed.
Other things worth mentioning is that the displays themselves are very, very good, with a relatively high 3K resolution that makes watching content on it very enjoyable. The six-speaker setup adds to this experience, and is noticeably louder than its predecessors. As for its design, while it’s a little less garish than before, the Slash Lighting array across the top lid will be a dead giveaway of the laptop’s true intentions, but it’s still a nice touch of personality to its grey colourway.
Portable desktop-class power, with two screens
As for what’s under the hood, the ROG Zephyrus Duo packs an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H alongside 64GB of LPDDR5X 8533MHz memory, a 2TB PCIe 5.0 SSD and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, all of which is kept cool with liquid metal, a custom vapour chamber, dual fans and a graphite nano-insulated film between the motherboard and the secondary display panel.
The ROG Zephyrus Duo without a doubt wins the title of world’s most powerful dual screen gaming laptop, by virtue of it beating its own predecessors really as there aren’t exactly many competitors in the market with such hardware. Nevertheless, we put it through some synthetic benchmarks just to get an idea of what we’re dealing with:
| Benchmark | Score |
| 3DMark Time Spy | 19,286 |
| 3DMark Steel Nomad | 5,151 |
| PCMark | 9,433 |
Of course, that’s all fine and dandy but it’s in games that the ROG Zephyrus Duo shines:
| Game | Score | Notes |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 | ~62FPS | Native res, balanced preset, DLSS off |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 | ~69FPS | Native res, balanced preset, DLSS quality |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | ~58FPS | Native res, ray tracing medium preset, DLSS auto |
| Cyberpunk 2077 | ~87FPS | Native res, ultra preset, DLSS auto |
| Black Myth Wukong | ~48FPS | Native res, cinematic preset, ray tracing medium, DLSS on |
| Black Myth Wukong | ~51FPS | Native res, cinematic preset, ray tracing off, DLSS on |
| Anno Pax Romana | ~62FPS | Native res, very high preset, ray tracing medium, DLSS quality |
| Anno Pax Romana | ~67FPS | Native res, very high preset, ray tracing off, DLSS quality |
| Marvel Rivals | ~91FPS | Native res, high preset, DLSS quality |
| Total War: Three Kingdoms | ~81FPS | Native res, ultra preset |
| Sid Meier’s Civilization VII | ~58FPS | Native res, high preset |
| Sid Meier’s Civilization VII | ~12.9s/turn | AI benchmark |
| Age of Mythology Retold | ~85FPS | Native res, high preset, 1731 points |
These numbers may not look particularly impressive at first glance, but keep in mind that I’m running these games at its native 3K resolution with higher than normal settings. For what it’s worth, lowering certain settings or even dropping it to a 1080p resolution will almost certainly get you higher frame rates, but I wanted to see the Zephyrus Duo pushed to the limits.
For some context, the Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i Aura Edition that we checked out previously had an Intel Core Ultra 7 365H with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5050 Laptop GPU, and I was basically never able to turn on ray tracing in these games without severe performance hits. In fact, I was playing games on that laptop at lower setting presets, with DLSS on too, just to get similar FPS numbers while also at a lower resolution.
That being said, I prefer keeping the native resolution and higher settings especially in the single player titles for a more immersive experience. When playing competitive shooters such as Marvel Rivals meanwhile, it comfortably maintains a high enough refresh rate that I honestly still would rather have the RTX 5090 running these settings to really feel like I’m in the heat of the battle.
On top of that, despite the sheer amount of performance the Zephyrus Duo is able to output, it has a surprisingly long battery life too. Don’t expect Snapdragon or MacBook levels of battery life, but the Zephyrus Duo was still able to get me a full day at work; roughly 6-8 hours with the brightness around 50%, with just one screen on. Of course, this was with the discrete GPU effectively turned off in hybrid mode. It’s also nice to know that while you’ll want the proprietary ROG Rectangle connector for full power, when working off site you can still charge it with USB-C.
One last thing to point out is that the ROG Zephyrus Duo has a healthy amount of connectivity to it. You’ll find a HDMI 2.1 FRL output, two USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, an SD card reader, a 3.5mm combo audio jack, WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0 wireless connectivity.
The best gaming laptop (a lot of) money can buy
The ROG Zephyrus Duo is a halo product, there’s no doubt about it. Its existence is more of a showcase of what ROG can do when it goes over the top, combining tricked out gaming performance with its now signature dual-screen setup.
At RM36,999 though, it’s obviously not a laptop for everyone. If you want the best gaming performance for your money, something from their ROG Strix Scar lineup will almost certainly make more financial sense. But the ROG Zephyrus Duo isn’t about making sense, it’s about making a statement.
There will probably only ever be a handful of Malaysians who could actually afford one, and it’s the most outrageously engineered machine we’ve seen in a long time, but if you’re in the market for the most balls-to-the-wall machine, it’s hard to beat the ROG Zephyrus Duo.
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