Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 (2023) Review

Asus has updated its dual-display gaming laptop for 2023, bringing AMD's and Nvidia’s latest Ryzen 7000 and GeForce RTX 40 Series silicon to the new ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 (starts at $3,499.99; $3,999.99 as tested). The relatively slim form factor and unique design don’t compromise the performance: This machine posted some of the fastest processing and gaming results we’ve seen, and the elegant design retains an undeniable cool factor. Of course, you have to pay up for what you see here, but if you’re already shopping in the high-end gaming system range, you may as well get the head-turning design to go along with the blazing-fast frame rates. If you’re looking for a more traditional layout and a better value, check out the recent Editors' Choice award holder, Lenovo's Legion Pro 7i Gen 8, a conventional gaming clamshell.

The Dual-Display Duo: Two Screens Are Better Than One

The two-screen design isn’t new any longer—see the similar 2022 Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 model—so it doesn’t need quite as much examination, but it is still pretty cool. If you haven’t seen this arrangement before, Asus Duo laptops use one main normally sized display, in addition to a second smaller screen above the keyboard. This second screen, named the ScreenPad Plus on this system, is a touch display that angles up toward the user when the laptop is pulled open. The size and specs of these screens have varied over the last few years, but the general concept is the same.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

As mentioned, the specs of these screens have continually changed by model, and this unit is both advanced and attractive. The main display measures 16 inches diagonally, and it bears a sharp 2,560-by-1,600-pixel resolution. That's a QHD-equivalent display, just in a 16:10 aspect ratio rather than 16:9. The panel also features a 240Hz refresh rate for smooth gaming sessions.

The lower screen is a glossy touch display, with an awkward-sounding 2,560-by-734-pixel resolution—still sharp, but so much shorter than a normal panel. Still, it provides enough space to be usable, and both screens are crisp and bright; the main display is a mini LED screen, and its brightness is higher than most alternatives. Image quality is definitely a plus on this machine.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

What's the purpose of a second screen like this one? You can pull any window or whole application onto the smaller display to use as a second monitor. Whether it’s a reference sheet you’ll glance at frequently (like a game walkthrough), your music app, or a chat app, the second display adds a lot of digital real estate to an otherwise pretty compact system.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Considering it’s a 16-inch dual-display gaming laptop, its footprint and weight are rather reasonable at 0.81 by 14 by 10.4 inches (HWD) and 5.9 pounds. The Legion Pro 7i Gen 8, with its single display of the same size, is thicker and heavier, at 1 by 14.3 by 10.3 inches and 6.1 pounds.

While the Duo design is not new, I should still take a moment to say the design continues to impress me. While hardly necessary, and certainly expensive, the Duo laptops continue to feel like they’re from the future, especially since these aren’t giant, thick machines.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

You will enjoy genuine usefulness from this twin-panel concept, and it provides some rare excitement in the relatively stale gaming laptop space. (However, you may experience some occasional awkwardness with the windows appearing where you don’t want them, as I did.) You can toggle the second display off entirely with a function button above the touchpad. You'll also find a handy bespoke menu on the left side of the ScreenPad Plus, where all sorts of customization options and shortcuts are available.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Design Nuances

One of the victims of the extra display is the keyboard, which is a bit awkward. This has been the case with each Duo system, so while it’s not new to this edition, it’s still an issue (if not a big one). The keyboard is shunted to the front edge of the system, with no place to rest your palms. Not a deal breaker, but it is slightly less comfortable than the normal setup, and takes some getting used to. The keyboard also feels a little cramped despite the relatively large chassis, because it can’t go beyond the bounds of the lower half.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The touchpad also suffers from this arrangement. It’s entirely non-traditional, relegated to a narrow portion on the lower right side. Again, not new to this product line, but it takes a lot of getting used to. Even when you acclimate, it’s still less ideal than a roomier, centered touchpad.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

On the flip side, the second display does bring a design advantage in improved airflow. The second screen raises up as you open up the laptop from its closed clamshell state, and beneath it, more ventilation is exposed. For creative-work and gaming laptops, moving more cool air through the system is a welcome performance buff.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Despite the relative thinness and unusual design, Asus found room to fit plenty of physical connectivity on the system. The left flank holds the power jack, a USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 2 port, a USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 2 port with charging and DisplayPort support, a microSD slot, and an audio jack. The right edge holds just one USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port with DisplayPort support. The rest of the ports are around the back, where you’ll find another Type-A 3.2 Gen 2 port, an HDMI output, and an Ethernet jack.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Testing the ROG Zephyrus Duo 16: Top-End Power Crams Into a Mainstream Gaming Laptop

As stated up top, the starting price is an eye-watering $3,499.99, so even getting in the door is considerably expensive. Our review model doesn’t stop there, going for broke on power. The highlight is the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX “Dragon Range” mobile processor, which was the subject of a standalone testing story we ran as the first Ryzen 7000 chip we got our hands on. The results the first time around were impressive, but a CPU will perform differently in every laptop, so we were nonetheless excited to put it through its paces here again.

The rest of the specs include 32GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD, and the all-power Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU. In this laptop, the GPU is configured at 140 watts (W) plus a 35W boost, which has a big effect on performance. We also tested the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU on its own when it first launched recently, but the same principle applies: different laptop implementation, different performance. The “base” model, if you can call it that, is a similar loadout, but drops the GPU to merely an RTX 4080, and the storage halves to 1TB.

To fairly gauge the Zephyrus Duo and its components, we’ve compared its results on our suite of benchmarks with those of the following systems…

First, you have last year’s Duo 16, making for a decent straightforward 1:1 step-up comparison. Following that, we have one of the best high-end values we’ve reviewed recently, the 16-inch Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 8, which also represents Intel’s 13th Gen Core i9 platform. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 and the Razer Blade 18 run on that silicon too, but are larger 17-inch and 18-inch laptops, respectively.

Productivity Tests

The main benchmark of UL's PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

Three further benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Normally, our final productivity test is PugetBench for Photoshop from workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. However, we've been running into a compatibility issue with the software version we use and the new hardware, so we'll look to switch up versions or solve this issue in the near future.

The short version of these results is that the Zephyrus Duo was incredibly fast. The longer version is that it set the highest score here on two results, landed right with the other leaders, and proved to be a powerhouse in content creation and editing when not gaming. The new Ryzen silicon has come to close to getting AMD back to neck-and-neck parity with, if not on top of, Intel—an improvement from the prior generation.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

We test Windows PC graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark: Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). We also try two OpenGL benchmarks from the cross-platform GFXBench, run offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions.

In addition, we run three real-world game tests using the built-in 1080p benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege. These represent simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive esports shooter games, respectively. Valhalla and Siege are run twice (the former at its Medium and Ultra quality presets, the latter at Low and Ultra quality), while F1 2021 is run twice at max settings with and without Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing turned on.

The unusual design did appear to somewhat limit the Duo 16 in comparison with the best of the best, but not by a large margin. Even with that modest gap, the gaming results were measurably powerful (though yes, that should be expected, given the parts and cost). Still, we can confirm it performed as it should, delivering top-end frame rates in a variety of gaming scenarios. You can load up any modern AAA title and enjoy high frame rates, with the additional display there to help with guides, online chats, music, and more.

Our most demanding game test, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, sees frame rates of comfortably more than 100 frames per second (fps) even at maximum settings. That is at 1080p, while at the Duo 16's native QHD resolution, it averaged 91fps on the Ultra High preset. That resolution is more straining, clearly, but the system can cruise past the 60fps target even then. You have no 4K concern with this display, but ray tracing and more demanding titles will benefit from the GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU and Nvidia's DLSS upscaling where it applies to the game in question.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptop battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

To benchmark displays, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

Battery life was, unfortunately, poor here. The dual displays, high resolution, and powerful components add up to only three hours of battery life on our test. That’s disappointing, especially because this system manages to be somewhat portable in spite of those factors, but it will last off the charger for just a short time. You probably wouldn’t do much pro-grade creative work or hardcore gaming sessions on battery, generally speaking, but this result does limit the product’s overall usefulness as a mobile device. It should be noted that this laptop ran its display several hundred nits brighter than most others in the test at 50% brightness, which surely contributed to this short battery runtime.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

On the flip side, color coverage is wide, which is exciting news for creative pros interested in this system. The main screen looked bright to my eyes, and the results confirm that—and then some. This is one of the brightest laptop displays we’ve tested, delivered by the mini LED backlighting, adding to the clear and vibrant quality image. Though the process was somewhat awkward on the ScreenPad Plus, I ran the brightness test on it, too: It measured 181 nits at 50% and 364 nits at 100%.

Verdict: A Top-Class Pick for Big Budgets

As has been the case with past Zephyrus Duo systems, this laptop is super-cool and hyper-expensive. For those with the deepest budgets, the “value” here may not matter, and they’ll be getting an elegant twin-screen system with the fastest modern parts. Those shoppers and early adopters may want the coolest, fastest thing, and the Duo 16 makes a compelling case on that front.

For the vast majority, though, it’s hard to justify meeting the asking price here. You'll find gaming laptops that are just as fast, or even faster, for much less money. That may be less of a concern for shoppers looking at laptops that cost considerably more than $2,000, to begin with, but if an alternative like the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 8 is less expensive and faster, it’s tough to make a case against it if all-out speed is your main reason to spend big. If your budget is nearly unlimited and the dual screens are the most appealing design you’ve seen, though, you will definitely enjoy this cutting-edge machine. Just mind the battery life; that was the main quibble that kept it from four-star status.