First Experience: ASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo 16
The Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 is a cutting-edge gaming laptop for enthusiasts who are looking for the ultimate experience. It’s a refinement of the existing Duo 15, bumping up the screen size and creating a seamless set-up.
The one which we reviewed is priced at INR 3,91,990, while the cost of the base model variant starts at INR 2,49,990. It’s an effective design, bolstered by an AMD Ryzen 9 CPU and an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti GPU powering top-end gaming performance. All of this is achieved within a thin, elegant chassis packed with advanced features. You can easily see where the sky-high price comes from, so while it isn’t for most shoppers, the Duo 16 does deliver for deep-pocketed early adopters.
As part of ASUS' ROG family of gaming notebooks, the Duo 16 has aggressive styling. ASUS’ dual-panel setup is a bold move at reducing anxiety caused by limited screen real estate.
ASUS has plenty of room for a healthy amount of ports, including two USB-A, two USB-C, HDMI 2.1, a microSD card reader and even a full-size Ethernet jack. The main display measures 16-inch diagonally and offers QHD resolution along with a 16:10 aspect ratio.
With a refresh rate of 165Hz, 1100nits of peak brightness, and a claimed 100 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, the Zephyrus Duo 16 is meant for visually appealing content. The display can output HDR content as well and one can especially enjoy watching Interstellar come to life on the mini LED screen. Whether you are inside CyberPunk 2077’s futuristic Night city or running through the Aztec ruins in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the viewing experience remains top-notch.
ScreenPad Plus is the real show stopper here and can be considered an extension of the main screen. The 14-inch touchscreen panel has a 3,840 x 1,100 resolution but can refresh only at 60Hz. ASUS’ clever software implementations allow a seamless movement of windows from the main screen to the ScreenPad Plus and vice versa. The possibilities are vast and ASUS has configured the ScreenPad Plus display in a way to ease the continuity with the main screen.
With a Ryzen 9 6900HX CPU at the helm, the ASUS Zephyrus Duo 16 is one of the most powerful processing machines out there. While AMD’s lead over Intel has been cut short thanks to the latter’s 12th-gen CPUs, the former is still ahead in terms of power efficiency. I don’t have to tell you that menial tasks, like opening a dozen Chrome tabs or Microsoft Office, will not even minutely trouble the system.
The Zephyrus Duo 16 flies in benchmarking tests with Cinebench R23 churning out a multi-core score of nearly 14,000 while PCMark 10’s work simulation output stood at 6,731. Apart from that, the laptop is packed with 32GB of dual-channel DDR5 RAM which can be upgraded to 64GB. As for storage needs, my variant has a 2TB NVME PCIe 4.0 SSD that returned read and write scores of 6,709MB/s and 4,953MB/s respectively.
There is an undeniable air of superiority around the Zephyrus Duo 16 whether it is the sound system or crispness of the display or just the overall build of the laptop. A must buy for gaming enthusiasts.
