Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15: two screens and maximal performance

Parameters and details

Zephyrus is a premium line of gaming laptops that merges maximum performance with unique design and functions. The hallmark has always been the AAS which stands for cooling with a flexible portion of the bottom that would uplift the notebook a few mm. On the other side of the portfolio there are ZenBooks, where Pro Duo with two displays attracted our interest last year. A new flagship, that merges the best that the manufacturer can offer, is here.

Basic parameters

Details

Dual packing is nothing special with premium laptops. In the black box there is a smaller steel colored one, where there is only the laptop, documentation and a wrist rest. Chargers are in a separate box with a camera as well.

Yes, you read that correctly. Chargers and a camera. Immediately after unpacking, the Zephyrus Duo 15 attracts with its untraditionally rich packaging, which is not seen very often.

ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 is, as I’ve already mentioned, a new flagship and the maximum you can currently buy for your money from Asus. No surprise, therefore, can be the highest Core i9-10980HK, the new RTX 2080 Super Max-Q in the 90 W version with 1330 MHz boost, 32 GB 3200 MHz RAM or a pair of 1 TB SSDs, rich connectivity, large battery and a pair of premium screens. The paper specs are really top notch and if we are not talking about custom notebooks with desktop components, this is the best you can get on the market at the moment. You may argue that the new Ryzen Renoir is a better choice of CPU, which I do not deny, but unfortunately, you will not find a combination of Renoir + RTX 2080 Super on the market yet. So if you want the highest graphics performance, you need to take the Intel.

Perhaps the first surprise after pulling it out of the box is that the notebook is relatively compact and light. It is of more of a square shape, as seen on the display lid, and the front of the display with a thicker lower bezel. The reason is, of course, the display behind the keyboard which has to be hidden somewhere. Back to the weight. It is 2.5 kg, which is really not bad for such a powerful laptop with two displays. I expected at least 3 kg, so I was pleasantly surprised. Behind the low weight is a body made of an alloy of magnesium and aluminum, which is pleasant to the touch and does not get dirty easily, nor attract fingerprints which deserves praise.

The build quality is at a high level, nothing creaks or bends, despite the fact that there are various moving parts and two hinges more than in a regular laptop. Zephyruses have always suffered from an unstable bottom that formed the base above which the rest of the laptop rose. This bottom plate used to be very thin, and when you put the laptop on your knees, you were afraid it would break. Nothing like this happens here and the bottom is as solid as on other traditional laptops. The AAS cooling has moved up, under the pop out display, but about that later.

The proper gaming laptop, which also has the ambition to attract creators and streamers, must not lack proper port selection. Therefore, the Zephyrus Duo 15 has three USB-A ports, two of which are 5-gigabit 3.2 Gen 1 on the right side and one 10-gigabit 3.2 Gen 2 on the back. There is also a Thunderbolt 3 port with support for DisplayPort 1.4 and charging via Power Delivery 3.0. It’s a pity that the three USB ports are on the right side, where you will most likely move the mouse so the accessories can hinder your movements. On the left side is a pair of 3.5 mm audio connectors for headphones and a microphone. There is also a power connector, which I praise for the change. Better than it would be positioned on the right.

At the back you will find an RJ-45 connector for Gigabit Ethernet, the already mentioned 10 Gbps USB and HDMI 2.0b which supports 4K at 60 Hz. The port selection is therefore very solid and perhaps only a memory card reader is absent, which the creators would certainly appreciate. However, since the notebook is primarily aimed at gamers, the absence of the reader can be understood.

Interesting are the three indicators at the rear ports which can be seen when the laptop is both closed and open.

I appreciate the notch for easier opening of the display lid, even with one hand. I missed this on the Zephyrus G14 and hence the laptop was difficult to open.

When viewed from above/below, it is easier to see the mentioned “square” shape compared to conventional notebooks.

Unscrewing the lower part is simple and relatively fast, except for a higher number of screws. Surprisingly, the bottom part does not offer any large perforation for cooling, as might be expected.

After removing the bottom cover, you get to the components. You can see a typical red motherboard. Cooling, a large battery or a pair of disks definitely deserve attention. So, let’s take a look at it together.

The tested configuration offers the highest possible configuration of the Zephyrus Duo and thus the Intel Core i9-10980HK processor with 8 cores and a clock speed of up to 5.3 GHz for 1-2 cores or 4.4 GHz for all core turbo. Pleasing is 32 GB of RAM at 3200 MHz, where 16 GB is on the board and 16 GB in SO-DIMM format. The other 16 GB should theoretically be exchangeable for 32 GB and thus expand the capacity to 48 GB. There is also a pair of PCIe NVMe SSDs with 1 TB capacity in RAID 0 for maximum speed.

The main star, however, is the RTX 2080 Super graphics card in Max-Q design. 90 W and 1330 MHz are its parametersand even more interesting will be the performance we will look at in a moment. We have tested several notebooks with the RTX 2080 Max-Q and I myself am curious what progress the renewed Super version brings. Lower configurations of the Zephyrus also offer an 8-core Core i7-10875H, which will have lower clock speeds and will not offer an unlocked multiplier. The lower model will also have the 2070 Super in the 90 W Max-Q version with a clock speed of 1390 MHz. The capacity of RAM or SSD will also be lower.

An interesting detail is mostly a pair of hinges hidden inside, which on the one hand open the lid of the display but mainly lift the second display. You won’t see anything like this on another laptop. A pair of speakers on both sides has an output of 4W, which is twice the normal value we are used to in laptops.

However, the main domain of the notebook is cooling, which uses the AAS Plus system, ie the Active Aerodynamic System, which opens 28.5 mm of space for cooling behind the secondary display and thus allows better air circulation. The manufacturer claims that the air flow has improved by up to 30% thanks to AAS. The larger cooling area also allows for quieter operation, which is usually not the case with ultra-powerful notebooks. Zephyrus Duo 15 boasts about the use of liquid metal Thermal Grizzly, which lowers temperatures and increases performance by up to 10 percent. The application is, of course, automated so that the right amount of liquid metal is used so that it does not spill out of the contact surfaces of the cooler and die over time. It is also worth noting that the back of the notebook is visibly lifted from the desk thanks to the legs.

When you open the display, you can see nicely how the secondary display also tilts. Personally, I would appreciate it if the second display extended even more, or if it had an even greater inclination.

In this detail, the hinge, that we found when analyzing the inside of the laptop, can be seen.

The Fans, that are covered with a grille, cannot be overlooked either.

We will deal with ROG ScreenPad Plus in a separate chapter, now let’s look at the keyboard.

That offers a traditional compact design on the bottom of the notebook similar to the first Zephyrus. For most gamers, this solution is unconventional, but I personally like it very much. You can keep your hands on the table and thanks to the thin profile, you can easily reach the keys. There is also RGB backlighting of all keys and synchronization via Aura Sync. But I was a little disappointed with the inconsistency of the backlighting of individual keys, which can also be seen on the gif below. You can hardly see secondary characters at all, which can be a problem for someone. The tested unit also had a classic US layout, I assume that most locals would prefer a CZ/SK layout. On the contrary, I would appreciate the English international version with a two-line Enter.

In the notebook package you will also find a wrist rest pad, which further increases the comfort of use. However, I can imagine that use on the road will be impractical and you will leave the pad at home/at work where you use the laptop most often.

The pad is rubber and has no magnets or anything similar to attach to the notebook. However, I don’t see it as a big problem, thanks to the rubber surface it holds to the table well.

The touchpad, which is located to the right of the keyboard, is also unusually designed. The right and left mouse buttons are separated from the touchpad. Its surface is made out of glass and very smooth. Tracking is good, but smaller dimensions can be an obstacle for some. Either way, it is expected that you will connect a mouse to the laptop so it is more of an emergency solution. Therefore, you may appreciate that you can switch to numeric keypad mode using the button in the upper left corner.

The notebook does not have a front camera, similar to the Zephyrus G14. This can be a problem for the home office nowadays. Also if you would like to stream games and be seen on video. However, nothing is lost, as you will find a full-featured camera in the package that you can use.

You can attach it to the top of the display, or just place it on a table or a shelf, thanks to the metal holder. It connects via a USB cable and you don’t have to set up anything. Thanks to 1080p and even 60 fps, the image quality is miles away from all the common 720p laptop cameras, whose image has looked the same for perhaps the last 10 years. So the external camera has the advantage of a better image than the built-in ones. The disadvantage, however, is the need to connect it and possibly carry it everywhere with you.

We find a 90 Wh battery in the laptop, which is a really good capacity. There are also larger ones but 90 Wh is definitely above average. The notebook comes with a main 240 W charger, which is connected to the left side via a circular connector. Charging takes two hours, after an hour you are at 79%, after an hour and a half at 98%.

As you may have seen in the introduction, the package also includes a 65 W USB-C charger, which you can use to charge your notebook via the Thunderbolt 3 USB-C port. Charging is, of course, slower, after an hour you will get only 58%. You also can’t count on full performance when using this compact charger, but as an emergency and compact solution for travel, it’s a great accessory.

How’s the battery life? The review unit has a 4K display, which is never a good sign. It also supports G-Sync, which often means only an hour-long battery life, as dGPU must still run and cannot switch to iGPU. The 90 Wh battery is big but without Optimus it will still be miserable. Let’s also not forget that we power one more display than usual. So the conditions are not the best, but here again the Zephyrus Duo 15 surprised pleasantly. Thanks to the switch in Armoury Crate, you can switch to Optimus mode after a restart, but better than nothing. In Optimus mode, in our YouTube test, the laptop lasted 3 hours and 18 minutes, which is not a bad value at all, considering all the circumstances. In dGPU + G-Sync mode, it’s only an hour, an hour and a half, which is as usual. However, this laptop is not aimed at long battery usage and surprises like with the Zephyrus G14 do not take place. Nevertheless, it is positive to see that the battery will last more than 3 hours in our demanding test. For less demanding work, 4-5 hours would not be a complete utopia, especially if you reduce the brightness of the display.

Let’s proceed to ScreenPad Plus and the utility application.

Asus ROG Zephyrus is a premium line of gaming laptops that merges maximum performance with unique design and functional solutions. The hallmark has always been the AAS which stands for cooling with a flexible portion of the bottom that would uplift the notebook a few mm. On the other side of the portfolio there are ZenBooks, where Pro Duo with two displays attracted our interest last year. A new flagship, that merges the best that the manufacturer can offer, is here.

ROG ScreenPad Plus

We’ve already seen the ScreenPad Plus secondary display with the ZenBook Pro Duo. It was a relatively large innovation in the field of laptops, as the secondary displays had been either tiny or laptops did not offer them at all. Asus decided to use the full width of the laptop and place a full-featured 4K display with an aspect ratio of 32:9 above the keyboard, which also added interesting features.

The ROG version of ScreenPad Plus offers a game design, but essentially the same functionality as on a ZenBook. The display is matte and touch sensitive, so you don’t have to worry about glare when looking from an angle.

You can take advantage of several built-in features such as a numeric keypad, quick shortcuts, or the ability to quickly split application windows in halves or thirds to create an efficient work layout.

You can have two browser windows on the main display and three other applications on the ScreenPad. You can then save such a layout in the so-called Task Group. This will allow you to bring up this layout by a simple press on the ScreenPad, and the applications you select will launch and lay out according to your preferences.

The traditional function of the ScreenPad is the ability to quickly move the application from the main screen to the secondary or vice versa and also expand to both screens at once.

There is also the ability to quickly swap content between displays using a single button in the ScreenPad menu.

ScreenPad brings interesting options and functions that will undoubtedly increase your productivity. However, I would appreciate it if the display offered more gaming features, let’s say the HP Omen X 2S had.

Asus ROG Zephyrus is a premium line of gaming laptops that merges maximum performance with unique design and functional solutions. The hallmark has always been the AAS which stands for cooling with a flexible portion of the bottom that would uplift the notebook a few mm. On the other side of the portfolio there are ZenBooks, where Pro Duo with two displays attracted our interest last year. A new flagship, that merges the best that the manufacturer can offer, is here..

Testing methodology

We tested the notebook in a home, not a laboratory environment. Nevertheless, the effort was made for the most accurate results. The results are therefore the average of the measured values from repeated tests.

The tests include synthetic benchmarks to compare the performance of both the processor and the graphics card. We also measure storage speed, battery life, charging speed and in-game performance. The goal is to test laptops and desktops in various scenarios and get a comprehensive overview of their performance and operating characteristics.

Asus ROG Zephyrus is a premium line of gaming laptops that merges maximum performance with unique design and functional solutions. The hallmark has always been the AAS which stands for cooling with a flexible portion of the bottom that would uplift the notebook a few mm. On the other side of the portfolio there are ZenBooks, where Pro Duo with two displays attracted our interest last year. A new flagship, that merges the best that the manufacturer can offer, is here.

Rendering and Geekbench

Zephyrus Duo 15 comes with the strongest mobile Intel Core i9-10980HK. It is the direct successor of the last generation 9980HK, which we saw in ROG Mothership, for example, and the slightly weaker equivalent of 9880H, for example from the HP Omen X 2S, is also not very far behind on paper. Until recently, 8 cores were the pinnacle of mobile processors, but as you know, AMD with the Ryzen 4000 Renoir eight-core in laptops also brought it to lower price categories, and especially the Zephyrus G14 with 4900HS gave great test results. So it will be interesting to see if Intel was able to squeeze out anything more from the Skylake architecture, as they did in the tenth-generation desktops.

Let’s start with the traditional Cinebench R15 for a first look at the raw performance of the processor. The new i9 in Zephyrus holds a 10-13% lead in the single-core from the previous generation in the HP Omen X 2S or MSI GS75 Stealth. Also from 4900HS in Zephyrus G14. This being said, it matched the desktop 8700K. This is the highest single-core performance in a laptop, not counting ROG Mothership, which is a concept device that is not sold normally. In multi-core, the new i9 has an 11% lead over Renoir and 30-40% over 9th generation Intel. This is a really solid increase in performance.

The newer R20 already shows smaller differences in single-core compared to Renoir processors. The 4900HS is only 4% slower. In contrast, Intel is still 12-13% slower. Worth mentioning is the ultrabook Acer Swift 3 with 4700U, which loses only 3% to the top i9. In multi-core, Zephyrus is 7% faster than a sibling with AMD and up to 37% faster than HP with the last generation i9. So it looks like Intel in the 10th generation pushed out quite significant performance increases from the same architecture.

Practical tests of Cinebench and POV-Ray show the real power of Zephyrus and the new i9. In Blender, the i9 is 19% faster than 4900HS in G14 and up to 25% faster than the previous i9 in HP. POV-Ray surprisingly has only a 5% lead over the G14 with Renoir but HP with the old i9 is up to 30% slower.

Geekbench in 3 versions again gives a little hint at the differences between the individual processors in laptops. We compare Zephyrus Duo 15 with G14 and Omen X 2S. Against a sibling with AMD, the novelty with i9 has a balance of -1/14/10% in single-core and 10/21/11% in multi-core. So, overall it is stronger, but don’t forget that the 4900HS is a 35W processor and we’re comparing it to 45W. The comparison with HP and the previous i9 is 5/6/10% in single-core in favor of the new Zephyrus and 12/8/12% in multi-core, again in favor of the novelty.

In Compute, we compare the performance of the 2080 Max-Q in HP and the newer 2080 Super Max-Q in Zephyrus. Geekbench 4 is practically identical, with a 2% loss for Zephyrus which, however, can be attributed to measurement errors. On the contrary, the newer Geekbench 5 already shows 20% higher performance of the newer Super model.

Asus ROG Zephyrus is a premium line of gaming laptops that merges maximum performance with unique design and functional solutions. The hallmark has always been the AAS which stands for cooling with a flexible portion of the bottom that would uplift the notebook a few mm. On the other side of the portfolio there are ZenBooks, where Pro Duo with two displays attracted our interest last year. A new flagship, that merges the best that the manufacturer can offer, is here.

3D/PC Mark and Unigine Heaven/Superposition

The combined PCMark 10 test shows a surprising 9% victory of HP over the new Zephyrus and a virtually identical score with MSI with a 6-core processor.

However, game-oriented 3D Mark Firestrike and Time Spy show a 15 and 17% lead of the new RTX Super over HP’s competitor. On the contrary, the Sky diver is 33% slower, which is a very strange result.

Tests focused on RTX and DLSS functions show an increase of 24-26% for the new Zephyrus with RTX Super graphics compared to HP, which is a very solid result.

Unigine Heaven game tests again show different results, where in Full HD Zephyrus is 23% faster but in 2K it is 4% slower, which is at least strange.

The latest Unigine Superposition graphics tests are already fully in the hands of the new Zephyrus with a 29 and 25% lead over Full HD and 4K over competing HP.

Asus ROG Zephyrus is a premium line of gaming laptops that merges maximum performance with unique design and functional solutions. The hallmark has always been the AAS which stands for cooling with a flexible portion of the bottom that would uplift the notebook a few mm. On the other side of the portfolio there are ZenBooks, where Pro Duo with two displays attracted our interest last year. A new flagship, that merges the best that the manufacturer can offer, is here.

Game tests – dedicated graphics

In Game Tests, we will be mainly interested in the increase in performance of the Super version of the RTX 2080 Max-Q compared to older, non-Super models, which we tested in HP and MSI laptops. Zephyrus G14 already lags significantly behind these tests due to the weaker RTX 2060 Max-Q.

In GTA, Zephyrus has significantly higher fps than HP and MSI by up to 60%, which translates into real 50 fps on average. This is definitely not a negligible difference.

In Far Cry, on the other hand, no big difference can be seen, quite the opposite. Zephyrus was ranked between HP and MSI with a loss of 4 and a lead of 5 fps.

Odyssey again shows the expected result, a 10 – 13% lead over the competition.

SOTTR shows almost no difference between the newer and old versions of the RTX 2080 and the Zephyrus has almost exactly the same score as the HP.

In Metro, the novelty is 21-25% stronger compared to HP and MSI. It even beats the desktop with 2070.

When RTX is on, the difference in the Metro has been reduced to 17-18%, which is still a significant difference.

Asus ROG Zephyrus is a premium line of gaming laptops that merges maximum performance with unique design and functional solutions. The hallmark has always been the AAS which stands for cooling with a flexible portion of the bottom that would uplift the notebook a few mm. On the other side of the portfolio there are ZenBooks, where Pro Duo with two displays attracted our interest last year. A new flagship, that merges the best that the manufacturer can offer, is here.

Conclusion of Part 1

In the first part of the test, we subjected the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550 to both gaming and work performance tests. In most cases, the new Zephyrus is unrivaled and the differences from the competition are in the tens of percent. The port selection, build quality and functions of the ROG ScreenPad Plus predestine the notebook to a great companion whether you would use it for gaming or work. Its relatively low weight is also surprising, or at least I expected it to be significantly heavier, either due to the secondary display or the need to cool the most powerful components available.

In the second part, we will take a closer look at the main display, the remaining tests, but also compare the performance modes that the notebook offers. Of course, there will also be battery life and temperature tests. Finally, we will make some overall evaluation with the pros and cons of this non-traditional device.

English translation and edit by Lukáš Terényi

• Contents
• Parameters and details
• ROG ScreenPad Plus
• Testing methodology
• Rendering and Geekbench
• 3D/PC Mark and Unigine Heaven/Superposition
• Game tests – dedicated graphics
• End of part 1