Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550 review: Two screens and a whole lot of speed - wolfbrejack
The Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550 is a dual-screen gambling laptop computer that's learned a thing or two. It has a couple of predecessors, to the highest degree latterly the HP Omen X 2S 15 and Asus ZenBook Pro from 2019. Only auxiliary screen sizes have been the limiting gene. The ZenBook In favour of upped the ante with a much big screen, for object lesson, but it still lay level, which made viewing angles a botheration in the make out.
With the attention-getting—and blisteringly fast—ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550, Asus takes the Lapplander small-screen out concept from the ZenBook Pro and uses a folding mechanism to tilt the screen door up about 20 degrees as you open the lid. That lean on both increases visibleness and allows for a more effective cooling path through the laptop. Pretty slick. And pretty expensive ($3,699 from Asus.com). But being the first at your Local area network party with a dual-display gaming laptop moldiness be deserving something.
This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best play laptops. Go in that respect for entropy on competing products and how we tested them.
Gordon Mah Ung The ScreenPad Advantageous touch screen tilts up about 20 degrees for easier readability and better cooling.
ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX5550 Specs
The Asus ROG Zephyrus Duette 15 GX550 is about moderate-size for a gaming laptop, with very few compromises in features. Here are the details:
CPU: Intel 10th gen 8-core Core i9-10980HK with thawed metal thermal interface material
GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super Scoop-Q
RAM: 32GB DDR4/3200 in dual-channel mode
Displays: 15.6-inch, UHD 4K 60Hz factory-calibrated 100 percent Adobe RGB panel with support for G-Synchronise and Optimus; 13.4-inch x 7.4-inch 1920×550 touchscreen.
Storage: Two 1TB Samsung PM981 NVMe M.2 in RAID 0
Networking: WiFi 6, Realtek Gigabit ethernet
Size: 14.1 x 10.5 x 0.8 inches.
Weight: Asus lists the laptop as 5.29 pounds, just our scale put it finisher to 5.6 pounds, with another 2 pounds for the 240-watt power brick.
The best way to describe the fair assortment of ports is with photos. On the left you find a dedicated charging jack for the 240-watt power brick and two analog audio frequency ports.
Gordon Mah Ung The left side of the Zephyrus Duo is rather bare
With the left side pretty bare, Asus fortunately makes good enough use of the back of the laptop by giving you Gigabit ethernet, USB-A, and pregnant-size HDMI 2.0.
Gordon Mah Ung Asus makes use of the support of the Zephyrus Duo to give you gigabit ethernet, USB-A and HDMI 2.0
The right side gives you two USB-A and Thunderbolt 3. We would have likable to see a card reader. The good news program is the Thunderbolt 3 jacklight supports USB Power Speech, so you can go out the squat 240W brick at home and just use a USB-C charger for lightly-tariff tasks.
Gordon Mah Ung Right Type USB-A and a Bolt 3 with support for USB Power Delivery.
Keyboard and trackpad
The per-key RGB keyboard is pretty typical of gambling laptops. The layout makes few compromises. As a gaming laptop computer, the space legal profession is wider on the leftist to accommodate those who hold their hands at utmost angles while gaming.
Gordon Mah Ung The trackpad is an offset variety. Information technology takes some acquiring utilized to, but we understand because a gaming laptop computer should really represent used with a mouse most of the sentence. A long tap happening the upper leftover corner turns on a virtual ten-primal feature, which could be useful for someone maybe practicing for the professional Microsoft Excel gaming view.
Gordon Mah Ung In this spot you would ordinarily see a webcam.
No webcam. Really.
We have to mention the elephant in the board: no webcam. Once more. This is the second ROG laptop we've seen without a webcam which, viewed in a Soar upwards video chat world, seems like the biggest head slapdash this side of Taipei. We funny that when this laptop was sketched kayoed a yr operating theater two ago, few thought anyone would fear if the webcam went overboard. The shimmy to remote working has unvoluntary us all to care about this former reconsideration.
Gordon Mah Ung The ScreenPad Plus is like Orchard apple tree's Touch Bar, but actually effective.
Construction
We assume't typically get into the construction details weeds of a laptop, but the alone ROG Zephyrus Couple is worthy of IT. For you upgraders, you can catch in the image from Asus below two M.2 slots (both of which are inhabited in our RAID configuration) and a single Thus-DIMM time slot for computer memory. The second memory module fortunately isn't soldered in, but it is happening the other side of the motherboard, so any upgrades would postulate major disassembly. Those cut-outs on the bottom left and reactionist are to make space for the tilt mechanism (more photos of that are under).
Asus If you look more closely at the picture above, you can also see the C.P.U., which looks a little bit like a baseball game field from an plane. The gray orbit that would be grass in that case is where Asus clamps a containment organization to keep the advanced liquifiable metal energy interface material face in spot and prevent IT from potentially shorting impossible the laptop.
If you look at the picture of the ROG Zephyrus Duo's cooler, below, you can see the wall up to contain the thawed metal.
Asus Why even carry that risk over unoriginal thermal paste? If you think of the thermal interface material as the catsup that mates the burger patty (CPU) with the roll (the cooler), Thermal Grizzly's liquid metal compound is artisanal ketchup. Asus said its tests show about a 10-pct advance in cooling over traditional thermal paste in laptops. Squirting cooler besides means running quieter, and in our experience the ROG Zephyrus Duo is sure as shooting quieter than most of the 10th-gen laptops we've seen with this much hardware, even when spouting awkward.
Hither's a closer looking at at the "feet," which are considerable bumps. That's typically a good thing in a gaming laptop, as strain flow is key to carrying out, merely they're also big because they're hollow, to accommodate the flexible joint and tilt mechanisms.
Gordon Mah Ung The bumps in the bottom are hollow and accommodate the hinge and tilt mechanisms for the second screen.
Lest you think the tilting mechanism leave break, Asus emphasizes that it's a chunky patch of all-metal, which you backside see to a lower place. Information technology's been designed to controversy the panel in the lead to a fixed lean against while letting you continue to adjust the primary display's angle.
The secondary panel itself is built of an alloy rather than plastic to keep it rigid (the laptop computer's body is a magnesium debase). Finally, if you happen to puzzle out your sneak out or world power cable jammed under the second screen, Asus aforementioned it would ask a considerable amount of storm to break.
For kicks we set back the laptop computer's own power corduroy under one corner and attempted to close the eyelid. We stopped up as we felt the cable's resistivity, and nothing broke or snapped. That doesn't mean you can't break IT, but it's not as dainty as you might think.
Asus Is the second screen worth the hassle?
All this work Asus has put into the ROG Zephyrus Duo would be meaningless if information technology weren't worth the effort to have a irregular display. The primary display in our case is a 15.6-edge 60Hz 4K panel. It's manufacturing plant-calibrated, G-Sync-documented, and can hit 100 percent of Adobe RGB. It's not particularly bright at a metric 300 nits. Asus offers this as a compromise for those who want to do content creation on the laptop. That's fine, but for a gaming laptop, we think the other option might be better: a 300Hz 1080p display.
The ScreenPad Plus is where the action is. If we precious to monitor the GPU's thermals, the Central processor's clock race, or bu set a second written document inside view, having the second panel is, healthy, as great as having it on your desktop.
The gaming experience isn't perfect, though. If you're in a halt and touch the second screen to adjust something or scroll a windowpane–or progress to the succeeding YouTube video–Windows changes focus from the game, and you'll stimulate to Alt-Tablet to go back to the game. This is a defect of Windows, not the ROG Zephyrus Duo. To prevent that from break your courageous experience, Asus added a button in the Armoury Crateful application that lets you easy disable the touch experience.
Most of our multi-monitor experience is side-by-side. The bottom-and-top configuration took approximately getting victimised to. That May embody our mousing habits though, as we tend to ride the bottom border of Windows equal a guardrail. With the peak-and-bottom experience, the cursor would just go to the second screen, and information technology would take us a few moments to find it again.
Asus' Armoury Crateful and other touch apps starting time introduced with Zenbook Duo are very polished. We'd say this is probable the high-grade multi-screen door have on a laptop today.
Keep out reading for carrying out benchmarks.
ROG Zephyrus Duad Testing
For carrying out testing Asus recommends victimization the Armory Crate utility to switch from its nonpayment setting of Execution to Turbo. We in reality tried and true both, as many people never ever permutation out of default mode.
The ROG Zephyrus Duo is the first laptop we've tested that has been confirmed to have Nvidia's Dynamic Boost features. Dynamic Boost is supposed to shift baron intelligently betwixt the CPU and GPU based on the gaming load. If, for example, a pun is burdensome on graphics (and most are), the GPU leave ramp up while the CPU will ramp down. If a gritty is dependent on CPU, it should storm up while the GPU ramps down.
Gordon Mah Ung ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 CPU Performance
Our first benchmark is Maxon's Cinebench R15, which measures a CPU's performance version a 3D model. IT's near a pure CPU load, and more cores are better.
The result is in reality spectacular when you compare it to the other top Intel-based laptops. The ROG Zephyrus Duette sticks close to them despite being near a third flatboat and half the bulk besides. We're seeing performance a trifle quicker than the Acer Vulture Helios 700, which weighs 10 pounds and features a slide keyboard to improve air flow.
The major comparison is against other 8-core thin and light play and work laptops, which are left eating the dust of the ROG Zephyrus Duo.
And yes, we volition point out just how telling the Ryzen 9 4900HS is in the ROG Zephyrus 14.
IDG To measure up how the Zephyrus Duo performs in lighter tasks, we use Cinebench R15 again, but set to use a single thread. As is often the case with this test, it's mostly a link up. You'd likely ne'er tell the difference in daily use between the number-10 laptop on this list and the number 1. If all you care about is single-threaded performance for daily use—these are completely equally thoroughly.
IDG Our future mental testing stresses the CPU for a thirster period to see how it handles itself as it gets hot. We takings a 30GB file and encode information technology using to Mechanical man Telecasting preset, using an aged version of the unfreeze HandBrake utility. The screen utilised to draw excess of 45 minutes when we outset adopted it four years ago, but we'Re down to basically 20 minutes with modern laptops.
Here, we see the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo perform in the neighborhood of laptops almost doubly its slant. It's almost 10 per centum quicker than the MSI GS66 Stealth which features the aforesaid Mainframe. The GS66 is about a pound flatboat, but both are definitely in the same neighborhood versus the 11-pound Acer Predator Helios 700. That leading Alienware Expanse 51m R1 actually features a screen background Nucleus i9-9900K.
IDG Zephyrus Duet 15 Play Performance
Moving to graphics performance, we'll kick this off with UL's 3DMark Metre Espy, a artificial benchmark that lets United States set-apart virginal graphics performance from Processor performance. Games are always useful for bowel checks, but for a repeatable and accurate run, 3DMark is hard to ticktack.
Incomparable pattern we've detected with recent thin-and-light gaming laptops is the importance of thermal direction. The nonremittal performance can be pretty similar, only they start to severalize when run in their "Turbo," "Utmost," or any nasal-octane performance profile the laptop maker offers. In this setting, the ROG Zephyrus Duo doesvery well. The 8-pound Alienware Area 51M R1 and the 11-pound Marauder Helios 700 hard flex their muscles here because they simply have much larger bodies to pack in more cooling and power delivery.
IDG The ROG Zephyrus Duo does slightly underperform in default mood, but Time Spy is somewhat of a flatboat cargo today and we suspect that to be the issue (which we'll discourse later).
We wanted to try something more innovative so we also run 3DMark's Port Royal, which measures Beam Tracing Performance. On its nonremittal mount the ROG Zephyrus Duo is essentially drained-even with the dilutant and lighter MSI GS66 Stealing. That's no surprise, as both laptops happening default are held to their factory limits on the graphics cards.
Set the Zephyrus Duo to its Turbo setting, though, and we see just about a 16-percent improvement in the Larboard Royal score.
IDG 3DMark's Interface Royal only measures ray trace performance in reflections and shadows. For a eyeshot into the future, we ran the fully path traced version of Quake II RTX, which reinvigorates the 23-year-old game with later looking art.
In Temblor Cardinal RTX we also see a fairly compressed finish 'tween all of the gaming laptops present, which we expected. Regular though it's a 23-twelvemonth-old game, the techniques it uses are simply cruel. That light-green bar on top is when the ROG Zephyrus Duo is on its Turbo setting and the GPU—for the most part—is allowed to run more freely. The result is about a 16-per centum improvement in performance.
IDG We too ran the hardRedness Dead Redemption 2, with the ROG Zephyrus Duo set to 1920×1080 and balanced nontextual matter. We byword 77 Federal Protective Service prohibited of it happening its stock setting and an 8.5-percent increase in performance by switching to the Turbo mode. Basically most weighed down-duty graphics and gaming loads and somewhat distressful go alike hell on the ROG Zephyrus Duo.
Simply we still run sr. games, and that's where we off a snag. Running the septet-year-oldRise of the Tomb Spoiler we expected functioning to be stellar, but we confusingly saw frame rates closer thereto of a system with a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti.
IDG We tried gushing the benchmark with the ordinal panel switched forth and double-checked that our unit was happening AC, but we could not resolve our publish. Looking through recorded numbers for the extremely lightweight 3DMark Sky Diver test we also adage undetermined bizarreness.
This shouldn't be happening. Infra you can see the performance of the MSI GS66 set to its default "Balanced" and its "Extreme point" place setting. You stern also see XPG's Xenia 15, which we're in the process of reviewing. IT features a hardware button to swap among a Power Saver Mode, a Balanced Mode, and a Performance mode. Like the MSI, the XPG laptop performance is where we expected, merely with a bigger hike up from Harmonious to Performance as it's slightly thicker and ISN't quite as thermally pocket-size by its parts.
IDG We think over early algorithms are to curst for just odd performance from the Zephyrus Duo in Very light trial run loads.
The XPG Xenia 15, when Seth to its Mogul Saver mode, locks down the CPU and GPU clock speeds and power consumption to widen battery life. All this is expected.
The ROG Zephyrus Duo, however, just gets champaign unearthly. Again, we see far substandard graphics and Central processing unit performance. The bizarre swing going from its default Performance to Turbo just makes no sense.
Like virtually 3DMark tests, Toss Diver volition first run two graphics tests intended to measure the GPU. Then it will break awa a simulated game physics test to measurement CPU performance. 3DMark is reporting that moments after the physical science test is kicked off, the Mainframe will spike up above 4GHz, and then dive down to 2.5GHz for a while before climbing retreat of the valley.
While you mightiness think this is merely our unit, the truly blistering performance everyplace else makes us think it isn't. What's the issue? Nvidia's Dynamic Boost or Asus' have algorithm? We won't know, but we are continuing to work with Asus to resolve it. We're 90 per centum sure this is zip more than the result of the early algorithms and can buoy constitute self-addressed in future updates.
ROG Zephyrus Duo Bombardment Life-time
Our last try is battery life. For that we loop a 4K video using Windows 10's super-underspent Movies & TV player. We put the laptop computer into airplane mode, with its display set apart at 250 to 260 nits. We also plug in a set of earbuds to try to reduce the impact of the sound subsystem on results.
The ROG Zephyrus Duo leave automatically kick down to Silent fashion when on battery to keep up power, but it does not switch off the second screen. Because just about people will turn out the second instrument panel to watch a movie on a trip, we turned it off too (a button honourable preceding the trackpad lets you well do this).
The result was a respectable six-plus hours bump off its 90-Watt-hour electric battery. Both the MSI GS66 Stealth and Gigabyte's Aero 17 get finisher to 7 hours, but that's not a huge difference like you'd see with, articulate, Dell's new XPS 15 9500, which hammers out more than 10 hours.
We besides ran the same video test with the second screen turned on, but dimmed well. We saw about 4 hours of assault and battery life story.
Donjon in creative thinker that our video test, while realistic, can be thoughtful a light test. Switch on the Wi-Fi and browse the vane operating room run Office, and you can look to take a third or more off battery life. Fire up a video editor Beaver State game, and you can expect no Sir Thomas More than an hour or two, realistically.
Essentially, assault and battery life seems largely eligible with a play laptop computer go through, unless you melt both screens immediately.
IDG Conclusion
There's a lot to unpack with the ROG Zephyrus Duo, but we'll start with the execution. If you believe U.S.A that the subpar performance on light gaming tasks is probably a temporary issue, the takeaway is that it's very fast for its weight and stature. We distrust as we see another trine OR five 15-edge laptops with similar parting combinations, near will square off down closer to the Gigabyte Aero 17 operating room MSI GS66 Stealth in operation. Asus' use of liquid metal and better cooling paths simply makes it the laptop computer to beat, and we're not sure others in the same class of laptop can do that.
The second point we want to touch on is the Leontyne Price. American Samoa configured, our review unit pushes $3,699 on Asus.com. That's practically Apple pricing (leave off you're getting a boatload to a greater extent performance and features), but gaming laptops are non getting cheaper. The far more conventional MSI GS66 Stealth, with a 300Hz panel and mostly similar parts, is $3,000. The Gigabyte Aero 17, with an arguably wagerer 10-spot, HDR 400 4K screen, plus an 8-core Core i7-108750H, GeForce RTX 2070 Topnotch, and half the RAM and far less storage, is $2,700.
The decision comes fine-tune to how much value that second concealment adds. That's very such a personal choice, only we have to say as multi-monitor users we find it priceless. Whether it's to scene reference documents while editing in the primary window, watching a telecasting while operative, or monitoring the squad statistics of the players you're lining in a match, we could ne'er locomote back to a single covert on our desktop. With Asus' ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550, now you don't own to practise it with a laptop computer, either.
Gordon Mah Ung 
Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/399315/asus-rog-zephyrus-duo-15-gx550-review-two-screens-and-a-whole-lot-of-speed.html
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