The Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo (above, right) was an eye-catching design with only a secondary screen that spread the width of the keyboard. In fact, I recall it catching my eye in Spider-Man: No Way Home. But the newest revision dispenses with the keyboard and gives us a full screen on the bottom of the design, for double 16-inch OLED touchscreens.
That is a whole lotta laptop, especially considering what’s hiding underneath the screens. You get the “Next Gen” Intel Core Ultra processor (presumably the new Panther Lake series, yet to be unveiled when I saw the Duo in person), and up to an Nvidia RTX 5090 discrete graphics card. Pair that with “up to” 64GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD storage (using a Gen5 drive, which is still pretty darn rare, and “easy swap access”) and you’re looking at a gaming laptop with a phenomenal amount of power.
That’s by design, I’m told. Obviously dual screens aren’t especially useful for playing games, unless you’re managing a stream or looking up guide info on the other display. The original Zephyrus Duo with its smaller, super-wide secondary display could handle that well enough. But thanks to those flagship specs and dual OLED panels (3K, according to the spec sheets), Asus believes this laptop will be popular as a workstation, too.
The thinking is that with the sturdy, fold-out kickstand and wireless keyboard/touchpad, not to mention several options for how exactly you position the primary unit, it’s excellent for all kinds of media creation and coding applications. Asus reckons you can use it in standard laptop mode (that is, with the keyboard and touchpad covering the bottom screen), with both displays visible via the kickstand, with both displays side-by-side again using the kickstand, both displays flat on a table to make use of the stylus support…and folded back on itself, Yoga-style, with one display pointed at two different users. That one seems especially unlikely to me, unless you happen to be mirroring your screens for a presentation.
That might make sense for multiplayer gaming…except that Windows 11 is incapable of focusing on more than one window at a time for input. So though there are probably some exotic exceptions (say, using multiple controllers in co-op with a mirrored display), this tent mode isn’t going to be especially useful for the gamers out there.
Surprisingly, the Zephyrus Duo isn’t the massive chonkster you might expect from a dual 16-inch touchscreen laptop that also hosts top-of-the-line gaming specs. Asus says that it’s 0.77 inches thick (19.6mm) and 6.28 pounds (2.8 kilograms). That’s far from small or light, but it’s not much bigger than a typical mid-sized gaming design. And that includes a 90-watt-hour fast-charging battery…which I assume will last about ninety minutes if you’re pushing this thing to its limits on both screens. Asus says 12 hours of video, so make of that what you will.
What will this massive dual-screen powerhouse cost? A year ago I’d have estimated that the base model would start around $3500. With the RAM and storage crunch at the start of 2026, I wouldn’t dare guess. I’d say budget for a 10-year-old used car and then cross your fingers.
Author: Michael Crider
Source: PCWorld
Reviewed By: Editorial Team
