Asus Zenbook Pro Duo 15 OLED UX582 review: A $3,000 laptop like no other - jacksonoverects58

Regardless of whether you have $3,000 to pass on a laptop, you have to respect Asus for the one it's come up with.

The Asus Zenbook Pro Duo 15 OLED UX582 has two touchscreens, including a 4K OLED display in the usual spot and a squatter OLED block out just above the keyboard. It's also a beastly simple machine, with an Intel Core i9-10980HK CPU, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 GPU, and 32GB of Chock up.

You might dismiss the Zenbook Pro Pair as a gimmick, only Asus has been doing the dual-sieve laptop computer dance since 2019. The UX582 refines both the design and second-screen software of the original model. Asus is intelligibly involved to the concept, and while it's not for everyone, IT does provide real utility for substance creators who have a fewer grand to burn.

Tech specs

Our top-of-the-line Asus Zenbook In favou Duad 15 Organic light-emitting diode UX582 recapitulation unit includes the following tech specs:

15.6-inch 3840×2160 OLED display
Secondary 14-inch 3840×1100 OLED mat display
Intel Congress of Racial Equality i9-10980HK CPU
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 (laptop computer)
32GB DDR4 RAM
1 T PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD
720p webcam
Asus indite with 4,096 pressure levels
Engineering stand
Backpack
Port side: HDMI 2.1, headphone sea do
Right side: USB-A 3.2 Gen 2, 2x USB-C Bombshell 3
Weight: 5.16 pounds (1.52-pound power brick)
Dimensions: 14.17 x 9.81 x 0.96 inches

asuszenbookproduoleft — Port selection is decent, merely photo editors might wish for an SD card slot.

Configuration options are scarcely on this laptop. Adorama sells a $2,700 versionRemove not-product link with an Intel Core i7-10870H processor, and supposedly there's a version with 16GB of Jampack, but we haven't found that one available for buy up.

You can still find the older UX581, with a 9th-generation Core-i9 CPU and RTX 2060 GPU (Here's a refurbished model for $2,019), on the other hand you'd miss out on the built design, in which the second screen tilts ascending at an angle instead of lying regressive.

asuszenbookproduoright — The right side is where you'll obtain all the In favor Yoke's USB ports.

Dual-screen design

While the Zenbook In favou Duo is by no means supple, its 5.16-pound frame is lighter than you might expect given everything inside. It comes in a light-green-aristocratic color, with an Al lid whose whirling pattern extends outward from the nonconcentric Asus logo. When you elevation the lid, a pair of hinges shore up up the lift of the second screen so it's easier to see and touch.

asuszenbookproduobrick — The 240W power brick adds an extra 1.52 pounds to the total package.

Asus is clearly proud of its work hither. The design of the Pro Duo's cardboard box mimics that of the laptop itself, porta corresponding a clamshell and lifting the laptop out of its container. The oversized tycoo brick comes in a fancy box of its own.

The In favor Duo also ships with a bunch of accessories, including a palm rest that slides adequate to the laptop's bottom march, an engineering science resist that you can plaster over to the laptop computer's arse, and a slight backpack. I had no problems packing everything into the bag, along with an external mouse, mechanical keyboard, and PlayStation 4 controller.

asuszenbookproduobackpack — This laptop comes with its possess backpack.

Every bit for the displays themselves, the main screen door is a 440-nit panel that covers 100 percentage of the DCI-P3 gamut, according to Asus. Information technology's one of the many vibrant screens you'll find oneself along a laptop right at once, and you can comfortably use it indoors at nowhere near supreme brightness. The secondary Liquid crystal display screen has a matte finish, which makes sense when you realize IT necessarily to avoid reflecting overhead lights into your eyes.

asuszenbookproduostand — Stick the technology base to the laptop computer's underside, and you can prop information technology ahead at an angle.

Putting the screens to use

From the perspective of Windows 10, the Asus Pro Duo's lower screen—or ScreenPad Plus, equally Asus calls it—is just a second monitor like any other. You tush give it a taskbar, adjust the display scaling, and drag Windows back and forth at will.

asuszenbookproduoscreen — Windows 10 recognizes the extra screen equally a second varan that sits beneath the main united.

That alone would make the Pro Duo more riveting than your average laptop. But the Pro Duo is the rare instance in which loaded vendor software is a welcome accession. By using Asus' ScreenPad Plus software system, you can open a bunch of original use cases that you won't get with a 2d monitor alone. More or less examples:

Set upwards a venire of touch controls in certain Adobe apps, such as Photoshop
Use presets to arrange apps in a tiled layout crosswise the two screens
Utilization the second screen as a gigantic trackpad
Pop open a number pad of paper that occupies the right half of the lower screen
Quickly flick Windows between the two screens

All of this does postulate a learning breaking ball. Asus' various icons and menus aren't always intuitive, and I had to hunting online to work out how to load Asus' Adobe-optimized control panels. I as wel found the second screen a bit hard to read without increasing its pull dow of presentation scaling.

asuszenbookproduophotoshop — Asus' software system includes a master panel for popular Adobe apps such as Photoshop.

But after few years, I got the hang of victimization Asus' drag-and-drop shortcuts to move windows around, and I set up few app presets for productivity. (My popular representative: web browser connected the intense screen, Typora crosswise the lower two-thirds, and Plexamp in the bottom-right third.)

I only wish Asus had embezzled the obvious dance step of letting you use the second screen as a Wacom-style drawing surface for the main screen out. Spell you tin can use the stylus directly on either show, the larger screen sits at an awkward angle for drawing, and the smaller peerless is too cramped. Beingness able to mirror your pen strokes from the smaller screen to the larger one would would make the Asus Pro Duo much much appealing to artists.

Keyboard and trackpad

The Asus Pro Twosome's unusual design does create much compromises connected the keyboard and trackpad front, but IT also creates some new opportunities.

I had no qualms with the quality of the actual keyboard, which offers quiet typing with satisfying tactile feedback, but it puts your hands in an uncomfortable position unless you use the included wrist wrest.

asuszenbookproduopalm — The radiocarpal joint rest is a nice touch, provided you remember to necessitate IT with you.

The trackpad, meanwhile, is plenty smooth, but taller than it is wide, making information technology a mismatch for the widescreen show. And because it sits next to the keyboard, lefties volition hate it. On the upside, the trackpad can transform into a number pad away long-run-pressing a button in its top-right corner, promote underscoring the idea that Asus actually expects you to plug in an external mouse.

Audio, webcam, and security

Despite the price, Asus very skimped along tv camera and security features. The webcam is the same somewhat-fuzzy 720p camera you'll find on untold cheaper laptops. While you can disable it with a keyboard shortcut, it lacks that corporeal shutter that some new high-end notebooks offer. The Zenbook In favor of Duo does support face recognition for sign language in, simply it lacks a fingermark reviewer, which I find much more undeviating in overall.

Connected the upside, the Harman Kardon-branded speakers are imposingly loud. While they don't offer much bass for music, high-end clarity is great for videoconferences and shredding through foes in your favorite first-soul shooter. Microphone superior is excellent every bit well, producing rich vocals for your next audio call or Flip stream.

Performance

Part of the Asus Zenbook Pro Distich's allurement comes from its screen background-like tech specs, essentially freehanded you a portable PC workstation. Still, our benchmarks show that IT doesn't quite observe up with other high-conclusion gaming PCs, perhaps owing to the peculiarities of the dual-screen design.

Looking HandBrake, for instance, the ZenBook Pro Duo encoded our test video Indian file in 24 minutes and 53 seconds, but barely beating out the Core i7-10870H in Gigabyte's Aorus 17G and placing well behind Asus' ROG Zephyrus Duo, which has the same Intel Core i9-10980HK. While all of these laptops mother the job done quickly, the Pro Duo does slightly underperform.

zenbookduohandbrake — The Zenbook Pro Duo doesn't quite keep abreast with its closest rivals in HandBrake.

The same is right in Cinebench, which tests short and sweet bursts of performance rather than the sustained loads of HandBrake. While single-thread scores were dustlike, the Pro Yoke was again behind the ROG Zephyrus Duo in multi-threaded carrying out despite having the aforementioned processor.

zenbookduocinebench — It's also slenderly behind Cinebench's quick test of multi-threaded performance.

Gaming is a mixed bag as well. Theoretically, Nvidia's RTX 3070 and RTX 2080 are suchlike, simply we saw laptops with the latter edge out the old in the ZenBook Pro Duo. That was the case, for instance, in Rise of the Grave Raider's benchmark tool around, where the ROG Zephyrus Duo again took the pep pill hand.

zenbookduorotr — The Zenbook Pro Duo beats entry-level gaming laptops in *Prove of the Grave Raider*, merely not by much.

3DMark's Fire Strike 1.1 benchmark showed similar results, though you can at least go through a all the way advantage for the RTX 3070 over the RTX 1650, which continues to ship in many take down-priced workhorse laptops today.

zenbookduofirestrike — It does, all the same, put back more than day between GTX 1650 GPUs in Ardor Hit.

The results were many favorable in 3DMark's Fire Strike Extreme benchmark, a more taxing test that renders at 2560×1440 resolution, versus 1080p for plain old Fire Strike. Here the ZenBook Pro Duo did manage to outperform the ROG Zephyrus Duo's RTX 2080 GPU.

zenbookduofirestrikeextreme — FIre Strike Extreme is one test where the In favou Duo had an margin terminated laptops with RTX 2080 GPUs.

In practice, you'll want to bewilder to 1080p in near cases, and you'll undergo no problems cranking heavenward graphics upper-class in turn. 4K gaming is possible on this laptop, but only with hits to nontextual matter quality and framerate. In Last Stranding and Atomic number 102 Man's Sky, for instance, 4K resolution was possible solely at about 30 frames per second.

Battery life, meanwhile, was as pleasant surprise disposed everything the Pro Duo has going connected. 4K OLED screens tend to be battery hogs. This laptop has two of them, and its tech eyeglasses father't lend themselves to longevity. Nevertheless, the Pro Twain held its own against other workhorse laptops, lasting for 6 hours and 25 minutes in our iteration video recording rundown test. We unbroken the second covert on at its default 50-percent cleverness for this mental test, but we played telecasting solitary connected the primary test at our authoritative test brightness of 250-260 nits.

zenbookduobattery — You won't get all-solar day battery lifespan from the ZenBook Pro Pair, but you can take it off the charger for a few hours if need be.

Duo operating room desktop?

Benchmarks aside, the Asus ZenBook Affirmative Duo is hard to compare with other PCs. Its closest competitor Crataegus oxycantha be a multi-Monitor desktop, or a laptop computer with an attached travel monitor lizard. The Pro Duo is more portable and versatile than either of those options, especially with the software package tools Asus has thrown along top.

For a certain niche of artists, media creators, and gamers, all that might tot up to something special, even if information technology's unattainable for the respite of us.