Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550, 2 gorgeous screens in 1 laptop

12/7/2020

With the eye-catching—and blisteringly fast—ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550, Asus takes the same small-screen concept from the ZenBook Pro and uses a folding mechanism to tilt the screen up about 20 degrees as you open the lid. That tilt both increases visibility and allows for a more efficient cooling path through the laptop.

Pretty slick. And pretty expensive. But being the first at your LAN party with a dual-display gaming laptop must be worth something.

Naturally, the Zephyrus Duo 15 is a spec beast. It is powered by the just-announced 10th generation Comet Lake H-series processors. We have written about these new processors in greater detail here. Complementing it is the equally new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super GPU for notebooks. Here’s what a fully decked out unit would look like:

Intel Core i9-10980HK
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2080 Super 8GB GDDR6
16GB DDR4-3200 RAM (up to 48GB)
2 x 512GB NVMe PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD in RAID 0

To keep everything cool, the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 has an extensive heatsink design that uses Thermal Grizzly’s liquid metal compound instead of regular thermal paste for the CPU. ASUS says this improves heat transfer and enables the CPU to sustain higher clock speeds for longer.

Additionally, the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 features what ASUS calls the Active Aerodynamic System Plus. As the secondary display is lifted up, it exposes a large 28.5mm air intakes that enables the notebook to draw cooler air above the notebook. ASUS says this improves airflow by up to 30% over previous Zephyrus designs.

Predictably, it’s packed with the latest and greatest in gaming hardware, so let’s talk about its design first. It’s called the Zephyrus Duo for a reason, and that’s because it has dual screens. The concept is not new, ASUS already has two dual screens notebook already in the market in the form of the ZenBook Pro Duo UX581 and the smaller ZenBook Duo UX481. But it’s a first for ASUS' gaming-centric ROG brand.

The main display measures 15.6 inches across and you can choose from two options: a colour-accurate high-resolution 4K display or a super-fast Full-HD display.

The first option is a 4K IPS display that covers 100% of the Adobe RGB colour space and is validated by Pantone. Obviously, this display is geared toward creative professionals. For gamers, you can opt for a super-fast 300Hz Full-HD display that supports G-Sync and has a response time of 3ms.

The second display, which is called the ROG ScreenPad Plus, measures 14.1-inch and has a resolution of 3,840 x 1,100 pixels and a decent refresh rate of 60Hz. This is identical to the ZenBook Duo UX581. The reason for its high resolution is so that if you opt for the 4K display, you can drag windows from the main display down to the second display without any odd resizing issues.

No word yet on local availability and pricing, but seeing that the ZenBook Pro Duo UX581 was nearly $5000 here, it’s safe to say that the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 won’t come cheap. This machine is truly for the enthusiast who has the spare budget for gaming on a laptop with dual screens.

The specifications of the laptop is indeed incredible and this is likely how Asus will showcase their hardware capability for laptop, which likely will set a trend or even competition among other laptop manufacturers.