Asus ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED review

The Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED is without a doubt a very capable laptop. It has one of the best displays you can get, the performance is top notch, at least for the high-end variant we used, and you'll also have a second screen if you need it.

The Asus ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED has a wealth of high-end features, from a dazzling OLED screen laptop to a fast Intel chip. The laptop’s dual-screen design also opens up endless multitasking possibilities, especially if you’re a professional software developer. However, the poor battery life and cramped typing keyboard are a big sacrifice for this dual-screen pleasure. The latest Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo features the world’s first 14.5-inch 2.8K 120Hz OLED display.

Like its larger 15-inch variant, it’s a beautifully built laptop with a wow factor for content creators that will grab everyone’s attention wherever you set up for the day. However, you will want to be near a power outlet if you want to use both screens and get a full day’s work done. That said, the Zenbook Pro Duo 14 comes with a powerful 12th generation Intel Core i7 CPU, an Nvidia RTX 3050Ti GPU, two beautiful displays, and powerful speakers. The Pro Duo 14 also features a smart, excellent and highly accurate stylus that is very pleasant to use.

However, you have to deal with the cluttered keyboard and thumb-sized touchpad, which will put some off. Overall, it’s a cheeky device that’s perfect for on-the-go content creation that can make good use of this stylus. The main attraction is the combination of a stunning 14.5-inch OLED display, which runs at 120Hz and provides an incredible 100 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, with a full-width secondary screen. Both panels feature touch input and color support.

Design

The dual screens of the Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED are truly stunning. But do they even make sense? Cleverly, the secondary screen appears when you open the Zenbook. This allows for both a better view of the display and a space for increased airflow and cooling. The reasonable downside is that it pushes the keyboard to the bottom of the case and the trackpad to the bottom right. The latter is much smaller than we are used to lately.

This also makes the keyboard a bit more compact. It’s still a nice keyboard to use with a very solid bed. But it all takes some getting used to. The dual screens and beefy specs also make this a fairly chunky laptop at 1.7 kg and almost 2 cm thick. It’s reasonably portable, but it’s not really thin and light. The advantage of the weight is the fantastic build quality. This thing looks and feels like a million bucks.

Anyway, the big question is how useful those dual screens really are. The flatness of the secondary screen limits its usefulness. It’s not very comfortable for web browsing or even an email client. For easy collaboration with a tool like Slack and maybe Spotify running alongside? That makes sense. Asus software tools also make it a breeze to arrange windows and share applications between the two displays.

Keyboard and Touchpad

To make room for that second screen, Asus had to get smart with the keyboard. The whole thing has been moved all the way down. That leaves nothing to rest your hands on while typing, so you will need a palm rest or even a separate keyboard for typing more than short emails. The keys themselves are pleasantly springy and have a good drop.

The half-width Shift key can mess up your muscle memory a little, and the function keys are messy, but once you get used to the layout, it’s easy enough to tap on as long as you are at a desk. Using this laptop on your actual lap is not particularly comfortable. The touchpad was also squeezed into the bottom right corner

Bad news for left-handers, and good reason for everyone to grab a mouse, unless you like using the second screen as a touchpad. It’s half the width of a typical laptop touchpad, and even with a high sensitivity, there’s not much room to wiggle your finger.

Display

The ZenBook Pro 14’s 14.5-inch OLED touchscreen display with a resolution of 2880 x 1800 pixels is bright and colorful and crisper than a freshly starched shirt. Whether we were playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider, watching videos, or editing footage, everything was nicely saturated and rendered smoothly, with no lag or visible tearing. The smaller Screen Pad Plus display is also colorful, but has an anti-reflective surface that gives it a special look.

The 14-inch Screen Pad has a sharp resolution of 2,880 x 863 pixels. We watched the season finale of Marvel’s Moon Knight on Disney Plus, and the color quality and sharpness of the main display were undeniable when we first saw the Egyptian deity Amit’s on camera. All of Amit’s crocodile scales were magnificently rendered in their green and blue hues, while the gold of the deity’s armor glistened when struck by light.

The purple energy blast from Harrow’s staff was electrifying and felt dangerous as he went up against the ever-transforming Moon Knight. The scene where Layla becomes the avatar of the deity Taweret and transforms into the Scarlet Scarab for the first time was breathtaking as she spread her golden wings for the first time.

Audio

The ZenBook Pro 14 Duo is equipped with Harman Kardon certified speakers that work with Dolby Atmos audio technology to deliver a beautiful, immersive sound experience. Nonetheless, we fired up Spotify and listened to Doja Cat’s “Need to Know.” As Doja Cat explained what and why she needed to know, the baseline hit so smoothly that we got up and started dancing while the smooth, pulsating beat played loudly and with excellent depth from the Zenbook’s powerful little speakers.

We can’t imagine how Asus and Harmon Kardon managed to produce booming, clearly discernible bass with excellent highs in such a densely packed device. We then listened to “Toxicity” by System of Down, and the vocals were reproduced clearly and powerfully while the driving guitar smashed into the soundstage with god-awful force, which absolutely delighted me.

The ZenBook Pro 14 Duo does a really good job of reproducing audio cleanly and without distortion, regardless of the volume, which in my case is always set to 100%. Nevertheless, the Zenbook reproduced the guitar’s spacious, powerful vocals and lead singer Serj Tankian’s spacious, powerful vocals with joyful precision.

Graphics

The ZenBook Pro 14’s Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 Ti GPU with 4GB of VRAM allows you to play something when you’re not in creator mode. I wouldn’t say it’s designed for playing triple-A titles, but it can definitely handle older games that are still fun. Check out our page for the best cheap gaming laptops. We tested the GPU using Sid Meier’s Civilization VI benchmark. Our ZenBook Pro 14 Duo scored 91 frames per second in 1080p. That’s above the premium laptop average of 47 fps in each case.

The XPS 15 scored 67 fps in 1080p, closely followed by the ThinkPad X1 (Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060) at 65 frames per second. During our GTA V benchmark, the ZenBook Pro 14 Duo scored 51 frames per second in 1080p, not beating the premium laptop average of 78 fps. The Alienware x 14 returned a score of 70 frames per second, followed by the top-of-the-line Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Gen 4 at 80 frames per second.

Performance

The specifications of the Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED raise some serious expectations. In practice, it cannot quite fulfill them. Certainly, it is a very powerful notebook, especially for a 14-inch model. But the Intel Core i9-12900H does not deliver its best performance in this system.

In our tests with the default fan profile, the chip clocked down to 2.9 GHz under high load. If you turn up the fans to the maximum, this value increases to about 3.2 GHz, which is however accompanied by an unpleasant noise. For comparison, these clock rates are at least 10% slower than larger notebooks with the same CPU.

In fact, we found that in 4K video encoding, the performance difference compared to the larger laptops with the 12900H processor is more like 20%. That means you still get a lot of performance. But inevitably not quite as much as a larger laptop. However, the system’s overall performance is very good thanks to a PCIe Gen 4 special SSD from Samsung and the 32 GB working memory.

Battery Life

Battery life is the Achilles’ heel of the Zenbook Pro 14 Duo. It’s just not good. The system powers a discrete GPU and two high-resolution screens, both with high refresh rates, so what can you expect? I could only get off the wall for three hours and 10 minutes with both screens set to 100 lux. This is the worst battery life we have seen from any of Asus’s Duo laptops, a trend that has taken hold with the recent Intel Alder Lake laptops. The most you can get out of the laptop is about five hours, but this is a very low consumption.

We managed to reach five hours and 18 minutes in a local video playback test, which is the lightest benchmark we have. Even some more powerful gaming laptops last longer in the same battery tests, despite having higher refresh rates and more powerful GPUs. In theory, the 76-watt-hour battery should be sufficient for a laptop of this size. The Razer Blade and the 14-inch MacBook Pro both have smaller batteries. However, the Zenbook Pro 14 Duo fails to deliver decent battery life, and this is a bitter pill to swallow for an otherwise fantastic laptop.

Heat

The ZenBook Pro 14 Duo aims to allow content creators to perform video and photo editing, so it’s important to keep your cool. Add two OLED screens to the mix and you might be in for a meltdown. And yet the ZenBook Pro stayed pretty cool. During our heat test playing a 15-minute 1080p video, the bottom hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a bit warm but not dangerous. The keyboard hit 90.5 degrees and the touchpad was a cool 86.5 degrees. The key and touchpad temperatures are below our 95-degree comfort threshold.

Configuration Options

The Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED starts at $1,999 and is about the same size in the UK. That’s not exactly a bargain. But all that hardware has never been cheap. Our test configuration raises the price considerably because of the high-end Intel CPU and 32 GB of RAM. At this point we are over $2,500 or £2,500. Of course, no laptop with similar components will be terribly affordable, even with only one screen.

When you consider the exceptional screen technology, the value proposition is not so bad. We just want to point out that if the main attraction is the 14-inch OLED panel, the previous generation 14-inch single-screen Asus Zenbook with 11th-generation Intel CPUs and prices starting in the low digits is still available, $1,000 or £1,000 if you look around. The previous generation Zenbook Duo 14, with lower resolution IPS screen, is also available at a similar price.

Conclusion

The Asus Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED is an excellent notebook. It is beautifully built, has solid hardware and an impressive dual-screen system. But it also has some drawbacks. The reality is that this notebook is not optimally designed from an ergonomic standpoint, with the keyboard pushed down and the trackpad squeezed into a small space.

So you have to weigh whether the compromise for these two screens is worth it. The relatively compact proportions also limit the Zenbook’s thermal headroom a bit. It’s still a very capable system, it’s just not quite as fast as we’ve seen on other devices with the same components. Perhaps the biggest limitation is the battery life, which is nowhere near the best PC laptops, let alone Apple’s ridiculously long-lasting M1-powered MacBook Pros.

Amy Hinckley
Amy Hinckley
The Dell Inspiron 15 that her father purchased from QVC sparked the beginning of her interest in technology. At Bollyinside, Amy Hinckley is in charge of content editing and reviewing products. Amy's interests outside of working include going for bike rides, playing video games, and watching football when she's not at her laptop.

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The screen is smaller than the main Asus ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED display, but it still offers more pixels (this is a 4K screen) and at least a full-size trackpad.Asus ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED review