Asus Zephyrus Duo 15SE review: Double delight

Innovation is progressive and necessity is the mother of invention. Keeping innovation in mind, companies today aren’t trying to follow ‘set’ patterns but taking a different approach to adding a differentiating factor with their products to bring innovations to the consumer market.

Whenever a tech company tries something different to bring some sort of innovation with their mainstream products, no doubt it brings some sort of freshness and joy to try out something different, it adds more options for buyers too. However, all these innovations also bring several new questions with them such as how practical it is? Or is it useful in the real world or just a gimmick?

Companies try one thing at a time and then improvise it as per the user’s feedback and then make some changes to the product and present it to the customers.

Asus here with its all-new Zephyrus Duo 15SE laptop is trying to do the same. They first introduced the dual-display with the Zephyrus Pro Duo and then they slowly transformed the feature to their Zephyrus lineup of gaming laptops.

The first version didn’t get us sold on the entire dual display idea, but, as the company progressed with the technology and improved upon the whole idea, the dual-display seems to be a good idea. Especially, if you are a hardcore user and often require multiple displays to work with.

The Asus Zephyrus Duo here also comes with a 5.5-inch secondary display along with a traditional 15.6-inch display. Plus, it is also among the most powerful gaming laptops you can find. Powering this machine is AMD’s latest Ryzen 9 5000 series processor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics.

The secondary display brings some legit functionality to the users than just being a second display in the laptop. Whether the secondary display brings some additional functionality or is it just innovative minds trying wacky stuff? Here’s our final thought about the Asus Zephyrus Duo.

Asus Zephyrus Duo 15SE: Display and design
The first thing we noticed after opening the lid of the laptop is the dual-screen setup. As we are familiar with the design, the primary screen is placed just like any other laptops in the market with thin bezels across all the sides and the second screen is placed at the base of the laptop towards the top.

This does bring an awkward design aesthetic for a laptop. If you have even been comfortable with a desktop setup, then you will get used to Asus Zephyrus Duo 15SE in no time. The keyboard is moved towards the front and Asus includes an additional rubberised palm rest in the box. Desktop-ish, right? And, yes the trackpad is moved to the right side of the keyboard, the direction in which most people use the mouse. Also, the trackpad doubles up as the Num pad, another cool trick from Asus which is functional.

If you are more of a laptop user then this might bring some level of inconvenience to you initially. But it’s an easy setup to get used to.

Another good thing about the whole Zephyrus Duo 15SE is Active Aerodynamic cooling. The new design not only offers better airflow but also lifts the secondary display by a certain angle giving a more ergonomic view to it. We thought that the hinge holding the secondary display in the air could break. We tried to add some pressure and it barely moved. The mechanism is smooth, silent and has a ‘Hulk’ build.

Coming back to the display, the primary 15.6-inch is a FHD anti-glare panel with 1920×1070 resolution. It has a 300 Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time, is Pantone Validated and also supports FreeSync.

What that means is the display is suitable for both creators and gamers. The 300 Hz refresh rate and 3ms response time are more than any gamer would need. The Pantone validation and 100% Adobe RGB is what a creator would need from the display. The colour production is just to the point. Viewing angle, brightness is just appropriate.

Moving to the secondary display, the 5.5-inch 4K touch panel with Asus ScreenPad Plus software can do miracles. The display is also bright, vivid and produces good colours. For us, this level of colour accuracy for secondary display wasn’t mandatory because most people will use it for stuff like dumping up useless windows, controls from editing software or game’s additional tools like Discord, etc.

Asus is offering a top-quality secondary display and that’s what anyone would want from a laptop that costs this much.

While the display placement has left Asus with no choice than repositioning the keyboard and trackpad, other design elements are exactly where they are supposed to be. The microSD card, charging port and headphone jack are on the left, 2 USB Type-A and 1 USB Type-C ports are on the right, while the Ethernet, HDMI and another USB Type-A port are placed at the backside of the laptop. We really like the placement of the Ethernet and HDMI port because they help with clutter-free setup and make the desk look cleaner.

The Zephyrus Duo 15SE has a solid build. It’s all-metal, square-ish and not that thick. Though it is a little heavy, that’s something expected from a high-performance gaming laptop.

Asus Zephyrus Duo 15SE: Performance
Let’s first start with the secondary display. The secondary display is exactly what one expects from an additional display connected via an HDMI cable. It’s just that Asus has planted it right on the body. You can move multiple windows from top to bottom screen and stack them side-by-side for easy readability. Asus’s ScreenPad Plus software will help you do that as it has dedicated markings where the window automatically fits like a glove.

We were hoping for something else and the secondary display on the Asus Zephyrus Duo 15SE delivers on that part thanks to the improved ScreenPad+ plus software. On the first boot, the built-in tutorial takes you through various how-tos on getting things done on the secondary display.

The first feature we liked is the additional control panel options that work with Adobe Photoshop, Premiere Pro and Illustrator. But, surprisingly, it didn’t work with After Effect or any other productivity software for that matter. Neither did we find a way to add software to the list. The good thing is that one can assign controls and commands in the control panel for Windows functions.

Another feature we liked about the ScreenPad+ is the ability to arrange software in groups and open them with just a tap.

Also, all the necessary controls are right at the top like brightness control, essential apps like Armory Crate, etc. The idea here is to provide seamless secondary display functionalities and Asus has managed to ace it.

Keeping the ScreenPad + aside for a while, let’s take a look at the hardware specifications of the laptop. Our unit runs AMD Ryzen 9 5800H processor paired with Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics. It also has 32GB RAM and 1TB Nvme SSD storage for faster data transfer and overall system performance.

This kind of internals can no doubt handle basic stuff right and without any worries. In fact, it can handle most editing tools like Premiere Pro, Photoshop, Affinity, with ease. We tested them and it was a breeze to work on this laptop.

Talking about gaming, the Zephyrus Duo 15SE also has the bells and whistles for it and it did offer us some terrific frame rates.

Let’s start with Overwatch. We installed the game and started playing it in Performance mode. It returned us somewhere around 280 to 290fps, which is an amazing frame rate for the game. Another game we tried was Far Cry 5 and it also returned good frame rates between 125 to 135 fps. The Witcher 3 and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey also returned over 100 fps mark. Do note that all these games were tested under the default setting the game chose for itself.

Gaming also reminds us about the use of ScreenPad + display. While playing CS:GO and Dota the necessary controls were shifted down on the secondary screen giving us more room for the game.

Cooling is also an important factor for gaming laptops. Well, the AAS cooling system where the secondary display lifts to 30-degree angle to make more room for two fans to draw more air from outside for better cooling. Also, the liquid metal here works really well.

The keyboard is good. It has a 1.4mm key travel which might not be much as per our liking but it does offer good feedback when pressed. Also, the keys are well spaced out and feel comfortable to type. The trackpad also works just fine.

Talking about audio, the laptop has got four speakers backed by Dolby Atmos. With minor tweaks and changes in the software, the speakers sound really great. They are loud, clear and also offer good vocal output. We also liked that the laptop does not have a webcam and Asus has included one in the box as an accessory. A good step for privacy concerned people.

Asus Zephyrus Duo 15SE: Battery
All that performance comes at a price and most laptops pay that in terms of battery life. Well, that’s also not true here with this machine. We weren’t expecting any magic here so we kept our hopes on the bay. With regular day-to-day stuff like browsing, doing office work, it lasted for around 6 hours with 50% brightness in Silent mode. But, anything heavy the battery will reduce to 3 hours tops. compromise in terms of battery life. Practically, Asus Zephyrus Pro Duo does not come with a single power-efficient hardware – be it the dual-display or the processor. The laptop is hardly able to reach the three-hour mark on battery with both displays on and our normal browsing, writing and playing music at full brightness. People looking to use this laptop for more resource-hungry work like editing videos and photos will get even lesser battery life.

Asus Zephyrus Pro Duo: Verdict
The addition of a secondary display added a freshness to the laptop and also brought a new way to work. At the price of Rs 2,99,000, the Zephyrus Duo 15SE seems to be a complete package as it can easily handle anything, thanks to the AMD Ryzen 9 5900H processor and 32GB of RAM. The ScreenPad+ software is not improved and it offers tons of practical features rather than just being a gimmick. Also, the gaming performance, battery life, display quality and everything else is top-notch here.

If you are looking for a really powerful machine that can handle anything without breaking a sweat, then Zephyrus Duo 15SE is the laptop to go with. Sure, there’s a price to pay but it’s worth every penny spent. As we say ‘it can be a creator’s machine by day and a gamer’s paradise at night’.

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