We take a look at the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo UX581GV – A brand new dual-screen laptop!
This is the brand new member of the ZenBook Pro family, the Pro Duo UX581V!
Design
When you fire it up it takes your breath away. It’s like when Keanu Reeves went on stage at E3 and some developer in the audience shouted at him “You’re breathtaking!”. The dual screen setup is nothing that new. Even the previous Zenbook PRO UX580, launched nearly a year ago had a touchpad capable of morphing in a secondary screen at a touch of a button.
Even the competition tried the dual screen approach-HP Omen X was having a secondary Full HD 6 inch display, which could be used for pretty much anything helpful, especially in gaming. But nothing comes close to Asus’s implementation. The screen below is a full 14 inch 3840×1100 px display, an real extension of the main screen and it looks just amazing!
Display
Yep, that’s how the future looks like. ZenBook PRO Duo integrates a 4K HDR OLED panel. This panel was announced by Samsung at the beginning of this year, it’s specially made for laptops, with a brightness between 0,0005 and 600 nits, a 120.000:1 contrast ratio, DisplayHDR and HDR10 and a 100% DCI-P3 color space coverage. The stuff the dreams are made of. I honestly didn’t believe that we’ll see such a panel so soon in a 3000 dollars laptop. But this guys took a huge leap forward, a spectacular tour de force just in in time for their 30 years anniversary!
Another great advantage of the OLED scrrens in general and this Samsung panel in particular is the ultra slim bezels, just a few millimeters thick, and so this Zenbook Pro Duo has a screen to body ratio of 89%, which allows a way more compact body, but also a futuristic look.
And if the DCI P3 standard is widely used in cinema industry is for the better, because as I already said, this one is a 100% DCI P3 which makes it ideal for the people in this field. Same for photo editing, not to mention that this surreal OLED panel boasts a fabulous 133% s-RGB color space coverage.
Touchpad / Upgraded NumPad
When it comes to organizing space around the keyboard and the ergonomics of this space, we always liked the way Asus shot two rabbits with one bullet: having touchpad and numpad in the place at the same time. NumberPad was the magic word, especially when we had to deal with pushed back keyboards, like we often encountered on the Zephyrus S range, due to cooling issues, or on Omen X 2s due to secondary screen issues. Unlike the previous versions, the new NumberPad 2.0 offers two levels of brightness. And, unlike the first NumberPad version, even when the keys are activated, the cursor may be used, thank to the smart software. Regarding the actual, physical keyboard, the keys have a 1.4mm stroke, which leads to a pleasant experience.
Performance
The Intel Core i9-9980HK CPU is a hungry one, and it’s natural, having 8 physical cores and 16 threads. A lot of mouths to feed, that’s why a 45W TDP it’s not surprising, and it’s also natural to have a thicker case, to rest assured that the CPU it’s cooled enough. What’s still a wonder for me is how they managed to add the secondary touch screen in the upper part of the chassis in a 2.4cm body including the lead, right above the area where the heatpipes are, and actually the entire engine of this laptop.
This sandwich is a hell of an engineering achievement, to manage somehow not to overheat the secondary screen. Especially when beside the Core i9 CPU, Asus added an NVIDIA RTX 2060 with 6GB GDDR6 VRAM. And yes, it’s the RTX 2060 laptop version, with 960Mhz base clock and 1200 MHz Boost Clock, not the MaxQ version we were waiting for since January 2019, which never came to light.
And that’s how this laptop is good enough also for… gaming, even if we don’t really tolerate the glossy screens for this kind of activity. But if don’t mind this small detail, why noy?! Anyway, adding up the already mentioned specs, the screen covered in protective glass, and last but not least the generous 71Wh battery, we guess that the 2.5Kgs of this laptop are pretty well justified.
Conclusion
So what is that laptop about? Is it just another unusual concept or we stare right into the future? It’s hard to have a right away answer. If that Touchbar on the MBP found some useful applications for itself like shortcuts in some apps, in Zenbook Pro Duo you can bring right to your fingertips entire sub-menus of an app and manipulate them however you want. Because in this particular case we’re talking about a full fledged display which can event complement or double the main screen functionality. You can drop here Photoshop or premiere tabs or the minimap of a game. Sky is the limit when it comes to efficiency. Time will tell if this device is the first in a new breed of laptops. We’ll be back soon with a solid review of this laptop, to see how well it moves, how good is the build quality, how hot it gets, things that are hard to answer right now.