The acclaimed double-display laptop now has a new streamlined layout, better components, and refresh rates that change with the resolution.
For more on the Zephyrus Duo 16:
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– Hey there, I’m Matthew Buzzi, And this is Sascha from Asus. And we have for you one
of many new announcements Out of CES for the Asus. This is the Zephyrus Duo 16, Not the first time we’ve seen
a dual screen Zephyrus laptop, But there is a new size, There is new features, of course. And Sascha is going to
walk us through this laptop That he has right there in his hands. Sascha, take it away about the design And what’s different about
this edition of this laptop. – Sure. All right. Let’s start with the design. You can see it’s actually the same size As the Zephyrus Duo 15, Because it’s still a 15 inch chassis, But this one is all about screen space. As the name implies,
it has a second screen, But obviously people who go For this want as much
screen space as possible. So, we fit in a 16 inch, 16” by 10” panel in there. And, as you can see, when I open it up, You can see super slim bezels all around. Oh, there’s a reflection of my monitor. So, you can see the bottom
bezel is basically gone. Now, there still is a bottom bezel, But it’s really hidden when
you look at it from the front. So, this is a normal angle
that you would look at it From when you’re using
the laptop, you can see. So, the screen pair
plus the second screen, It’s a half height display, Essentially half height
of the main display.
It not only folds up like on the Duo 15, But it actually slides back. So, they can see it as I open it And open and close the laptop, The second screen slides back and forth, And that closes the gap
and brings it closer To the main panel. And then from the front, You don’t really see the
bottom bezel anymore. So, there’s only a very thin
line between the main screen And the second screen of like
two or three millimeters, Which makes them look like one seamless, Super large display, Which is really cool for anybody who needs As much screen space as possible. And beyond that, You also get top of the line
performance with this one. So, the Duo 15, it’s already
a really powerful laptop. And at the same time, one
of our quietest laptops, Because this opens up a lot
of air flow as well, right? So, the CPU, the GPU are right below The screen pair plus the second display. So, we can pull in fresh
air very easily directly Into the cooling system
to cool CPU and GPU. We can ramp up the TDP and
TGP to really high levels. Yeah. So, it’s a really
powerful workstation. And it also gives you a second display For as much screen space as possible. – Yeah, that change in
the displays lining up, The bezels lining up like that is small, But that’s something
that makes a difference. That’s like when you
have a two monitor set up And the screens aren’t quite flush Versus when you really get the edges,
It makes a big difference when the edge, The edge to edge is perfect. If you get your set up right, It looks like one, you
know, one giant screen, Which is what you want. So, I’m interested to see that in person. We did like the 15 quite a bit. Surprised me how both,
as you said, it was, I can attest pretty quiet
for a laptop of that caliber And pretty light too for a laptop That has a gaming laptop, A) that, You know, Usually a reputation
for being a bit heftier And, B) with two displays
was pretty light. So, this. – It’s pretty compact. Like, if you look at it, So like when you look
at this from the side, It’s pretty slim considering, you know, The performance you get in here, You get a top of the line CPU
and GPU, everything maxed out, And this is competing with much bigger And much heavier desktop
replacement laptops out there On the market that are
pretty chunky, right? So, considering that, this is pretty cool. It’s like you said,
pretty light, pretty slim. And nobody would expect that
there’s like a second display In a laptop like this. It’s still pretty portable. – As far as power, you maybe Can’t say exactly what’s
in it at this stage, But updated silicon, updated GPU or CPU? – Yeah. So, just like the
current Zephyrus Duo 15, It comes with the latest AMD mobile CPU.
So, latest, the ones that
were just announced at CES, This one’s going to have the latest one And the GPU has been bumped up as well, The latest in video and mobile GPU. So, there’s going to be
a nice performance bump From both of them. At the same time, We also bumped up the
CPU TDP, and GPU TGP. So, for the GPU, It’s 135 plus 15 for a total of 150 Watts. And we are actually going to be able To push this a little bit higher In turbo mode to 165 total. So, that’s a nice performance bump. And for the CPU, yeah, We’re able to push it to around 80 Watts, 90 Watts for CPU-only load. So, you know, If you’re doing some video editing And the GPU is not used
at all, just a little bit, You can actually push the CPU way high And get a lot of nice
performance out of it. – So how we’re able to push the CPU, TDP, And TGP even higher is we
improve the cooling system. And one big component
of that is liquid metal, Which we’ve been using for
years now in all ROG laptops Use liquid metal on the CPUs since 2021. And in 2022, that’s not going to change, But we actually push things even higher Or the temperatures even lower. Looking at it that way,
we’ve been poking and nudging Thermal Grizzly who has
been creating liquid metal On our laptops and applying
liquid metal on our laptops Together with us to do
something even better
To push temperatures even lower. And so we co-developed a
new liquid metal formula That brings CPU temperatures
another five degrees lower Compared to the regular
Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut. That’s going to be called
Conductonaut Extreme. And it’s going to be
available in retail as well For everybody else to
use on their PC parts. But we’re the exclusive partner for this Only on our laptops in 2022. And yeah, pretty exciting. Even five degrees lower temperatures Than regular liquid metal, Which already has way better temperatures Than any other thermal
paste on the market. Memory up to 64 GB DDR5, Fully maxed out, two Gen4 SSD slots, And the top configuration, for this one, You can actually have it
shipped out of the box With four terabytes of
Gen4 SSDs in RAID 0. So, two two-terabyte SSDs on RAID 0. Yeah, and crazy fast. I think it’s like, It’s over 10,000 megabytes
per second or something, Read speeds. So, yeah, crazy fast. The LAN port in the
back has been upgraded To 2.5G as well. So, that’s perfect for
anybody who’s working On video, video editing,
just like you guys, When you have really
large video projects and, You know, you’re collaborating on them, You have to move those large
files over the local network From one person to another. And that’s where 2.5G really helps a lot.
So, for content creators, really cool. The keyboard has been improved as well With much better key travels. I think you can see that clearly. It has 1.7 millimeter key travel now. It feels like double
the key travel compared To the previous generation. It isn’t double, but you know, For key travel, like every few extra point Something millimeters just
makes so much of a difference. And this one feels really nice. It’s about the same as all
our other Zephyrus keyboards, Which are pretty good. Same as the G14, G15, M16, yeah. The touch pad is a little bit bigger. What’s cool is when the
screen pair plus lights up, There’s a piece of glass here
of some black PCB and RGB LEDs That you can customize, Or just turn off, if you don’t like it. – Sure. – And yeah, there is a webcam as well. Something that the previous
generation did not have. And for the main display, There’s two panel options
that are really interesting Because they’re both
exclusive or brand new. And we’re the only ones who
have that kind of panel. So, the first one is a dual spec panel That we developed together with BOE, One of the biggest panel
vendors for laptops. And it allows us to run
the panel at 4k, 120 Hertz, Or switch it to 240 Hertz
when lowering the resolution To only full HD. So, the way we’re doing that is, Essentially, the panel
can run at 240 Hertz,
But 4k 240 Hertz would be overwhelming For the panel control logic And also the electronics of the panel. So, with some trickery, We’re basically able to
run the pixels at 240 Hertz By lowering the resolution. And yeah, that’s one of the panels. And the other panels is our
Nebula HDR mini LED panel, Which has 512 mini LED zones For a really high contrast ratio Of a hundred thousand to one, Which is a hundred times more
than a typical laptop panel. And you can also get the
brightness up to 1100 nits, Which is double the brightness
you usually get on laptops. A cool feature for that
one is we have an option To switch all the mini LED zones To just work like a single backlight zone. So, when you do that, you
lose all the contrast, right? You just have the regular contrast. So, why did we do that? Well, when you’re a content creator And you’re working on videos or pictures, You’re editing something, If you just change a few pixels, That might be over the threshold, Which then determines the
brightness for that zone. So, what can happen and does
happen is once you do that, This part of the screen then
becomes brighter or darker, But that changes how that part
of the image looks, right? And you want consistency. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want consistency, right? Even if the brightness changes, Then the color reproduction changes too.
So, that’s a nightmare for
content creators, right? So, we have that option to
just toggle it on and off. It’s pretty cool as well for
anybody who wants to know, How does that work And what difference does it make If I have those 512 zones
compared to regular panel, So you can just toggle
the 512 zones on and off, Essentially, and then see like, okay, This is what it looks like in a game With the 512 zones versus without. Yeah, so two really cool, Interesting panels on this one. – Not something I would
know from looking at it. And of course, if you’re less
familiar with the Duo line, You can look at the review. We’ve touched a lot of gaming
and non gaming Duo systems, And you might not be sure what you can do With that second display, So you can go check out, you
know, the Zephyrus 15 Duo And see what kind of applications There are. You can drag pretty
much any application down To the lower screen, Use it as a reference, put
your Spotify down there, Put, you know, Your reference when you’re playing a game, Like an FAQ or something
down on the bottom, A checklist or Twitch or something down On the bottom screen. Anything that you would
use the second display for On a monitor, there are
the same uses on a laptop, Just at a different form factor. So, yeah, check that out. That’s out there. Sascha, I think that was
a thorough dive on this.
We will, of course, Check it out for review
when it becomes available. So, thank you so much for
walking us through it now. And stay tuned to PCMag.com
for more coverage out Of CES 2022. Thanks for watching.
