The first laptops with Intel Comet Lake H processors and Nvidia RTX Super graphics cards are on the way soon, and we’ve already gone hands on with a few of them thanks to a recent Asus press event. The star of the show there was the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15, a hyper-modern machine that is the best argument for dual-screen laptops we’ve seen to date.
Like the Asus Zenbook Pro Duo, a dual-screen laptop released last year, the laptop’s 14-inch secondary display sits beneath the main 15-inch screen, offering about the same width and nearly half the height with a resolution of 3840×1100. that machine though, the secondary screen automatically angles upwards as the lid of the laptop is opened, ensuring that you’re not looking at the screen off-axis and allowing a 28.5mm air intake to be exposed.
The mechanism here is robust too; the touch screen didn’t shift a millimetre under even the harshest of taps and worked silently even on the pre-production machine we had access to. The transformation is fascinating to watch, the sort of thing you’ll want to do just for the joy of it, and that’s a rarity on laptops these days.
As pleasant as it is, that perfectly positioned secondary screen also feels very practical. It’s easy to envisage a multitude of uses for the secondary touch display, from toolbars in Photoshop or Premiere Pro to map and inventory screens in battle royale games. Of course, most games aren’t built to take advantage of this extra real estate, with only Dying Light 2 listed as being compatible at present, but Asus is working with Overwolf to display in-game stats on the second screen in games like Rainbow Six Siege, Counter-Strike and League of Legends.