ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED review: powerful ultrabook with two screens

ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED is a compact portable laptop workstation, the power of which is quite enough to work not only with documents, but also for photo editing, video editing and other resource-intensive tasks. Although all the advantages of such power can be used only when connected to the socket. An additional display is still quite unusual, but it really has many scenarios for useful use. Both as a simple extension of the workspace and as a ready-made toolbar for some applications. The downside of the secondary display is the unusual position and design of the keyboard, which requires getting used to and additional space on the table, and also makes it not very comfortable to use on your lap. Both displays in the laptop are of excellent quality, but the main OLED makes a special impression. Among the advantages of the laptop it is also worth noting a good set of modern ports, including a full-fledged HDMI 2.1, a very nice stereo system, as well as an efficient cooling system that copes with powerful hardware. 

5 reasons to buy ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED:

• Gorgeous bright OLED screen with a refresh rate of 120 Hz
• High performance
• Efficient cooling system
• Additional screen with a lot of possibilities for use
• Spectacular appearance and quality materials

2 reasons not to buy ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED:

• Non-standard keyboard and touchpad require time to get used to and additional space on the table
• High price

Quick transition:

1. What's in the box?
2. What about the appearance and design of ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED?
3. How convenient is it to use ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED?
4. How can I use the additional display?
5. How good are the screens?
6. What about performance and battery life?
7. In the dry balance

What's in the package?

ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED, like almost all other laptops of the company, is packed in two boxes. The package includes the laptop itself, a 180 W power supply, a power cable, a Velcro cover, a stylus, documentation and one more not quite familiar element. These are additional legs that can be glued to the bottom of the laptop. With their help you can make an even greater angle of inclination relative to the horizontal surface. The case is black with embossed Zenbook inscriptions. Inside there is a place for transporting the stylus.

The bundled ASUS Pen 2.0 stylus works with both the main and additional display. It recognizes 4096 degrees of pressure and angle of inclination. The set also includes interchangeable nozzles that correspond to the feel of different hardness options for pencils 2H, H, HB, B. The stylus has two physical buttons and a sliding design with a Type-C connector for charging.

What about the appearance and design of ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED?

ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED is not the first model with such an additional ScreenPad Plus screen. The first such model appeared back in 2019. Since then, the design has been refined in some respects, but globally it looks familiar. The upper half of the working surface is occupied by an additional large display of the same width as the main one. In the opened state it is slightly raised for a more convenient angle of inclination, as well as for better ventilation of quite powerful hardware inside. In this case, the keyboard is shifted to the front edge of the working surface, and the touchpad is on the right. You can display any information on the additional display and in general use it as an additional monitor. And software improvements allow you to display a toolbar in some applications.

The entire body of the ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED is made of metal. ASUS calls the color Tech Black, visually it is rather dark gray. The lid has concentric circles familiar from the ZenBook line, but instead of the Asus inscription, there is now a new triangular logo. The company claims that the lid has a special coating against fingerprints. In general, yes, the situation has improved compared to the models of previous years, but still it was not possible to completely get rid of prints.

On the left there are only ventilation holes and a combined 3.5 mm headphone jack.

On the right are status indicators, 1 full-size USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports with support for power and image output.

Some connectors are located on the back. Namely: HDMI 2.1, MicroSD Express 7.1 high-speed card reader and power jack. There are ventilation holes on the left. In general, a pretty good set of ports, as for a 14.5-inch laptop. But there are a couple of controversial points. Of course, the internal very dense layout imposes some restrictions. But the connectors on the back are not always convenient with limited space on the table, especially considering that there should be more space on the front of the notebook for palms, because the keyboard is on the edge of the working surface. And an SD card reader might be more appropriate for some users: still many professional cameras use standard SD. But, again, the internal layout does not allow to install it.

There is traditionally nothing interesting on the front except for the notch for lifting the cover.

Above the display there is a whole set of different things. In the middle there is a webcam, an infrared camera and an indicator of their operation. There are two microphones on the sides. And a little to the right there is a light intensity sensor, RGB-sensor for automatic adjustment of the screen color temperature according to the lighting around and ToF-sensor, thanks to which the laptop can be automatically locked/unlocked depending on whether the owner of the laptop is nearby.

Below are massive rubber strips for better grip on the table surface, ventilation holes and speakers.

ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED has dimensions of 323.5x224.7x19.6 mm and weighs 1.7 kg, so there will be no problems with transportation. Some design features have already been mentioned above, we will talk about some more. As for the quality of construction and materials, everything is very good, as always in the top ZenBooks.

How convenient is it to use ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED?

The unusual design of the ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED takes some getting used to. In the open state, the entire upper part of the working surface is occupied by an additional ScreenPad Plus touch screen, which is placed at a slight angle. Therefore, the keyboard is located directly in front of the user. The laptop can be opened by about 145°. Hinges allow you to open the laptop with one hand and securely fix the display in the desired position. Slightly raised additional screen opens additional holes for ventilation. At the same time, a rather interesting design is used, which is called AAS Ultra: the main display unit is attached to the additional one, not to the main part of the notebook.

If we ignore the unusual position of the keyboard, the layout itself is quite usual for ultrabooks. There is no additional numeric block, the top row of keys, as well as the arrow block have a reduced height. They are combined with Home, End, PgUp, PgDown through Fn. There are two additional buttons between Delete and the power button in the top row. The first is responsible for moving applications between screens, the second - for disabling it. Both Shift, Enter, Backspace and "~" are slightly shorter than usual.

The buttons have a small depression of 0.2 mm and a full stroke of 1.4 mm, the stroke is very pleasant and quite informative. After getting used to the position and layout, typing becomes very comfortable and you can get a really high typing speed. There is a white backlight with several brightness levels.

The touchpad is located on the right. It is small and has a vertical orientation. So it is difficult to say that it is quite comfortable, even taking into account the excellent sensitivity and a very pleasant surface. For basic tasks: browser, minimal typing it will be enough. But to work with Adobe programs, DaVinci Resolve and something similar, the mouse will be very important.

How can I use the additional display?

ScreenPad Plus has a lot of possible usage scenarios. First, it is an additional display on which you can put individual applications. For example, music player, messenger. And on the main one you can directly do your work. And secondly, in the proprietary ProArt Creator Hub application, you can configure panels with tools for all current Adobe applications. They can be configured according to your needs, they are launched automatically when the applications are launched. Unfortunately, so far only Adobe. There is hope that later there will be, for example, DaVinci Resolve, Ableton and other applications that look logical on such a laptop.

For ScreenPad Plus settings there is a corresponding application ScreenExpert. In it you can adjust the brightness, background, energy-efficient mode of the additional screen. Quickly launch specific programs or groups of programs.

How good are the screens?

One of the advantages of ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED is its main display. This is a 14.5-inch OLED touchscreen with a resolution of 2.8K (2880x1800), 16:10 aspect ratio, 0.2 ms response time, 120 Hz refresh rate. They promise DCI-P3 color coverage of 100%, there is PANTONE Validated certification. Apparently, there are different configurations of the laptop and in the top models the maximum brightness is 550 cd/m2. In our case, Samsung ATNA45AF01-0 matrix is used, which has a maximum of 360 cd/m2. In the settings there is a whole set of useful functions for the display. There are Splendid display modes, color temperature settings, a set of tools to maximize the life of the OLED panel, DC Dimming and the choice of refresh rate.

Visually, the main screen has excellent image quality: very deep blacks, rich colors, maximum viewing angles and the smoothest picture in dynamic scenes. The maximum brightness was 346.99 cd/m2 (which is close to the declared indicator). The color space coverage is much wider than sRGB, and the color reproduction is very close to the reference values:

The additional display uses a 12.7-inch IPS matrix with a resolution of 2880x864 pixels and an aspect ratio of 32:10. It is also touch-sensitive and supports a refresh rate of 120 Hz. But visually, of course, it differs from the main one. It has a matte finish and, perhaps, because of this, a crystalline effect is visible at some angles. But in general, there are no questions to its quality: very wide viewing angles, large brightness margin, pleasant color reproduction.

Maximum brightness is 525.399 cd/m2, black field brightness is 0.594 cd/m2, and static contrast ratio is 885:1. The color space coverage is close to sRGB, the color display is also very good:

What about performance and battery life?

ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED is available with 12th generation Core i7 and i9 Intel Alder Lake-P processors. In our configuration, Intel Core i9-12900H is installed. It is manufactured on 10nm process technology, has 6 productive cores and 8 energy efficient cores. Powerful cores support Hyper Threading, as a result, the processor can process up to 20 threads simultaneously. The frequency of productive cores is from 2.5 to 5 GHz and 1.8 - 3.8 GHz for energy-efficient cores. L3 cache memory is 24 MB. Intel Iris Xe with 96 computing units and a frequency of up to 1.45 GHz is used as built-in graphics. And as a discrete video accelerator, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop is used with a frequency of up to 1035 MHz with 4 GB of GDDR6 video memory. The total TDP level of the processor and video card can reach 85 watts. RAM - 32 GB LPDDR5, works in dual-channel mode. It is soldered on the board, it will not be possible to increase the volume. Wireless interfaces: Bluetooth 5.2 and fast Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax) (Dual band) 2x2.

The performance of the laptop is at a fairly high level: it is enough not only for working with browsers and documents, but also for processing photos, video editing and audio recording. Actually, the notebook is intended for this purpose in the first place. In synthetic tests, ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED demonstrates high results in processor tests. In graphics - not so much, but the RTX 3050 Ti Laptop can hardly be called a gaming graphics card:

Cooling of the laptop is provided by a fairly large number of vents and the ASUS IceCool Plus cooling system. It consists of two IceBlade fans, each with 97 embossed blades. They cool two 8mm heat pipes connected to the CPU and GPU.

The laptop works really stably at high loads. During the first minute (during the adaptation of the cooling system) there is a throttling up to 20%, then the temperature of all internal components is kept at about 60° and there are no problems with performance. At that the noise of fans is audible, but it is not very loud. When working with documents or a browser, the cooling system is not heard at all. The case almost does not heat up, the laptop can be kept on your lap while working.

The drive used is an SSD of M.2 format PCIe Gen4 x4 NVMe, model Samsung PM9A1 with a capacity of 2TB. Up to 7000 MB/s read speed and up to 5200 MB/s write speed are declared.

The real speeds are a little lower, but in general it is a very fast SSD:

ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED is not a gaming laptop, but it has enough power to play modern games, even if not at maximum settings. In Cyberpunk 2077 at high settings without ray tracing with DLSS performance mode you can get 30-40 60 FPS. Gears 5, high settings: about 60 FPS. God of War, high settings, DLSS in balance mode: 40-50 FPS. The Ascent, ultra settings, no ray tracing, DLSS in balance mode: about 60 FPS.

ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED has a 76 Wh battery. They promise up to 9.5 hours of work. The bundled 180 W power supply allows you to use the laptop at maximum performance, but charging is also supported with a 100 W Type-C power supply. With an average level of performance, comfortable display brightness, working with a browser and documents, connecting via Wi-Fi, as well as playing music online, the laptop lasted a little more than 6 hours, which is very good considering the Core i9 inside.

The ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED stereo speakers were surprisingly high quality for a laptop. They sound loud and quite high quality, although the bass is still lacking. The proprietary SmartAmp amplifier is used, which (according to ASUS) allows you to achieve a 350% volume increase without distortion.

To adjust the sound there is a Dolby Atmos application with presets and an equalizer:

Among useful applications there is ProArt Creator Hub, which we wrote about above. In addition to the settings of the additional screen panels, you can select the performance mode, monitor the system load, go to the screen calibration (this requires a calibrator of a certain model), make groups of applications for quick simultaneous launch, and set priorities for different applications.

There is also the usual for all laptops of the company MyAsus program for updating the system, selecting charging modes, displaying the display, turning on noise reduction and much more.

In the dry balance. Three things you need to know about ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED (UX8402).

• ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED is a compact metal ultrabook with two 120 Hz displays
• Inside is a powerful Intel Core i9 processor and a discrete GeForce RTX 3050 Ti graphics card
• The keyboard and touchpad are non-standard and take time to get used to

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