APRIL 2020 • TECH ADVISOR 39Blue’)finishwithprettyminimaldetailing,withboth
theAsus logo and its concentric circle finish offset
slightly on the aluminium body.
Performance
So it’s a bit of a brute and the second screen (mostly)
works, but does the ZenBook Pro Duo deliver where it
counts? Yes, but not without downsides. I reviewed the
top-of-the-range model with a Core i9-9980HK backed
up by 32GB of RAM, which is more than enough for
evenfairlydemandingwork,andunsurprisinglyit
prettymuch breezed through our benchmarking.
Battery is an issue, though. All that power doesn’t
come easy, and I found that even simply using the
device for writing in Chrome, with Spotify, Slack and
Twitter going on elsewhere, I’d be lucky to get three
or four hours of continuous use unless I cut the display
brightness right down. Do anything more demanding
and that runtime will naturally drop further. That means
you’ll always want the power brick nearby, and that’s
big and hefty in its own right.
There’s cooling too. Asus has gone all out, with
much of the side chassis occupied by large vents which
spew out hot air pretty much continuously. It’s another
reason you won’t want to use this thing on your lap, but
you’llevenwanttoavoidkeepinganycolddrinksin
theway of the exhaust – they won’t stay cool for long.
With all that oomph and cooling power, you might
think this would be a capable gaming laptop too. And
it sort of is, with the RTX 2060 in particular letting
you tap into the latest ray-tracing tech. There’s not
quite enough oomph to power the full 4K display at