WEBVTT

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It's been about 2 years since we first saw Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite chips in

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laptops, and it was a pretty important step for ARM. But today, Asus is

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sponsoring this video to have us take a look at two of their laptops containing

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the successor to the Snapdragon X Elite,

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the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme. In

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front of me are the two updated versions of Asus's 14 and A16 laptops. While the

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A14 is a very nice spelt small size,

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we're going to be taking a look at the big boy today, the ZenBook A16, which is

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a 16-in laptop. I think ASUS has been on somewhat of a hot streak with their

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laptops this year. I was really impressed with their ZenBook Duo. We

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also liked their expert books for their business lineup, and I have been pretty

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keen to check out the Zenbook.

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Wow. You know, it's pretty it's pretty light. Is there anything else

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interesting in here? No, just documentation. Inside the box, you

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obviously get your laptop and I can feel it's using the same Asus exclusive ser

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aluminum with magnesium material, which makes this thing both much more durable

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than standard aluminum laptops. And it makes this thing really light. I don't

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know the exact weight of this specific unit, but the A16 comes as low as 2.65

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lb, which is a lot lighter than a MacBook. 2.67. You know what? Being 20 g

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off, that's that's pretty close. Also included in the box is a 130 watt

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charger, which is higher than I was expecting, but it does thankfully terminate in a USBC port, which means

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that we don't have any sort of proprietary connection. Love to see that. Speaking of ports, we do have an

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HDMI 2.1 and two USB 4 ports that are

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capable of doing 40 Gbits per second. We have a 3.5 mm combo jack and on the

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other side, a single USBA and an SD 4.0

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card reader. Now, you know what I'm going to say? I would love to see a second USBA port cuz then it's really

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easy to attach your peripherals. But this is probably a pretty ideal loadout

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for a laptop of this size. And you can still run three displays through these

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ports without having to use a dock. And I guess once you're hooked up to your display via USB, you can start using

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like the USB ports on your display. So like maybe I'm asking for too much. Ever

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think about that? On the bottom, we have ventilation intake as well as an exhaust that goes out the back of the laptop

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underneath the display as well as venting for our speakers and some very

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slightly very slightly raised feet. Get those fans just barely off the ground.

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Man, it's so light. So light. And it's like

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Look at how thin this is. This is This is like not This is going to happen in

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life, Glenn. You got to You got to understand the keyboard's a standard

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chicklet style keyboard. I find that the ASUS keyboards tend to be pretty nice.

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That's just my preference. And there's not too much flex. You kind of have to give her, but it is present. Also, ASUS

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missed opportunity. Could have made that a button. or like a fingerprint reader, which this doesn't have, but it does

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have Windows Hello builtin into the top of the display, which is got tiny little

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bezels. Should we turn it on? Let me know in the comments below if we should

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turn this laptop on. The A16 features a 16in ASUS aluminina OLED display that is

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certified display HDR, true black 1000.

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Because it's OLED, it means you're going to have really great contrast ratios. You're going to get 1100 nits of HDR

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peak brightness as well as 100% coverage of the DCIP3 color space. And it comes

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factory calibrated. if you care less about the productivity side of things and you just want to know if you can

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game on it. You do get 120 Hz with a 0.2 millisecond response time. So, it's

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going to be good for pretty much anything you're going to throw at this class of laptop. Qualcomm's been like

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pretty hard at work on their new chips, and they promise a lot of improvements

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to performance, especially when it comes to the GPU. The Snapdragon X2 Elite

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Extreme comes with 18 cores on its CPU. 12 of those are high performance prime

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CPUs, and six of those are highly efficient performance cores. Their

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naming is very funny. They claim that it will deliver up to 64% faster

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performance in creative applications compared to the last gen and 2.3% higher

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gaming performance versus the prior gen Adreno GPU. 2.3 times, what did I say?

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Correction, 2.3 times the performance, not percent, it's much higher than that.

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And they also claim that the GPU is getting that much more performance while

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being 125% more efficient. But even with

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all of the efficiency that you'd find on a Qualcomm powered laptop, that didn't

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stop ASUS from packing this thing with a nice large 70Wh battery. Sure, it's not

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the biggest batteries. We're seeing a lot of laptops with 99W hours, but I'm

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going to hope that the general efficiency of the Snapdragon chip is

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going to mean that this is going to get pretty good battery life. I mean, Asus claims 21 plus hours of offline video

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playback, which is how everyone uses their laptop, and 12 plus hours of web

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browsing for those weirdos out there. In our battery endurance test where we're

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doing Plex playback at 1080p in Windows battery saver mode, we saw this laptop

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get 13 and 12 hours of battery life. And

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in our battery stress test where we just run Cinebench on repeat until the thing

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dies. The Asus A16 got an hour and 15

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minutes, which is also pretty good and also indicates that this is probably

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running at around 65 watts because it's a 70Wh hour battery and if this thing

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was pulling 70 watts for a full hour, that would make it die. the math maths

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which is kind of crazy. I just don't associate like Snapdragon with like such

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high powered chips but actually the Snapdragon XLite 2 can go up to 95 watts

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depending on the configuration which is crazy. Compatibility is a fair concern.

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I have found that for the most part my apps perform basically identically as

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they would on an x86 system. Though I have encountered specific issues with

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games like uh UFO 50 where it like boots but like for some reason it doesn't

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accept like any inputs so I have to like force close it. It's It's kind of

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frustrating cuz I love that game. But there are ongoing efforts to improve

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compatibility. In October 2025, Microsoft added AVX2 emulation to

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Windows, which allows these chips to have far better performance in software

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that requires AVX2. It's like it's getting better. Take a listen to the

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speakers here.

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At 100%, they're not very good, but up to like

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40, they're decent, especially for something this thin. I think that the

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speakers on this are completely serviceable, but they're um perfectly

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chromulent speakers. Webcam. Webcam. This is a recording on the webcam and

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also on the laptop microphones. Uh let us know in the comments how you think it

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sounds. For the webcam quality, I have a lot of issues with the image quality.

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There's some very clear white balance issues. Like I'm there's like weird

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areas where I'm like kind of totally blown out and the color is really off.

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It's to me the webcam right now looks like there might be something that's like not quite finalized in terms of

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drivers. However, it is still like serviceable webcam and that it shows

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images of you. So, hopefully they'll be able to fix this up and make it look a little bit nicer. Cool. I want a game

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now. Whoa. Honestly, this looks really

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good. There is some upscaling going on, is there? There isn't. There's just some

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really bad artifacts in these lights. That's not how that's supposed to look.

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Like, they're like goes to show that there's still some

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weirdness with the with Qualcomm. But overall, the fact that I am on a laptop

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this thin, this lightweight, running a Snapdragon CPU, and I am playing

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Cyberpunk at 1920 x 1200 and it's like

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totally playable. Sure, it's not the best experience of all time. It's not running at like 120 or anything. It

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might not even be all the way at 50. Yeah, this is honestly pretty crazy. It

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is not the quietest laptop, but also we're running a pretty thin laptop. If

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this is how good it plays Cyberpunk, I'm really interested to see how it performs

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in the rest of our gaming tests from Labs. And looking at the Labs results,

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it performs pretty dang well. In Cyberpunk 2077, at 1080p, we're getting

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50 average FPS with 41 on the 1% lows. That's actually pretty good. On Dota 2,

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at the best looking preset, we're getting 88 average FPS, which isn't

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particularly high for Dota, but also you could just crank the settings down a

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little bit. In Rocket League, at max settings with no anti-aliasing, 151

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average, 114 low. Obviously, we know that Qualcomm is capable of like strong

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gaming chips with things in VR headsets and stuff, but I'm really surprised to

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see them doing so well on the window on like a platform that isn't tailor made

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for them. It's on Windows, but I don't think there's a ton of people buying this laptop for gaming, even though

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apparently it can. You're probably buying it for, you know, other laptop

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stuff. In our benchmarks, like our CPU benchmark performs really well in

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Cinebench. In Blender, we render our scene in 4 minutes and 34 seconds, which

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is nearly half of last gen. So, that's that's crazy. Now I feel my laptop is

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inadequate. In Puget Bench though, we see kind of the first set of caveats. It

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does really well in our Photoshop benchmark, but it uh would DNF in both

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Da Vinci and Premiere. Now, it actually runs both of these programs pretty well

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overall in general use, but there's some sort of compatibility issue with our

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specific Puget benchmark, and we're not really sure. And that's the exact kind

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of downside that you might encounter on a Qualcomm laptop is like your program

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works 99% of the time. And there's one

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small weird thing where it's really going to just like struggle. But as we

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said, it's getting better. And with chips getting this powerful, we're probably going to be seeing more of

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them. And that's going to hopefully mean more interest in supporting the

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software. And in the interest of improving this compatibility, Qualcomm's

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actually going to be taking over the driver updates instead of asking each specific vendor to make their own

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drivers. So hopefully we're going to see more rapid improvements that are going

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to broadly apply to all of the Snapdragon chips and they're going to

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come out more faster. For our encoding benchmarks, we see great performance in H.264, but lackluster performance with

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AV1. And in our archival benchmark, it does a great job with 7zip. And that

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might be in part due to the 48 GB of RAM

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that is on the chip. It's not soldered

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on the board. It is on the SoC itself, which means that it runs really fast.

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It's running at 9500 mega transfers per second. A little bit

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faster than that actually, which might not make a huge difference in day-to-day usage, but also 48 gigs of RAM is hard

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to come by these days. It's interesting to see how the two platforms of x86 as

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well as like Snapdragon have been kind of like playing cat-and- mouse. X86 finally has good battery life, but

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Qualcomm has really improved their gaming performance, but also they're

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still kind of king in performance per watt. Depending on your workload, this thing could be a great choice.

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Personally, for my job, this thing's awesome. And it's almost a problem that

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it can gain because I'm going to be so much more distracted. Now, we can talk

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all we want about power efficiency, but what's also important to know is the price. And this thing comes in at

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$1,999.99,

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which ain't cheap, but also it's a top-of-the-line CPU in a pretty nice

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form factor. If you want to save a couple bucks, you can get basically the

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same chip just slightly clocked down for

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$1,600. It's still an X2 Elite Extreme. It's

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still going to have the same great GPU as well as the same 48 GB of RAM. It's

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just going to be a little bit slower. And honestly, seeing how fast this thing is, something to consider. Thanks for

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watching ShortCircuit. If you enjoyed this, why don't you check out my video on the Asus Zenbook Duo, a machine that

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I am absolutely smitten