Today we have one laptop and two screens.
It's gonna be fricking weird.
And huge thanks to ASUS for sponsoring us.
First of all, they gave us this very nice
little laptop sleeve.
It says ZenBook on it.
And I don't think it's real leather, but who cares?
No animals had to die.
What else do we have?
Okay, bets.
Type C, not type C.
Not type C.
I'll say type C.
Okay, I'm saying type C.
Oh, 180 watts, nevermind.
Barrel charger.
Oh, what is this?
Oh, we get a pen.
The ASUS Pen 2.0.
Apparently it has 4,096 pressure sensitivity points.
They have different tips that come with it.
I don't know if you can see that right there.
What a nice box.
ASUS has done a really good job lately with their packaging.
That's upside down.
Oh.
Oh yeah, look at this, David.
Fancy.
This is not a cheap laptop.
This is a very expensive laptop.
This is the laptop.
Where like your friends all have MacBooks
and you want to flex on them.
I was honestly hoping that there's a CD in here
for some reason.
I don't know.
Just the way that it was packaged made me think of a CD.
Oh, what's this?
Like actually, what is this?
It's a stand.
It's a laptop stand.
Let's see.
Have we even mentioned this is ZenBook Duo 14 yet?
Oh, well it is.
And it's IO.
Wait.
Oh, weird.
The IO is actually pretty good.
I was kind of concerned there at first
because on the left side, you only have the headphone jack.
Although I guess that is a feature now.
Around back, there's a micro SD card reader,
power input, and an HDMI port.
And around the other side,
we have two Thunderbolt 4 ports and USB type A.
Oh, and it is HDMI 2.1.
Wicked.
That's a really solid loadout.
The only thing that I kind of wish is that the USB type A port
was not on the right-hand side right there,
just because then if you plug in a mouse to it,
that's wired, it'll get in the way of your hand.
But also so many mice,
and especially if you can afford this thing,
like just get a wireless mouse.
Before we open it up,
I really like the finish on the back of this.
I don't know if you can really tell on the camera,
but it's like brushed aluminum,
but with a circle around their little A logo here.
Zoom in here, Dave.
We got to get the action the first time it's opened.
Oh, ah, fancy.
Yeah, you could probably even put like,
I don't know what the resolution of this bottom display is,
but you could have like two YouTube videos down there
while you're like watching something else up here.
These are incredibly weird resolutions.
So the top screen is 14 and a half inches,
2080 by 1800,
and the bottom is 2080 by 864 for some reason.
12.7 inches on the bottom.
This one's a touchscreen.
Is this one touchscreen?
It is.
Yeah, these are some fine looking displays.
The bottom one I'm not totally sure how I feel about yet,
but this top OLED display looks fantastic.
The contrast on it is just incredible
and they have picked a great background to show it off
the first time that you open it up.
I do usually complain about OLED on laptops
and I'm going to complain about the bottom one
because it's very obvious what's wrong.
It just looks weird.
The problem that I'm seeing is just that
in the areas where it's white,
it's really grainy.
Which is a problem that I've had quite a few times before
on OLED with touchscreens,
because something with,
I don't know exactly what's on the go,
but my guess is that the digitizer doesn't quite line up
with the sub pixels correctly
and it creates kind of a weird screen door effect
kind of thing.
Yeah, I guess it kind of depends on how you think of it.
Cause as far as displays that I've had on laptops before,
this is not the best,
but as far as displays that I've had,
and track pads before,
this is exceptional.
So I guess it depends on how you think of it in that way.
I also don't quite understand it
because whatever the problems are with the bottom display,
the top one, there's none of that.
The top display just looks awesome.
Okay, so I can see it.
You're not going to be able to see it on the display,
but on an all white display,
you can see like the digitizer and the sub pixels
kind of looking a little bit weird,
but at the same time,
that's only going to be a problem
when you're looking at an all white display.
Oh, a little thingy just came up.
I have settings for my second display.
Are you able to see that, David?
So we have battery saver on this display.
Oh yeah, I guess that having two displays
wouldn't be great for your battery life.
Brightness, oh, let's make it full bright.
Oh, nevermind.
I accidentally turned it off.
Brightness, all the way up.
There's also another button here that changes which display
the window you're currently working on is on.
Handwriting, huh?
What's this do?
Is this easier than typing?
Well, I guess it depends on how good you are at typing.
I could type a lot faster than this,
but like, can my nan?
I'm not sure.
This is a pre-production sample,
so things might just not work also.
Oh no, it kind of looks like it's just dead.
Okay, we'll give that a second.
How is the keyboard?
The keyboard's kind of strange.
So there's, as you can see, no palm rest whatsoever.
So your hands kind of just like sit on the table.
Actually, can we get one of those?
Just like fancy plush palm rest things.
I don't think you need it now that I have my hands just here,
but I want to see how it feels.
There's a little bit of typing and this is fantastic.
The key switches are awesome.
I don't know.
They just nailed the keyboard on this.
Aside from it being kind of weird that my hands are just
sitting on the table instead of on the actual computer,
I am totally happy with this.
The only thing that I might want to change is that the
space bar is a bit sloppy.
As for the track pad.
I'm not quite as happy about it,
but I understand what they're doing.
So as you can see, it's about three fingers wide
and six fingers tall.
Kind of strange.
Let's have the little tiny buttons down here
for right and left click.
It isn't as bad as you'd expect.
If I'm honest, this is what,
it shocked me the first time that I had a Zephyrus
that had the track pad down here on the side.
It's a lot more functional
than you would expect.
Oh, do we have a wrist rest?
Heck yeah.
This is not the best wrist rest that I've ever seen.
This is just worse.
I don't even need to type.
Yeah, you don't need a wrist rest.
It's more comfortable without it.
Anyway, in this thing,
you get an i9-12900H for the processor.
That is six performance cores and eight efficiency cores
for a total of 20 threads.
That's a lot of fricking horsepower for something that is,
this large and especially this large
and having two displays.
And for the GPU, we have an NVIDIA RTX 3050 Ti.
Okay, so now you can watch your
how to beat the first boss guide on one display
while you play the game on the other.
This is sweet.
I feel cold.
Oh no.
Well, this feels like 40, 50 FPS.
I forgot to turn on my counter, but whatever.
Either way, this is running great.
And this display looks awesome.
Awesome for gaming.
Like the torch in the center,
alongside like the dark background looks great.
Cause like on a lot of displays,
you'll get either a bright torch and the rest is just gray,
or you'll be able to see the details,
but the torch would be like not bright at all.
Whereas this just looks fantastic.
Like you have the brightness of the torch
and detail in the shadows.
Awesome display.
Can you play it on the smaller screen?
Can I play it on the smaller screen?
That's a good question.
Settings, graphics.
Let's turn off full screen.
I just drag it down.
Oh, I can.
Cool.
This is like not the best, if I'm honest.
I've had better gaming experiences before.
The display is still quite good, but like, you know,
just because of the angle that it's at
and we have like film lights here,
I need to be like there and not get the glare.
Okay. So it works pretty well.
If I hit escape and I just go down, like the mouse works.
Perfectly awesome.
Then I can come back up here,
refocus on Valheim and it works well.
Should we, should we look at the other laptop?
Okay.
We got a laptop.
We got a second laptop.
This one was a surprise.
It presumably has a nicer box on launch.
This is a ZenBook 16X
and it does not have a second display,
but it does have a keyboard that moves up.
Actually, let's just take a moment to check this out.
Take a moment to talk about why you would want
your keyboard to move up
and also why this display moves up in this fashion.
Now you might think that
in like the case of the secondary display here,
it's just so, you know, it angles up and looks at you,
which is perfectly fine.
But the main reason they created a hinge like this
in the first place is to improve the thermals.
So you might've noticed that while we're playing Valheim
and screen recording at the same time,
this thing was almost satisfied.
It was silent.
And that's largely because loads of space for cooling.
I can see a fan that's right in here.
Maybe I can stick my finger in it
and you'll hear the light.
Nope.
Oh yeah.
We can take it apart.
Interesting.
This feels like a haptic touch touch pad on the 16X.
I guess we didn't even do a tour of it.
Ah, geez.
Getting way ahead of myself here.
One second.
IO.
We have dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, USB type A,
our DC in, anything on the back?
Nope.
And then on the right hand side,
we have a full size SD card reader.
I love to see that.
If you are a photographer,
having a full size SD card reader is just the best.
You can go out, snap a whole bunch of photos,
stick your SD card in there,
and it will go over super fast.
Also headphone microphone combo jack and HDMI 2.1.
Is that correct?
Wicked.
Good job, ASUS.
I consider this thing to be just the absolute Lightroom beast.
And that's pretty much entirely
because of this little nubbin here.
It used to be like a little,
a little circle track pad thing.
Now it's much closer to what you'd find
on like one of the original iPods.
So we have click in the center and then move around.
So like if we come over here,
the ones that immediately you have access to
are just like screen brightness.
So I can click on that and you'll be able to see
as I turn it around, gets dimmer, gets brighter.
And this works awesome
because it automatically plugs into Lightroom.
So you can go click on like your brightness
and you just spin it.
You just spin it a little bit
and you click on your other values and same sort of thing.
It's just, it feels nicer when you're editing photos.
It also would appear that we have a haptic touch pad
and it is really nice and big.
I know that the other one right here,
the Duo does not have a large touch pad.
This one most certainly does.
Look at this.
Also big, the display, 16 inches, 16 by 10.
It also is OLED.
And this one looks even better.
Is it not a touch screen?
It is a touch screen.
Damn, how did they do that?
Oh, they did it by just it being big.
Oh, cool.
Look at that.
The keyboard on this is a little bit on the strange side.
So we have, as you can see, it's lifted up.
And I don't know, maybe I'll get used to it in a little bit.
Let's type a little bit more.
I still don't know how I feel about how angled it is,
but I think I could get used to it.
What is annoying is that the switches
just are kind of letting me down.
Well, the switches are great,
but the rigidity of the chassis
and center, as you can see,
it kind of moves just a little bit.
It's like not great.
It's the sort of thing where I probably would have given
this much higher praise
if I hadn't just touched the exact same switches in this,
which is just way sturdier.
Like this base right here, the switches all feel awesome.
This one's like an easy A plus.
This one right here, where it's kind of,
the whole deck has a little bit more movement.
It's more like an A minus.
Now, in the 16X, we get the same i9-12900H for the processor
and an RTX 3060.
Six gigabytes of RAM and RTX 3060s in laptops
just are so much faster than a 3050 Ti.
This 4K OLED panel on the 16X is just fantastic.
Now, it has like more pixels than the 14,
and also it's just plain bigger.
So even though it does have the graininess
that I always complain about on OLEDs,
it isn't a problem until you're about, like,
here.
Do you know what's also great?
Crab rave.
Huh.
The 16 has very good speakers,
but it's like a little bit harsh.
Those are both fantastic speakers to have on a laptop.
It's amazing how good speakers have gotten
in the last, like, three years, maybe?
Both of the displays, top and bottom on the 14,
are 120 Hertz OLED.
It's actually just like the best display you can get
for like consuming content and like video gaming.
It's frigging awesome.
This one right here, high refresh rate, too?
No, 60, ah, that's too bad.
So the 14-inch starts at two grand and goes up to three,
and the 16-inch starts at $2,600 and goes up to three grand.
Yeah, here we've got our 76-watt-hour battery.
I don't know how long that's going to last you.
There's so many variables, especially with OLED screens.
What you're showing on it
can change your battery life significantly.
Like, showing only dark displays can net you
like an extra two hours of battery life
compared to having really bright displays
because it's actually turning off the pixels.
RAM, you're not replacing it, as far as I can see,
but the storage is replaceable, which is awesome.
Like, there's a small chance that the RAM's
on the other side of this and you can replace it,
but that's going to be a huge pain in the arse to get at,
so it's effectively not replaceable.
As for the big boy, I do love how easy it is to replace.
It's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know,
I do love how easy the bottoms
of ASUS laptops are to take off.
Is that a vapor chamber?
Damn!
We're not able to do performance or thermal testing on these
because they're pre-production units
and not representative of what you'll actually get,
but this is an impressive cooler.
This is like gaming laptop spec sort of stuff.
96-watt-hour battery, that's coming just,
just under what is legally allowed to go on a plane.
Same thing here.
The SSD is replaceable.
I don't see any RAM.
Okay, guys.
Can you settle mine and Jono's debate down in the comments?
ZenBook 16, ZenBook 14.
Which one would you want?
Do you want to flex with the dual screens?
Do you want the one that's more practical
for actually using as a professional?
I don't know.
Let us know.
Huge thanks to ASUS for sponsoring this video.
Hit like, hit subscribe.
Links are going to be down below for you to buy one of these
and just have a great old day.
See ya.