2 Screens 1 LAPTOP! - ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 Duo & 16X
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2023-05-05
·
2,964 words · ~14 min read
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Today we have one laptop and two screens.
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It's gonna be fricking weird.
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And huge thanks to ASUS for sponsoring us.
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First of all, they gave us this very nice
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little laptop sleeve.
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It says ZenBook on it.
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And I don't think it's real leather, but who cares?
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No animals had to die.
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What else do we have?
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Okay, bets.
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Type C, not type C.
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Not type C.
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I'll say type C.
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Okay, I'm saying type C.
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Oh, 180 watts, nevermind.
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Barrel charger.
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Oh, what is this?
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Oh, we get a pen.
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The ASUS Pen 2.0.
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Apparently it has 4,096 pressure sensitivity points.
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They have different tips that come with it.
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I don't know if you can see that right there.
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What a nice box.
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ASUS has done a really good job lately with their packaging.
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That's upside down.
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Oh.
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Oh yeah, look at this, David.
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Fancy.
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This is not a cheap laptop.
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This is a very expensive laptop.
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This is the laptop.
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Where like your friends all have MacBooks
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and you want to flex on them.
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I was honestly hoping that there's a CD in here
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for some reason.
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I don't know.
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Just the way that it was packaged made me think of a CD.
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Oh, what's this?
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Like actually, what is this?
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It's a stand.
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It's a laptop stand.
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Let's see.
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Have we even mentioned this is ZenBook Duo 14 yet?
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Oh, well it is.
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And it's IO.
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Wait.
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Oh, weird.
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The IO is actually pretty good.
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I was kind of concerned there at first
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because on the left side, you only have the headphone jack.
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Although I guess that is a feature now.
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Around back, there's a micro SD card reader,
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power input, and an HDMI port.
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And around the other side,
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we have two Thunderbolt 4 ports and USB type A.
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Oh, and it is HDMI 2.1.
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Wicked.
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That's a really solid loadout.
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The only thing that I kind of wish is that the USB type A port
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was not on the right-hand side right there,
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just because then if you plug in a mouse to it,
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that's wired, it'll get in the way of your hand.
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But also so many mice,
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and especially if you can afford this thing,
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like just get a wireless mouse.
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Before we open it up,
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I really like the finish on the back of this.
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I don't know if you can really tell on the camera,
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but it's like brushed aluminum,
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but with a circle around their little A logo here.
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Zoom in here, Dave.
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We got to get the action the first time it's opened.
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Oh, ah, fancy.
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Yeah, you could probably even put like,
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I don't know what the resolution of this bottom display is,
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but you could have like two YouTube videos down there
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while you're like watching something else up here.
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These are incredibly weird resolutions.
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So the top screen is 14 and a half inches,
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2080 by 1800,
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and the bottom is 2080 by 864 for some reason.
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12.7 inches on the bottom.
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This one's a touchscreen.
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Is this one touchscreen?
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It is.
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Yeah, these are some fine looking displays.
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The bottom one I'm not totally sure how I feel about yet,
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but this top OLED display looks fantastic.
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The contrast on it is just incredible
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and they have picked a great background to show it off
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the first time that you open it up.
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I do usually complain about OLED on laptops
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and I'm going to complain about the bottom one
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because it's very obvious what's wrong.
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It just looks weird.
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The problem that I'm seeing is just that
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in the areas where it's white,
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it's really grainy.
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Which is a problem that I've had quite a few times before
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on OLED with touchscreens,
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because something with,
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I don't know exactly what's on the go,
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but my guess is that the digitizer doesn't quite line up
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with the sub pixels correctly
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and it creates kind of a weird screen door effect
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kind of thing.
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Yeah, I guess it kind of depends on how you think of it.
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Cause as far as displays that I've had on laptops before,
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this is not the best,
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but as far as displays that I've had,
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and track pads before,
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this is exceptional.
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So I guess it depends on how you think of it in that way.
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I also don't quite understand it
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because whatever the problems are with the bottom display,
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the top one, there's none of that.
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The top display just looks awesome.
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Okay, so I can see it.
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You're not going to be able to see it on the display,
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but on an all white display,
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you can see like the digitizer and the sub pixels
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kind of looking a little bit weird,
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but at the same time,
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that's only going to be a problem
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when you're looking at an all white display.
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Oh, a little thingy just came up.
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I have settings for my second display.
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Are you able to see that, David?
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So we have battery saver on this display.
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Oh yeah, I guess that having two displays
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wouldn't be great for your battery life.
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Brightness, oh, let's make it full bright.
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Oh, nevermind.
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I accidentally turned it off.
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Brightness, all the way up.
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There's also another button here that changes which display
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the window you're currently working on is on.
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Handwriting, huh?
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What's this do?
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Is this easier than typing?
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Well, I guess it depends on how good you are at typing.
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I could type a lot faster than this,
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but like, can my nan?
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I'm not sure.
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This is a pre-production sample,
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so things might just not work also.
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Oh no, it kind of looks like it's just dead.
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Okay, we'll give that a second.
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How is the keyboard?
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The keyboard's kind of strange.
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So there's, as you can see, no palm rest whatsoever.
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So your hands kind of just like sit on the table.
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Actually, can we get one of those?
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Just like fancy plush palm rest things.
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I don't think you need it now that I have my hands just here,
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but I want to see how it feels.
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There's a little bit of typing and this is fantastic.
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The key switches are awesome.
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I don't know.
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They just nailed the keyboard on this.
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Aside from it being kind of weird that my hands are just
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sitting on the table instead of on the actual computer,
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I am totally happy with this.
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The only thing that I might want to change is that the
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space bar is a bit sloppy.
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As for the track pad.
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I'm not quite as happy about it,
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but I understand what they're doing.
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So as you can see, it's about three fingers wide
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and six fingers tall.
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Kind of strange.
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Let's have the little tiny buttons down here
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for right and left click.
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It isn't as bad as you'd expect.
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If I'm honest, this is what,
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it shocked me the first time that I had a Zephyrus
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that had the track pad down here on the side.
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It's a lot more functional
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than you would expect.
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Oh, do we have a wrist rest?
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Heck yeah.
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This is not the best wrist rest that I've ever seen.
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This is just worse.
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I don't even need to type.
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Yeah, you don't need a wrist rest.
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It's more comfortable without it.
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Anyway, in this thing,
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you get an i9-12900H for the processor.
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That is six performance cores and eight efficiency cores
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for a total of 20 threads.
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That's a lot of fricking horsepower for something that is,
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this large and especially this large
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and having two displays.
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And for the GPU, we have an NVIDIA RTX 3050 Ti.
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Okay, so now you can watch your
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how to beat the first boss guide on one display
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while you play the game on the other.
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This is sweet.
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I feel cold.
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Oh no.
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Well, this feels like 40, 50 FPS.
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I forgot to turn on my counter, but whatever.
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Either way, this is running great.
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And this display looks awesome.
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Awesome for gaming.
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Like the torch in the center,
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alongside like the dark background looks great.
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Cause like on a lot of displays,
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you'll get either a bright torch and the rest is just gray,
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or you'll be able to see the details,
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but the torch would be like not bright at all.
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Whereas this just looks fantastic.
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Like you have the brightness of the torch
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and detail in the shadows.
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Awesome display.
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Can you play it on the smaller screen?
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Can I play it on the smaller screen?
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That's a good question.
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Settings, graphics.
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Let's turn off full screen.
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I just drag it down.
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Oh, I can.
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Cool.
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This is like not the best, if I'm honest.
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I've had better gaming experiences before.
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The display is still quite good, but like, you know,
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just because of the angle that it's at
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and we have like film lights here,
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I need to be like there and not get the glare.
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Okay. So it works pretty well.
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If I hit escape and I just go down, like the mouse works.
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Perfectly awesome.
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Then I can come back up here,
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refocus on Valheim and it works well.
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Should we, should we look at the other laptop?
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Okay.
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We got a laptop.
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We got a second laptop.
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This one was a surprise.
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It presumably has a nicer box on launch.
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This is a ZenBook 16X
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and it does not have a second display,
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but it does have a keyboard that moves up.
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Actually, let's just take a moment to check this out.
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Take a moment to talk about why you would want
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your keyboard to move up
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and also why this display moves up in this fashion.
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Now you might think that
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in like the case of the secondary display here,
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it's just so, you know, it angles up and looks at you,
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which is perfectly fine.
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But the main reason they created a hinge like this
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in the first place is to improve the thermals.
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So you might've noticed that while we're playing Valheim
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and screen recording at the same time,
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this thing was almost satisfied.
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It was silent.
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And that's largely because loads of space for cooling.
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I can see a fan that's right in here.
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Maybe I can stick my finger in it
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and you'll hear the light.
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Nope.
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Oh yeah.
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We can take it apart.
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Interesting.
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This feels like a haptic touch touch pad on the 16X.
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I guess we didn't even do a tour of it.
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Ah, geez.
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Getting way ahead of myself here.
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One second.
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IO.
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We have dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, USB type A,
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our DC in, anything on the back?
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Nope.
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And then on the right hand side,
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we have a full size SD card reader.
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I love to see that.
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If you are a photographer,
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having a full size SD card reader is just the best.
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You can go out, snap a whole bunch of photos,
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stick your SD card in there,
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and it will go over super fast.
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Also headphone microphone combo jack and HDMI 2.1.
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Is that correct?
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Wicked.
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Good job, ASUS.
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I consider this thing to be just the absolute Lightroom beast.
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And that's pretty much entirely
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because of this little nubbin here.
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It used to be like a little,
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a little circle track pad thing.
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Now it's much closer to what you'd find
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on like one of the original iPods.
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So we have click in the center and then move around.
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So like if we come over here,
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the ones that immediately you have access to
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are just like screen brightness.
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So I can click on that and you'll be able to see
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as I turn it around, gets dimmer, gets brighter.
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And this works awesome
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because it automatically plugs into Lightroom.
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So you can go click on like your brightness
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and you just spin it.
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You just spin it a little bit
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and you click on your other values and same sort of thing.
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It's just, it feels nicer when you're editing photos.
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It also would appear that we have a haptic touch pad
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and it is really nice and big.
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I know that the other one right here,
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the Duo does not have a large touch pad.
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This one most certainly does.
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Look at this.
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Also big, the display, 16 inches, 16 by 10.
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It also is OLED.
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And this one looks even better.
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Is it not a touch screen?
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It is a touch screen.
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Damn, how did they do that?
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Oh, they did it by just it being big.
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Oh, cool.
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Look at that.
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The keyboard on this is a little bit on the strange side.
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So we have, as you can see, it's lifted up.
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And I don't know, maybe I'll get used to it in a little bit.
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Let's type a little bit more.
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I still don't know how I feel about how angled it is,
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but I think I could get used to it.
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What is annoying is that the switches
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just are kind of letting me down.
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Well, the switches are great,
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but the rigidity of the chassis
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and center, as you can see,
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it kind of moves just a little bit.
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It's like not great.
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It's the sort of thing where I probably would have given
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this much higher praise
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if I hadn't just touched the exact same switches in this,
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which is just way sturdier.
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Like this base right here, the switches all feel awesome.
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This one's like an easy A plus.
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This one right here, where it's kind of,
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the whole deck has a little bit more movement.
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It's more like an A minus.
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Now, in the 16X, we get the same i9-12900H for the processor
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and an RTX 3060.
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Six gigabytes of RAM and RTX 3060s in laptops
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just are so much faster than a 3050 Ti.
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This 4K OLED panel on the 16X is just fantastic.
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Now, it has like more pixels than the 14,
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and also it's just plain bigger.
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So even though it does have the graininess
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that I always complain about on OLEDs,
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it isn't a problem until you're about, like,
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here.
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Do you know what's also great?
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Crab rave.
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Huh.
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The 16 has very good speakers,
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but it's like a little bit harsh.
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Those are both fantastic speakers to have on a laptop.
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It's amazing how good speakers have gotten
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in the last, like, three years, maybe?
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Both of the displays, top and bottom on the 14,
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are 120 Hertz OLED.
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It's actually just like the best display you can get
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for like consuming content and like video gaming.
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It's frigging awesome.
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This one right here, high refresh rate, too?
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No, 60, ah, that's too bad.
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So the 14-inch starts at two grand and goes up to three,
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and the 16-inch starts at $2,600 and goes up to three grand.
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Yeah, here we've got our 76-watt-hour battery.
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I don't know how long that's going to last you.
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There's so many variables, especially with OLED screens.
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What you're showing on it
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can change your battery life significantly.
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Like, showing only dark displays can net you
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like an extra two hours of battery life
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compared to having really bright displays
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because it's actually turning off the pixels.
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RAM, you're not replacing it, as far as I can see,
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but the storage is replaceable, which is awesome.
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Like, there's a small chance that the RAM's
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on the other side of this and you can replace it,
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but that's going to be a huge pain in the arse to get at,
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so it's effectively not replaceable.
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As for the big boy, I do love how easy it is to replace.
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It's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know,
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I do love how easy the bottoms
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of ASUS laptops are to take off.
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Is that a vapor chamber?
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Damn!
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We're not able to do performance or thermal testing on these
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because they're pre-production units
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and not representative of what you'll actually get,
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but this is an impressive cooler.
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This is like gaming laptop spec sort of stuff.
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96-watt-hour battery, that's coming just,
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just under what is legally allowed to go on a plane.
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Same thing here.
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The SSD is replaceable.
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I don't see any RAM.
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Okay, guys.
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Can you settle mine and Jono's debate down in the comments?
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ZenBook 16, ZenBook 14.
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Which one would you want?
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Do you want to flex with the dual screens?
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Do you want the one that's more practical
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for actually using as a professional?
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I don't know.
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Let us know.
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Huge thanks to ASUS for sponsoring this video.
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Hit like, hit subscribe.
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Links are going to be down below for you to buy one of these
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and just have a great old day.
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See ya.