ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED UX582 Hands-on, Quick Review: What A Refresh

ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED UX582 Hands-on, Quick Review: What A Refresh

Early verdict: The ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo 15 UX582 gets turbo-charged internals as well as a cooler design (literally) on top of its two screens, making it one of the most powerful laptops for content creators.

Pros

  • Has one of the most powerful processors around
  • Has top-tier mobile RTX 30 series graphics
  • The screen is better than ever
  • ScreenPad Plus more useful this time around

Cons

  • Very heavy
  • Expensive

After refreshing its smaller 14-inch ZenBook Duo, ASUS has done the same for its bigger 15-inch brother. The new, bigger variant gets all the new toys you’d expect from a laptop that’s aimed squarely at content creators.

Design

Externally the ZenBook Pro Duo 15 UX582 looks very similar to the previous generation, which is expected considering the product line the dual-screen laptop belongs in. The lid and chassis is made out of machined magnesium alloy for toughness and rigidity, with the company’s trademark concentric circle finish laid on top.

The laptop comes in Celestial Blue, and overall the design gives the laptop a modern and sophisticated appearance. Overall thickness isn’t bad, at 21.5mm. It’s chunky for a laptop sure, but it’s a good 2.5mm thinner than last year’s model.

Weight is almost the same at 2.4 kilos, putting it on the heavier end of the scale when it comes to the overall weight. It’s about as heavy as your typical gaming laptop and is as much of a pain to take with you. This should stay planted on your desk as much as possible.

The laptop uses the same tilting hinge design as ASUS’s other premium laptops which angles the keyboard a few degrees up to give you a better typing position. This also gives the laptop more room to breathe and allows more air to circulate in the laptop’s chassis to cool the components.

As far as connectors go, there’s a good mix – you get a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port, two 2x Thunderbolt 3 Type-C connectors, a single HDMI 2.1 port, and a 3.5mm audio jack.

Display

One new design element for the refreshed ZenBook Pro Duo 15 UX582 is the tilting second screen. The previous generation laptops static second displays suffered from viewing angle issues if you didn’t look at it just right. That issue is resolved thanks to the tilting mechanism on the ScreenPad Plus on the new model which lifts the 14.1-inch second screen around 9.5 degrees.

The tiling design also solves another problem in the chassis, and that’s airflow. The tilting screen opens new avenues for air to circulate in the chassis, and ASUS claims you’re getting at least 36% higher airflow compared to the previous generation.

As for the main display, it’s a 15.6-inch OLED panel that has a 4K resolution and touchscreen support, as well as 440 nits maximum brightness, DCI-P3 color gamut as well as 100% Pantone Validation.

The ScreenPad Plus is a 14-inch IPS touchscreen that has a 4K-equivalent resolution, which also has stylus support.

The Screenpad Plus gets all of the improvements that the refreshed smaller ZenBook Duo 14 gets, giving the second display far more flexibility than the previous generation.

Keyboard and trackpad

Because of the positioning of the second display, ASUS had to move the full QWERTY keyboard of the ZenBook Pro Duo 15 UX582 to the bottom of the chassis, much to our chagrin. We were never a fan of this relocated setup, as it eats up valuable space on the chassis where your wrists are meant to go.

ASUS does include a nifty wrist-rest as a consolation, but you’ll probably be able to take it along with you if you move around with the laptop a lot since it’s so long.

The trackpad is located on the right side, beside the keyboard, and like most trackpads made by ASUS for its high-end offerings, it can conveniently transform into a number pad if you need it.

As for key travel and typing comfort, the ZenBook Pro Duo 15 UX582’s keys feel great. ASUS is yet to make a laptop that has a bad keyboard, and the ZenBook Pro Duo 15 UX582 isn’t about to become the first one.

Performance

You get two choices for processors for the ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED UX582: an Intel Core i7-10870H and an even more powerful Intel Core i9-10980HK. The laptop also comes with a fairly powerful GPU, thanks to NVIDIA’s RTX 3070 that runs at 90W, which can further be bumped up to run at 110W with Dynamic Boost.

That’s paired with up to 32GB DDR4, and a 1TB M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD. Those are very powerful internals, which gives the ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED UX582 the same hardware as most high-end gaming laptops in the market nowadays.

Early performance benchmarks of the ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED UX582 confirm that the laptop trades in a giant leap in terms of performance VS its smaller brother.

We’re confident that the laptop will be able to handle gaming tasks easily, though you’ll have to wait for our full review to see those numbers.

Wrap-up and verdict

ASUS has given the ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED UX582 a massive upgrade both inside and out, giving the laptop a massive edge in both raw computing power as well as thermal management and graphics capability VS the previous generation device.

Despite the improvements, the ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED UX582 retains the same price as its OG predecessor from 2019. While it does cost a fortune, you definitely get what you pay for.

ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo 15 OLED UX582 Price Philippines

The Core i9-10980K variant with an RTX 3070 GPU is priced at Php 199,995, while the Core i7-10780H variant with the same RTX 3070 GPU is priced at Php 169,995.

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