The market for professional gaming solutions is growing every year. Here you will find top-end hardware for gaming stations, accessories, furniture, and much more. Company ASUS keeps up with trends and continues to develop a line of gaming laptops under the brand ROG… A few days ago, a new product came to our editorial office for review – ASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550LXS with two screens, top-end 8-core processor Core i9 tenth generation from Intel and discrete graphics NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER Max-Q… The official price for the model with our configuration is around 349,000 thousand rubles (according to the service “Yandex.Market” at the time of this writing). In the West, such a configuration costs 4500 euros, which at the current exchange rate is much higher than the retail price in Russia.
PACKAGING AND DELIVERY
The laptop comes in a large black cardboard box with the corporate red logo and the inscription Republic of Gamers. Opening it, you will find two more boxes: black oblong and gray flattened with an unusual lid.
The black box with the iridescent ROG logo contains a network cable, a 240V power supply, a 65W USB Type-C charger and a GC21 webcam with a tripod mount. The second box contains the laptop itself.
When you open one of the sides of the ASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550LXS lying inside, it rises. This not only looks spectacular, but also makes it easy to pull the laptop itself out of the recess. You will find a compartment under the device with a rubber wrist rest that does not attach to your computer. Nearby there is a cardboard box with various documentation – a brochure with a description of the ports and about the first start; warranty card; a card with information on how to get a copy of Dying Light 2; and a thank you card from the Russian division of the Republic of Gamers. Yes, you deserve thanks.
APPEARANCE, LOADING AND NOISE
The laptop is made in a futuristic style and is dressed in a gray metal case. The lid of the device features a mirrored ROG logo and an iridescent dark gray line that unevenly divides the lid of the ASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550LXS diagonally. The edges look like polished metal, which adds solidity. But the metal on the lid is thin enough, and if you press lightly in the center, it will slightly bend.
If you are a fan of touching appliances with dirty hands, for example, right after eating, then you will not find fingerprints on your laptop unless you touch the mirror logo. And that’s just great. They got me dirty devices.
You will find three LEDs in the recess between the lid mount on the bottom of the laptop. The left one glows when the device is turned on, the middle one – when charging is in progress, and the right one blinks with any loading of the drives.
The laptop is 2 cm thick, excluding the legs. The length is 26.8 cm, and the width is 36 cm.
As for the connectors and holes, on the left side you will find a connector for charging from a 240-watt power supply and 3.5 mm jacks for connecting a microphone and headphones / headset, as well as a hole for exhausting hot air. On the right, you’ll find the same symmetrical opening, two USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A connectors and one USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C with DisplayPort 1.4, Thunderbolt 3 and Power Delivery. On the back in the middle, you will find one RJ45 connector for wired internet, one USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A and one HDMI 2.0b. On the rear sides, the developers have placed two more holes for the cooling system.
On the front edge, you will find a small indentation that will help you finally open the device. Moreover, the lid can be opened effortlessly with one hand. When lifted, the auxiliary touchscreen located above the keyboard, dubbed the ROG ScreenPad Plus, will begin to rise. The height of the rise is 13 degrees. The diagonal of this IPS-screen from the manufacturer BOE with a color gamut of 72% NTSC is 14.09 inches, and the non-standard resolution is 3840×1100. The refresh rate is 60 Hz. The thickness of the frames is 5 mm at the sides, 7 mm at the top and 22 mm at the bottom.
Two air intakes are hidden under the ScreenPad Plus. This screen is great for displaying additional applications that you may need depending on the tasks assigned to you (streaming, working with photo and video processing, and so on). In addition, ASUS has partnered with various PC game developers who use this screen to display additional information in popular games such as League of Legends, Dota 2, CS: GO and Dying Light 2, which comes as a gift to buyers of this computer. …
The main screen from the Taiwanese giant AU Optronics opens approximately 120 degrees, and its diagonal is 15.6 inches. It is also based on a 60 Hz IPS panel with 100% Adobe RGB color gamut and 4K (3840×2160) resolution. The thickness of the screen frame is 8 millimeters on the sides, 6 millimeters at the top and about 50 mm at the bottom.
The laptop is started by the power key, located in the upper right part of the keyboard unit, and is highlighted in a pleasant red color. The key is illuminated constantly.
When turned on, the keyboard is first highlighted in red and then in all colors of the rainbow. The keyboard travel is pleasant enough, the presses are deep and quiet. The distance between the keys is 1.4. It was convenient for me to type on it.
Below the touchpad are physical separate buttons for those who don’t like using gestures, which the touchpad also supports.
In the upper left corner of the touchpad there is a touch button to switch it to the numeric keypad mode. The accountants will be delighted.
The time from pressing the power on and until full loading takes 30 seconds, taking into account the proprietary sound saver and loading the shell on the auxiliary screen above the keyboard. Not very fast, but, most likely, the second screen is to blame for this result.
The device is quite quiet – in normal mode the noise level is about 30 db. Under heavy loads, powerful cooling starts to work, and the laptop not only gets hot, but also noisy. The average noise level under load is 46 db.
WORK AND TESTS
The laptop is supplied with a 4-cell rechargeable Li-Ion battery with a passport capacity of 90,000 mWh. A full charge will last for 6-7 hours of normal use, such as surfing the Internet, working with documents, watching videos and listening to music. In active gaming mode, the laptop runs for about 90 minutes.
The computer itself was produced in May 2023 and is based on an Intel Core i9-10980HK processor, clocked at 3100 MHz. The processor is 8-core and operates in 16 threads, and the maximum frequency is 5300 MHz. The laptop has 16 gigabyte DDR4 memory dies (operating at 1600 MHz) with a maximum frequency of 3200 MHz from Samsung – one is unsoldered, and the other is freely available and replaceable. And two INTEL SSDPEKNW010T8 (NVMe v1.3.0) 1 terabyte solid-state disk drives combined into one 2 TB RAID-0. The available RAM can be expanded up to 48 GB. The built-in Intel (R) Wi-Fi 6 AX201 160MHz network adapter is responsible for the wireless connection in the laptop.
There are two video adapters in the laptop: the Intel UHD Graphics accelerator built into the CPU with 1 GB of video memory and a discrete NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super card in the Max-Q design with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory. Intel Comet Point PCH – cAVS and NVIDIA TU104 are used as a sound adapter.
As for the screens, despite the quality of the main display, on the black one we found two noticeable highlights in the lower right part (in the corner and slightly above). They are visible to the naked eye when the device is first turned on on the initial animation with a black background and the ROG logo. It is not known whether this is a defect or a standard defect for the model.
The brightness of the screen is high, it is clearly visible in the sun. There are no problems with viewing angles either. There were no complaints about the lower screen. The quality is excellent – it is bright enough with good viewing angles and no glare. The sensor works without any brakes and clearly at the touch points.
In standard (quiet) mode, NWinFO64 shows the following temperatures:
- CPU – 67 ° C
- GPU – 56 C
- INTEL SSDPEKNW010T8 – 52 ° C
- INTEL SSDPEKNW010T8 – 50 ° C
The speed of the hard disk in Crystal Disk Mark was 3489 MB / s for reading and writing 2795 MB / s, which is good news. In graphics tests, the GeForce RTX 2080 Super performed well. In the fresh benchmark Boundary Ray Tracing at maximum settings in 4K, the device showed 46 frames per second.
In the Unigine Superposition Benchmark in 4K at high settings, the system showed between 45 and 68 frames.
Final Fantasy XV Benchmark scored 3870 points in 4K at high settings and a Standard score.
In games in 4K, the ROG Zephyrus showed fairly stable performance. So in the Gears of War 4 test on ultra-settings, the device was able to give an average frame rate around 55. In Forza Horizon, on ultra with V-sync off, we managed to get 62 FPS. And finally, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, also at ultra, showed 36 frames per second with beams and DLSS on. The hardware of this laptop is enough for comfortable 4K gaming at high settings. In turbo mode, the temperature during the tests was kept around 70 degrees, both for the CPU and the GPU.
The weight of the laptop is 2.4 kg, it is quite small for a portable gaming solution, but you cannot hold it on your lap for a long time. However, there is a dedicated Ultrabook series for working on your lap.
As for the sound, this laptop has 2 speakers of 4 watts. Hi-Res Audio support is also announced. Sound quality is acceptable.
RESULTS
ASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 GX550LXS is a very cool solution for those who need powerful hardware and do not have enough extra workspace. Takes up a minimum of space. The device seems to be made for players, but we would recommend it more to people with creative work who perform their tasks sitting at the table. For carrying home from work or from home outside the city, this device is suitable. I also recommend paying attention to the FHD solution with a refresh rate of 300 Hz, since 15 inches is not enough to make out a special difference on such a small screen. The 4K model, due to its excellent color reproduction, is more suitable for photo and video editing, as well as for working with 3D graphics.
Author: Sergey Dyakonenko (Madnfs)
A photo: Sergey Dyakonenko (Madnfs) and Alexey Olkin…
Read also: A lightweight and powerful laptop that you don’t want to tear yourself away from: ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 (GA401IV-HA188T) review…
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