Tested: Is the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo the year’s most expensive laptop?

We’ve always been big fans of the ASUS ZenBook Duo here at Creative Bloq, with the 2026 release getting 9/10 back in May and heading straight for our graphic design laptop guide. The major drawback of this unusual laptop, particularly from the point of view of running demanding creative software, has been its graphics processing abilities, which has always been reliant on the CPU’s integrated graphics cores which are never the best.

Well ASUS has clearly been listening - or possibly listening to gamers - as the ROG Zephyrus Duo takes the 14in Zenbook Duo concept, bumps it up to a pair of 16in screens, and adds an Nvidia GPU. And not just any old GPU, but in the model we have here, a top-of-the-line RTX 5090. It’s immense, though rather expensive, and is the most bonkers laptop we’ve seen for some time. Which is a good thing. It’s just a shame it’s so outrageously expensive.

Key specifications

Design, build and display

• Two 16in screens
• Keyboard has no feet

The ROG Zephyrus Duo takes everything that was great about the Zenbook Duo and makes it, well, greater. In that it’s bigger, heavier and thicker than the comparatively svelte 14-incher. So you get a pair of 16-inch screens, a thicker body to allow for the cooling system, and more ports on the outside.

Approaching 3kg in weight it’s a chunky beast, but isn’t really designed to be used on your lap. There are five different ways you can arrange the keyboard and its hinged double screen, but only one of them looks like a traditional laptop suitable for resting on the top of your legs - all the others are going to require some sort of desk.

The machine is completely black, with a glossy line across the back of the lid and some logos embossed into the casing including the ASUS ROG angry eye staring from the stand that supports the screens. The keyboard, which attaches using magnets so it can be easily removed, is covered in a soft-touch material that feels almost like fabric, but probably isn’t. It’s matte black, though, which serves to make the RGB backlighting more noticeable, and with 1.7mm of key travel it doesn’t feel as compromised as the Zenbook Duo’s equivalent. It still has no feet to raise it up, however, making it an unsatisfying place to type if you have to place it flat on a desk.

Design score: 4/5

Features

• Thunderbolt 4
• Extremely bright screens

The Zephyrus Duo really has it all. There's a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports, which can be used for charging alongside the dedicated charging hookup. There are two 10Gbps USB-A ports that will match a lot of external SSDs as well as providing a home for a mouse and keyboard dongle if you want to use one. There's a full-size HDMI for hooking up to an external monitor, an SD card slot for importing that drone footage, and the keyboard has its own USB-C port for charging, though it also charges through its magnetic attachment point. All that’s missing is an Ethernet port, but you can replicate that through a Thunderbolt dock or rely on the Wi-Fi 7 for a stable network connection.

The screens are what’s really going to endear this laptop to creative users. While they might not make much sense for the gamers the machine is aimed at, as any attempt to use it as a single 32in display will be stymied by the hinge down the centre, creatives are potentially more likely to make use of them as separate monitors. So you can have your edit window on one side and your tool palettes on the other, for example, or turn them into portrait mode and have a development environment on the left and a web browser on the right. Twin them with an external monitor and you’ve got three, or set them to mirror one another so you can show off what you’re doing to an audience.

It’s lucky, then, that they’re particularly nice. They’re what ASUS calls ‘ROG Nebula HDR,’ which means OLED, and they’re its high-end touchscreen laptop displays. This means you get just short of 500 nits of brightness, with 100% sRGB, 98% DCI-P3, and 94% AdobeRGB colour response.

Battery life is surprisingly good for a machine with so much going on. Intel’s third-gen CPUs are well optimised for endurance, and looping a video on one screen saw it keep going for just shy of 13 hours. Adding the second screen saw this drop to 11 hours, but what’s really going to suck the juice up is activating the RTX 5090 chip, which neither of these tests required. It’s quite capable of depleting the battery in just two hours if you try playing a game while unplugged.

Feature score: 4/5

Benchmark scores

We test every one of our laptops using the same benchmarking software suite to give you a thorough overview of its suitability for creatives of all disciplines and levels. This includes:

• Geekbench: Tests the CPU for single-core and multi-core power, and the GPU for the system's potential for gaming, image processing, or video editing. Geekbench AI tests the CPU and GPU on a variety of AI-powered and AI-boosted tasks.
• Cinebench: Tests the CPU and GPU's ability to run Cinema 4D and Redshift.
• UL Procyon: Uses UL Solutions' Procyon software suite to test the system's ability for AI image generation in Stable Diffusion, its Microsoft Office performance and its battery life in a looping video test.
• Topaz Video AI: We use Topaz Video AI to test the system's ability to upscale video and convert video to slow-motion.
• PugetBench for Creators: We use the PugetBench for Creators benchmarking suite to test the system's ability to run several key tasks in Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as its performance when encoding/transcoding video.
• ON1 Resize AI: Tests the system's ability to resize 5 photos to 200% in a batch process. We take the total time taken to resize the images and divide by 5.

Performance

• Lots of power for creative apps
• Similar spec elsewhere produces better scores

With this kind of hardware on board you’d expect exceptional performance, and while the Zephyrus Duo is good, it seems to be paying the price for the unusual design and the thin body this necessitates. Where previous laptops equipped with an RTX 5090, such as the Razer Blade 18, have scored over 245,000 points in the Geekbench 6 GPU test, the Zephyrus Duo only manages 183,460. Likewise in Cinebench, where the Duo posts just 54,258 against the Blade’s whopping 102,452.

Over in the CPU department, the 16-core Ultra 9 386H is a 16-core chip that has a strangely low peak turbo frequency of 4.9GHz. We’ve been seeing Intel CPUs beat 5GHz for a while now, since the Core i7-8086K Limited Edition desktop chip in 2018 and the Core i9-9980HK for laptops a year later, so you have to wonder if it’s the cooling system in the Zephyrus Duo that’s prompted this choice, or if Intel is so confident in the IPC (instructions per clock) gains it’s made with Panther Lake that we don’t need that kind of speed.

Well, the Razer Blade 18 (Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus, 24 cores) scores 20,294 in the Geekbench 6 multi-core CPU test, and the Zephyrus Duo (eight fewer cores) gets 16,514. That works out at 845/core for the Razer, and 1032/core for the Zephyrus. Not all cores are created equal, of course, but this makes it look like the 386H is working pretty hard. Its performance in the Cinebench 2026 multi-core CPU rendering test, however, sees it score 4702, only just ahead of 4678 from the i7-14650HX in the MSI Crosshair HX 14, a 16-core chip three generations older and loaded with more Performance cores. The 386H’s single-core performance, from a lone P core, is much better than the i7’s though.

This does, however, boil down to some pretty snappy performance in creative apps.

The huge GPU gives a big boost to AI operations, and while that CPU may not be keeping up with the greatest out there, it doesn’t do badly. Tasks that can be broken up and parallel-processed go flying by, the 64GB of RAM (something that likely contributes mightily to the price) means you can load up layers and effects and instruments without too much fear of slowdown.

Performance score: 4/5

Price

The model we’ve reviewed here costs £6,099.99 / $5,499.99. Even the entry-level model, which sports an RTX 5070Ti and less RAM but the same CPU, costs £3,999.99 / $4,499.99. You’re getting quite a lot for your money, with the RTX 5090 GPU, two 16in screens and a load of RAM, but seeing big numbers like these behind the £ or $ are going to put people off. The Razer Blade 18 we reviewed costs less (£4,999.99 or $5,399.99), and while you’ll need to spring for an extra screen to emulate the Duo’s USP, the performance is better from the 18-incher.

Value score: 2/5

Who is it for?

• Show-offs

Don’t get us wrong, the ASUS ROG Zephyrus is magnificent. The only issue is that the double screen is less useful for games than it is for productivity and creative apps, the enormous price will probably deter users with an eye on the budget, and you can get more performance for less cash elsewhere. It does, however, look really cool.

Buy it if...

• You prefer multi-display working
• You need a discrete GPU
• You have lots of money

Don't buy it if...

• Budget is important
• Your desk is already full of monitors
• You have a traditionalist view of computer design

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