Asus Zenbook Duo (2025) Review

Introduction

The Asus Zenbook Duo (2025) is a bit more of an iterative upgrade over its predecessor, against the outright revolution of the 2024 model against its respective previous model.

The big thing here is the move to Intel’s new Arrow Lake-H chips for even more power, with my sample packing in the top dog Core Ultra 9 285H. It also comes with 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM and a 2TB SSD, as well as the line’s signature pair of 14-inch 3K 120Hz OLED screens.

All of this is going to run you £1999.99/$1699.99, making it quite an expensive choice. However, against more standard form ultrabooks such as the Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024) and the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025), it’s not as bad as it seems.

I’ve been testing this clever beast for the last couple of weeks to see how potent it really is, and whether it can take the crown as one of the best ultrabooks we’ve tested.

Design and Keyboard

• Clever form factor
• Port selection is just okay
• Keyboard attachment feels a bit flimsy

One of the main reasons why the Zenbook Duo (2025) is more of an evolution against its predecessor rather than an outright revolution is because it maintains the same form factor. That is to say, a proper dual-screen laptop with a detachable keyboard and trackpad, as opposed to older models which came with a much smaller second screen.

The presence of two full-size 14-inch displays makes using the Zenbook Duo (2025) unlike any other laptop I’ve tested.

You can use it in more of a conventional form factor, with the keyboard and trackpad attaching via pogo pins to the secondary display. This covers up that bottom screen and gives you a slender 14-inch ultrabook to use, in a similar way to the Asus Zenbook A14, but with even more power in a bit of a heavier chassis.

The real fun begins when using this new Zenbook Duo with both of its screens at once, either laid flat on a desk as a normal laptop with the keyboard in front of you. By putting the kickstand up at the back and raising both screens to a more usable height, or even by turning the laptop 90 degrees to use it with them in more of a book-style configuration. The possibilities are virtually endless, and I’ve never experienced a laptop as clever physically as this one.

Once you’re all done, you can slot the keyboard and trackpad over the second screen, close the Zenbook Duo (2025), and take it on your travels. It is otherwise a 14-inch laptop that’s just 14.6mm thick, and therefore easily portable. With those two screens though, it weighs a bit more than some other laptops with the same screen size, tipping the scales at 1.35kg.

I should say though that the build quality here is top-notch. The laptop’s magnesium aluminium alloy chassis feels fantastic, and keeps the weight down, while its sizeable kickstand on the underside keeps the laptop up well when used in this configuration. The only piece that lets it down is the plastic keyboard and trackpad attachment, which while thin, feels quite flimsy and has some flex. A slightly more solid option wouldn’t have gone amiss.

The unfortunate sacrifice here is the port selection. Against some of the competition, it’s on par, but lacks a little bit of flexibility. The left side houses one of the two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, as well as a high-speed USB-A and a headphone jack, while the right side has a full-size HDMI and the second Thunderbolt 4 USB-C. I’d have appreciated an SD card reader here, and a second USB-A port, but with the thickness of this laptop, it probably would be a bit of a challenge.

The keyboard here, given the compact screen size, is a smaller option with arrow keys and a function row. It’s pleasant to use, with decent travel and tactility, and I had no issues with it. There is backlighting here, with a crisp white illumination underneath the keys for after-dark working. It is, of course, Bluetooth, and pairs easily to the main unit. The trackpad here is larger too, coming with responsive tracking and solid actuation.

You can also use an on-screen keyboard and trackpad on the bottom screen by tapping six fingers on the screen, and while it’s helpful to have, you don’t get anywhere near as much tactility or feeling as with an actual keyboard. I can see it being useful if you’re in a pinch, but the physical keyboard and trackpad are much more responsive.

The packaging here seems to be entirely plastic-free, with the laptop coming in a cardboard box and paper bag, along with the cable and power brick.

Display and Sound

• Detailed, smooth output across both screens
• Deep blacks and fantastic contrast
• Speakers offer decent body, but not too much bass

The Zenbook Duo (2025) features a pair of OLED screens, with both of them being 14-inch options with a 3K (2880×1800) resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate for fantastic detail and silky smooth motion. They are also both touchscreens, accepting inputs from Asus’ stylus, with responsive and accurate tracking, and have the benefit of a slightly taller 16:10 aspect ratio that’s ideal for modern workloads.

Being OLEDs, both screens offer exemplary colour accuracy, measuring out with perfect coverage of both the mainstream sRGB and creative DCI-P3 gamuts, while Adobe RGB coverage at 95% is also excellent.

In addition, there are deep blacks and gorgeous contrast on both panels, with a measured 0.01 and 25210:1 respectively. The 6900K colour temperature is also pretty good, too.

The Zenbook Duo (2025) can get quite bright, with a peak SDR brightness of 345.3 nits sitting well for both indoor and outdoor use, and matches well against its 400 nit SDR quoted figure. It is strung by that peak brightness figure against some OLED panels I’ve tested though.

The speakers here are pretty good, with a fair amount of volume and decent depth. They don’t fall into the trope of being too thin, although do lack a bit of low end extension to be used for more than just casual listening.

Performance

• Strong generational uplift over the previous model
• Some thermal constraints being hit with the form factor

Being a new model, it is perhaps unsurprising that Asus has bundled in one of Intel’s newest, and most potent, processors with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H shipping in my sample. This is Intel’s most powerful chip in their lineup of Arrow Lake-H chips, packing in 16 cores (6 P cores, 8 cores and 2 LP E cores) and 16 threads, as well as a boost clock of up to 5.4GHz.

With this in mind, it’s not perhaps as fast as you might think in some areas, owing to the size constraints of this model over other laptops with the same chip, most notably the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025). Single-core performance is strong and arguably where it should be, with scores in line with MSI’s choice, with only a few points separating them, and the Ryzen AI 9 365-powered MSI Prestige A16 AI+.

It’s in the multi-core scores in both Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 where that throttling becomes evident, with a 27 percent difference between the Zenbook Duo (2025) and Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) in Cinebench, and 7 percent in Geekbench.

With this in mind, Asus’ option remains a potent choice against both its contemporaries, and the previous year’s model with an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H inside. We’re seeing a 21% increase in Geekbench 6 single-core and a 28% increase in multi-core, while Cinebench R23 delivers similar yields with the new chip delivering 19% stronger single-core performance and 18 percent better multi-core results.

The 3D Mark Time Spy score that this 2025 model garnered is also a lot stronger than the previous year’s option, arguably owing to the much beefier iGPU within the Core Ultra 9 285H. The Intel Arc 140T is much more capable and gives the Zenbook Duo (2025) a lot more in the way of graphical horsepower. This makes it a lot more suited for graphically intensive work, such as rendering or even gaming to a degree.

The presence of a beefier iGPU helped the Zenbook Duo (2025) to serve up some solid results in some tested games, with Cyberpunk 2077 offering 20.10fps at 1080p, while Returnal provided 27fps and Rainbow Six Extraction served up 43fps. That’s some especially playable rates at max settings without any ray-tracing or upscaling applied. To get those results on the previous model, you’d have needed upscaling.

At QHD, the 18fps served up by Rainbow Six Extraction and 12.13fps offered by Cyberpunk 2077 are necessarily the best, and to play at this higher resolution, you will need to sacrifice some visual fidelity for lower quality settings and apply some upscaling. The presence of upscaling with Xess 1.3 set to Quality pushed Cyberpunk 2077 up to 24.82fps at 1080p, giving a much stronger result.

Ray-traced gaming at top presets, such as Cyberpunk 2077 at its RT: Ultra preset, even at native 1080p, will prove a bit of a challenge, as the 7.88fps average demonstrates. You will need some upscaling for this, and putting Xess 1.3 to Quality allowed the average to reach 14.24fps, which is nearly double.

The 2TB SSD inside my sample is capacious, providing lots of space for installing important apps, files and more, while it’s also reasonably speedy with read and writes of 5234.14MB/s and 4830.99MB/s. The Zenbook Duo (2025) also comes with 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM to keep it suited for multitasking and more intensive workloads.

Software

• Clean Windows 11 install
• Some useful Asus-specific apps
• Copilot AI functionality is also present

The Zenbook Duo (2025) comes with full-fat Windows 11, with a reasonably clean install that seems to lack the annoyance of any pre-installed VPNs or antivirus software to be immediately uninstalled.

There are only a couple of other Asus-specific apps here for your troubles though, such as MyAsus. This is a catch-all app where you can do everything from checking battery life to choosing which type of workload the laptop’s network connection prioritises.

In addition, there is also GlideX, which is where you can manage tasks such as casting or mirroring the Zenbook Duo (2025)’s screen to other devices wirelessly, or transfer files across the same network. You can also enable remote access to a mobile device, too. The Storybook app is designed as another means of organising photos and videos, using AI to recognise faces and file your photos for you, which is handy.

This Zenbook Duo (2025) also has the usual AI features that its contemporaries also have, in spite of not actually being a Copilot+ PC. This includes image creation features in Photos and Paint, as well as the clever blurred background, auto framing and eye contact tools with the Windows Studio webcam effects.

The reason for this not being a Copilot+ PC is because the Core Ultra 9 285H inside the Zenbook Duo (2025) doesn’t have enough AI horsepower (or TOPS) to meet Microsoft’s minimum threshold. It’s intriguing that Intel has decided to do this, given the immense power that’s otherwise on offer, even against the Core Ultra 200V chips that are fully Copilot+ PC compatible.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 12 hours 6 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one to two working days

The battery capacity from the previous model remains unchanged, with the Zenbook Duo (2025) retaining a larger 75Whr to power it. That’s quite a big one, although it is worth remembering that it is powering two high-res, high-refresh OLED screens, as well as a powerful laptop chip.

With this in mind, Asus’ quoting of up to 10.5 hours of video playback on a charge seems conservative, especially considering it managed to last for 12 hours and six minutes in the PCMark 10 test at the requisite 150 nits of brightness.

This pales in comparison to the nearly 19 hours on the Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025), and the nearly 21 hours on the Asus Zenbook A14. It is stronger than the Zenbook Duo (2024) though, which lasted for just eight hours in the same test.

The 65W USB-C charger also allowed for quick recharge speeds too, with it taking just 35 minutes to bring the Zenbook Duo (2025) from zero to 50%, ensuring you won’t spend too long away from the mains. A full charge from dead to 100% took 88 minutes, which makes for some of the better speeds I’ve seen.

Should you buy it?