ASUS 14.5″ ZenBook Pro 14 Duo OLED Multi-Touch Notebook (Tech Black)

Incredible, but…

By Ray

Rated 5 out of 5

Date: 2022-08-15

Love this laptop. I came from the 2022 15 version with the larger trackpad, and a Lenovo gaming laptop before that. The Xe graphics are surprisingly adequate for CPU bound games like Oxygen Not Included and KSP. They perform about as well as a GTX 960 in benchmarks, but with the added smoothness of a serious modern CPU. The battery life is YMMV… indoors with the second screen off, and light workloads, with dark apps, you can get 9 hours.
My biggest peeve is the position of the Charging ports. The Type-C PD 3.0 ones are all on the right, making mouse use less comfortable than it could be. Another peeve is the lack of information and open source utilities on about how to take care of the OLED panel, which could be one a big problem depending on what apps and operating systems you run.
The keyboard gets an A , and it’s quite, predictable and satisfying. The track pad is a bit small, bit it’s easy to get used to with sensitivity at maximum, and it’s one of the best for gaming. The Zephyrus and 15 version have considerably better track pads, but are also way thicker and have less than half the battery life.
The build quality is very good. I’ve been to a convention with it and handled it a bit roughly occasionally, nothing creeks. But finger prints on the back are annoying. The speakers are phenomenal, partially due to the magnesium alloy shell.
I tried using a 100w Type-C adapter for the rear charging barrel connector, but that wasn’t enough and caused constant popups about charging connecting and disconnecting. Theoretically a small buck converter adapter could be made in the future that could deliver the 20v 7A this needs with a 180W PD 3.1 brick. In the mean time I’ll just get a 90 100W Type-C cable by UGreen and live with it. There is no benefit to the 1lb single purpose 20v 7A 63.7mm DC barrel charging brick, other than perhaps running a Blender render with the new Intel oneAPI Cycles backend.
Basically, Great laptop, Almost perfect.