Asus Zenbook Duo review: An (almost) perfect productivity laptop

Best Prices Today: Asus Zenbook Duo (UX8407A)

I’m a huge fan of long-lasting laptops that can hold up as a productivity solution for the road. In this case, the new iteration of the dual-screen Asus Zenbook Duo has everything I want and more.

For years, my go-to has been the Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio 2. But the new 2026 edition of the Zenbook Duo arguably does all that in a single laptop.

The new Zenbook Duo was the launch vehicle for Intel’s new Core Ultra Series 3 or “Panther Lake” chip, which Intel claims offers the power of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 with battery life that can last as long as a full day or more. That’s helped by packing the largest allowable battery inside this new iteration of the Duo.

Essentially, the Zenbook Duo’s “Panther Lake” iteration improves both as a productivity machine and as an entertainment option over the 2025 Zenbook Duo (Lunar Lake), with more powerful gaming options and smaller screen bezels that improve the look and feel. It’s still a surprisingly chunky laptop, however, pushing near four pounds.

Asus Zenbook Duo: Configurations

Normally, we’d review a laptop with a price and ship date attached. In this case, Intel sent us the laptop, not Asus. The top-of-the-line model, which we’ve reviewed here, costs $2,299.99, and it will ship later this quarter. Other configurations will be available, as indicated below.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

Asus Zenbook Duo: Specifications

• Model number: UX8407A
• Display: Two 14-inch (2880 x 1800) touch OLED w/stylus support, HDR
• Processor: Intel Core Ultra 7 355/ Ultra 9 386H / Ultra X9 388H (Ultra X9 388H as tested)
• Graphics: Intel Arc B390
• NPU: Yes, up to 50 TOPS
• Memory: 32GB LPDDR5X, integrated / non-upgradable
• Storage: 1-2TB M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD (1TB as tested)
• Ports: 2 USB-C (Thunderbolt 4), 1 10Gbps USB-A, HDMI 2.1, 3.5mm audio jack
• Security: Windows Hello (camera)
• Camera: 1080p30
• Battery: 99Wh
• Wireless: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4
• Operating system: Windows 11 Home / Pro
• Dimensions: 12.21 x 8.21 x 0.77 to 0.92 inches
• Weight: 3.54 pounds
• Color: Moher Gray
• Price: $2,299.99

Fun fact: I wasn’t told that I would be reviewing the Asus Zenbook Duo, and I was expecting a more conventional clamshell laptop when I removed it from the box. What’s surprising about this laptop is that it appears to be just that: a slightly thicker clamshell. Only when you remove it from the box do the dual screens and the floating keyboard emerge.

Normally, a clamshell laptop has both a screen as well as a keyboard deck. In the case of the Duo, the deck is replaced by an additional, 14-inch screen. A “floating” keyboard can sit above one of them, held down by magnetic pogo pins. The secondary screen can also be supported by a small kickstand. This new Duo replaces the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) version of the Zenbook Duo that we reviewed last year.

What makes the Zenbook Duo different is how you can align the screens. You can hide one to create a “traditional” clamshell; orient both screens on top of each other in landscape mode to create an “elevated” screen; align them vertically, one next to another, in portrait mode; or lay both screens flat, which creates a “sharing” mode that flips one screen to face a secondary user. The kickstand is now integrated, and Asus has minimized the individual screen bezels even further to give the displays a more cohesive appearance.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

There’s a mammoth advantage that the Asus Zenbook Duo offers, which doesn’t immediately stand out: a 99 watt-hour battery, basically the largest that can be put inside a laptop or external battery pack to meet FAA airline regulations. (Part of the battery sits behind one screen, part of it sits behind the other, but Windows treats it as a single whole.) Think of it this way, you’re getting the largest battery available paired up with a processor designed to sip power.

Don’t forget to read our performance evaluation below to see if this laptop lives up to these claims, especially the Panther Lake processor’s powerful gaming performance! Physically, this laptop looks somewhat like the earlier Asus Zenbook S 14, itself the launch vehicle for Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) chip. It’s basically the same dimensions, but a quarter- to a half-inch thicker and almost a pound heavier than a more traditional thin-and-light. The Duo has the heft of an older, chunkier laptop but with the promise that you can leave its 100W charger at home or in your hotel room.

All of the Zenbook Duo is made out of “ceraluminum,” which Asus touts as having lightness of aluminum as well as the durability of ceramic. It all feels a bit plasticy, but I don’t really care what a laptop is made out of as long as it holds up.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

I performed most of my testing in a traditional clamshell configuration, with the keyboard perched over one of the displays, which shuts off to save power. In this case, the keyboard and touchpad use the physical connection, even if the laptop is in airplane mode.

You certainly can use the Zenbook Duo in its portrait mode, where the paired displays create two vertical columns for reading a column of email and a vertical web page. I think more people will prefer unfolding the kickstand, however, and positioning the two landscape displays one over the other. This feels more like my traditional on-the-go setup, with one primary and an additional secondary screen for reference.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

In either scenario, both screens are physically separate, which feels a little insecure in a public space, and basically makes working on a plane impossible. Otherwise, this is the first dual-screen laptop I’ve reviewed, and I could see the productivity gains immediately.

Well, sort of. Placing the displays one above the other doesn’t pose much of a problem, but in portrait mode the “sides” of the screen on the keyboard deck become the top and bottom. On the left-hand side of the Zenbook Duo are an undisclosed HDMI port, a Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C) port, and a headphone jack.

On the right is the laptop’s power switch, another Thunderbolt 4 port, as well as a legacy USB-A port, too. In portrait mode, one side is the top, and the other the bottom, making one of those ports inaccessible. It also makes it a bit awkward to charge the laptop displays, since the cord from the laptop to its 100W charger will sprout from the top of the device.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

Asus says that the laptop will ship with a pen (the SA205H) with MPP 2.6 support, but that accessories will vary by country. I don’t think my review unit shipped with one inside.

An underappreciated strength of the Duo is its cooling. Though it partially failed my performance stress tests — where it successfully looped a Cinebench CPU benchmark without a significant drop in performance, but failed to do the same in a GPU test — the cooling fans are exceptionally quiet even under load. Air appears to be pulled from the bottom of the Zenbook and is pushed out the sides, but very quietly. It might be noticeable in a quiet office, but just barely. In a normal setting, it’s totally quiet under the Windows “Balanced” power settings, the default.

Asus Zenbook Duo: A fantastic, power-saving display

OLED screens have become vastly more commonplace over the past few years, especially in laptops, because their inky blacks make for a more visually striking experience. However, OLEDs with high screen refresh rates are a bit less common. And a pair of screens? Well, that’s nearly unique.

As a fan of Lenovo’s ThinkBook Plus Rollable and subsequent prototypes, I really like a notebook that can expand to deliver additional screen space on the road. The Rollable, though, is a single screen. The smaller bezels separating the two displays still aren’t as convenient as a foldable, but the smaller gap (less than 10mm) feels cohesive and allows your eyes to “create” a single image when you’re actually looking a pair of screens.

OLED screens look great, of course, and the displays are VESA certified as True Black 1000, covering 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut. The Asus Lumina Pro LED displays are capable of a nearly perfect DCI-P3 color gamut and with a variable refresh rate than can go to 144Hz and as low as 48Hz. That’s extremely helpful both for smooth refresh rates — including gaming — as well as saving power by lowering the refresh rate, too. Finally, Asus says that the displays can reduce blue light by up to 70 percent, though I lack the ability to test that.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

(To be fair, I tested this laptop at a fixed refresh rate of 60 Hz, which can be manually adjusted to 144Hz while running on wall power. The laptop includes a setting to dynamically adjust that down to 48 Hz, which I typically don’t do because of the variability. But the incredible battery life that you’ll see below could be even greater with that control enabled.)

Asus says that the two displays can put out 1,000 nits apiece in HDR mode; our light meter measured them producing 480 nits apiece in SDR mode. That’s far more than necessary for outdoor use. Unlike the 2025 version of the Zenbook Duo, these screens feature a new anti-reflection coating that can cut light reflection by 65 percent, but they’re still too glossy for my taste.

From a structural standpoint, the dual-screen construction feels quite strong. It reminds me of Lenovo’s early tablets, with a metal kickstand that holds the upper display in place, even when tilted forward. I’m not as fond of the display setup in portrait mode; there’s no other way to secure the displays except by using the angle to prop them up. Put another way, the displays will be less prone to be knocked over in portrait mode when folded close to one another, which robs them a bit of their utility.

I also don’t like the Asus five-finger gesture where you close all fingers together, and then expand or “explode” them outwards. This takes a window on a single screen and projects it across the entirety of the display, but it’s tough to get right and therefore works intermittently.

The Zenbook Duo ships with the MyAsus app, the overarching system utility that offer performance adjustments, and the ability to configure specific aspects of the laptop. I’ve always thought that the MyAsus app is one of the more useful, well-organized collections of laptop utility functions. I ended up mildly hating the ScreenXpert software, which hovers in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. I would wade through a series of menus to turn it off, inadvertently trigger it again, then have to rediscover the process to banish it once again.

Asus Zenbook Duo: Audio improves to superior levels

Asus has made additional improvements in the audio subsystem, moving to a total of six speakers, with two firing to the front. It’s a little odd trying to find where the sound originates from while the screens are unfolded, but there’s no doubt that the audio quality is excellent, though a bit flat. The Zenbook Duo offered Dolby Atmos as an audio enhancement, delivering sound that was pretty clear even from the bass on up to the upper end. The speakers delivered enough volume to comfortably fill my office with sound, too.

I think some traditional clamshells produce a slightly richer sound, but you won’t be disappointed with how this laptop’s speakers sound at all.

Asus Zenbook Duo: On paper, the keyboard is good. Under my fingers…

My first reaction when typing on the Asus Zenbook Duo was… I’ve felt this keyboard before. To my fingers, it felt very much like the Microsoft Type Cover keyboards: flat, without an enormous amount of support. Asus says the keyboard has 1.7mm of key travel, which feels right. That’s a tad more than the 1.5 mm travel of a midrange laptop keyboard.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

When docked, the keyboard charges itself via the pogo pins. Undocked, it runs off a dedicated battery inside the keyboard itself. Asus rates the keyboard’s battery at over 11 hours by itself, though I didn’t test this specifically. You can also switch off the keyboard while undocked via a small switch. There are three layers of backlighting.

Typing on the keyboard itself was moderately comfortable, at least while docked. I wasn’t as happy using it in undocked mode, as the thin flat keyboard rests flat on whatever surface you rest it in. Personally, I like it raised or angled a bit. But even when used in a clamshell mode, my fingers felt a little unfamiliar on the spongy keys — I typed the majority of the review using this laptop, just to gain some added familiarity. It’s not my favorite keyboard.

Asus includes dedicated keys to launch its ScreenXpert software, which includes brightness controls for both screens, as well as the ability to sync that brightness level. (The software also lets you know the battery capacity, in percentage, of the keyboard.) There are also dedicated keys to swap content between screens and even disable one entirely.

The trackpad is nothing to write home about, but it does the job.

Asus Zenbook Duo: The webcam’s not great, but it does the job

The Zenbook Duo includes a full HD (1080p) webcam with Windows Hello capabilities, which worked acceptably during the course of the review period, though I had to log in manually occasionally.

The webcam didn’t focus exceptionally well, though these examples taken in my office and upstairs in my living room came out fairly well. In general, it’s a softer image than I’d like. But I’m not sure if one of our best webcams would overbalance the displays in their extended mode.

The Zenbook’s mics continue to be excellent. I’ve used the Asus Zenbooks as an example of superlative noise filtering, assisted by the NPU’s AI powers. Those controls live within the MyAsus app, a handy collection of utilities to adjust the laptop’s performance and more.

Asus Zenbook Duo: Standout performance thanks to Panther Lake

I spent the better part of two weeks with the Asus Zenbook Duo, testing it as a representative of the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 “Panther Lake” platform. You’ll find a number of performance tests there that aren’t included here, particular battery performance tests, along with some additional games.

At this point, the Asus Zenbook Duo is the only Panther Lake system I have to test, though more reviews will be released soon. For now, I’ll compare it to the earlier Zenbook Duo, as well as some of that laptop’s rivals. Again, my Panther Lake overview compares this laptop to representative laptops that use Intel’s Core Ultra Series 1 and Series 2 chips, AMD’s Ryzen AI 300, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. (The AMD Ryzen AI 400 and Snapdragon X2 Elite have yet to ship.)

Intel also claims that the Panther Lake’s performance is as fast as a slightly older gaming notebook with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 inside. That’s a huge claim, and it’s partially true. Again, it’s worth checking out the other article for a deeper explanation.

I think it’s worth beginning our look at the Zenbook Duo’s performance, however, by examining a key selling point, which is its battery life. The laptop contains the largest battery allowable for transport on an airplane: 99 watt-hours, which is normally the size you see in a chunky, heavy gaming laptop. In this case, the battery accounts for much of the extra pound, bringing the laptop’s weight to about 3.5 pounds.

I’m not a huge fan of our ancient video rundown tests, only because chipmakers now treat video playback as relatively trivial and a task that doesn’t take up much power at all. (This test loops a 4K video file until the battery runs out of juice.) I have a little more respect for tests that simulate work such as UL’s Procyon Office benchmark, which slowly loads tests in Microsoft Office and Outlook, simulating your workday. There’s an additional wrinkle, of course. Do you want to know the results for one screen or two?

I’d like to think that PCWorld readers want all the information they can, so I tested all scenarios. Here’s what I found:

• One screen, video rundown: 22 hours, 15 minutes
• Two screens, video rundown: 13 hours, 29 minutes
• One screen, Procyon Office rundown: 13 hours, 56 minutes
• Two screens, Procyon Office rundown: 8 hours, 49 minutes
• One screen, video rundown at maximum performance settings: 13 hours, 32 minutes

In my earlier review of Intel’s Core Ultra 2 chips, my tests of the other platforms topped out at 17 hours, 17 minutes for the Core Ultra 2 platform and just over 16 hours for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite. I mistakenly tested the Zenbook Duo using Windows’ maximum battery settings for a video rundown, but it created an extra data point.

As you might imagine, even two weeks of testing time didn’t allow for three runs of battery testing like I’d prefer, along with the various performance tests and rundown iterations. However, Intel provided us with an additional single-screen Lenovo laptop that produced 25 to 28 hours of battery life as a check against the Zenbook Duo. I also left the laptop running in a fixed 60Hz refresh rate during all of my tests, which would be directly comparable to other laptops. Since the Zenbook Duo can be set to dynamically drop down to 24 Hz when needed, even more battery life might be possible.

For comparison, we’re using the $1,679 HP OmniBook Ultra 14, the $999 Asus VivoBook S 14, the $939 Acer Swift 16 AI, and the $1,999 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, together with the $1,699 Asus Zenbook Duo with Intel’s Lunar Lake chip inside as well as the $3,299 ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable.

I tested the laptop using our suite of standard benchmarks. I kept the laptop in its traditional clamshell mode during the tests. Additional screens mean additional pixels, and that’s not a direct comparison to its single-screen competition.

I first began with the PCMark benchmark, one of my favorites. It measures overall performance across a variety of applications, and it chewed up the CAD exercises with ease.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

We use the Cinebench benchmark to measure the CPU performance on apps that the PCMark test doesn’t cover.

Here, we use the multithreaded portion of the test. CPU-specific tasks include the operating system, file decompression, and some games. Again, the Asus Zenbook Duo flies through it with no problems. However, AMD’s Ryzen is right behind! We’re still awaiting the next-gen Ryzen AI 400 chips, and that’s a positive sign for AMD.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

We run the Handbrake test as much as a measure of the laptop’s computational ability as a test to see how well it can execute at full load, during a prolonged period. It’s a measure of the laptop’s cooling as much as the performance of the chip.

Again, Intel’s Panther Lake is holding on to a narrow lead.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

However, as our Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) evaluation showed, 3D graphics is a killer strength of this chip and, by extension, the Asus Zenbook Duo.

If you have work (or play) that demands solid graphics, this notebook could be for you.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

I almost didn’t compile a chart of the battery-life figures of the rival laptops, because 1) there’s too much variability in what the Asus Zenbook Duo offers between the multiple screens and rundown tests and 2) because it’s not particularly close, right?

Wrong. While I did see 22 to 25 hours of battery life in a Lenovo laptop Intel provided us, the Zenbook Duo actually squeaked by a little closer than I thought it would over the competition. I’ll be interested to see what notebooks like the Samsung Galaxy Book 6 eventually produce. At CES, Samsung management was talking about 30 hours of battery!

Mark Hachman / Foundry

Asus Zenbook Duo: Conclusion

Nevertheless, if you’re in the market for an innovative, dual-screen laptop, you really can’t go wrong with the Asus Zenbook Duo. It’s simply superb in almost all aspects of the experience, although I’d prefer using another keyboard if I had the chance.

Part of that is the Panther Lake chip, certainly, but Asus engineers have still crafted a Zenbook Duo that’s better than the last. This is a superb productivity machine, one that road warriors, business travelers, and consumers alike should consider for their next laptop.