Regardless of seeming like a fast branding alternative, the Zenbook Duo lived as much as that Evo badge in my testing. Our overview unit featured an Intel Core i7-1165G7 CPU with solely 8GB of RAM, however it nonetheless felt snappy as I juggled a number of apps directly. To be trustworthy, I would actually solely advocate the Duo with 16GB of RAM to actually maximize your multitasking potential. However I used to be nonetheless in a position to run dozens of browser tabs, Evernote, Slack, Spotify and YouTube throughout each screens with none hassle.
Intel’s Xe graphics additionally proved worthy, scoring almost 4,000 factors larger than final yr’s mannequin in 3DMark Evening Raid. I did not have an opportunity to do a lot gaming on the Duo, however that rating alone makes it clear it’s going to have the ability to play a low-impact title like Overwatch. NVIDIA’s MX450 ought to provide extra GPU energy, however I have not been in a position to take a look at that but. Extra necessary than video games, although, is the ZenBook Duo’s uncooked computing energy. Its vastly improved PCMark 10 and Geekbench scores make it clear that Intel’s Tiger Lake {hardware} is a significant improve. It additionally lasted 11 hours and 40 minutes in our battery take a look at, which is near many ultraportables, although 5 hours lower than the XPS 13.
For probably the most half, I discovered the ScreenPad Plus to be much more helpful than final yr, just because I might see it higher. However it’s nonetheless a bit too quick for a lot of apps. Technically, you possibly can run three tiny home windows side-by-side, however I discovered that too small to be helpful. As an alternative, I sometimes had an online browser or a productiveness app like Evernote up on the primary display screen, whereas two different apps sat under. More often than not, it was a mix of YouTube and Spotify on the ScreenPad Plus for simply controlling media (and a pleasant strategy to sneak in my favourite YouTube channels whereas working).
