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The ROG Zephyrus Duo is the world’s first dual 16-inch OLED gaming laptop and is now available to order online via the ASUS Store for $12,999 AUD for the RTX 5090 Version with the 5070 Ti version arriving in June starting at $8,999 AUD.
ASUS’ gaming brand ROG was born 20 years ago this year, and to celebrate my favourite innovative gaming brand when it comes to pushing the boundaries, I wanted to take a brief look back at the brand’s history which feels like it comes together nicely with the launch of the ROG Zephyrus Duo.
ROG was born in 2006 with the introduction of motherboards with ASUS wanting something more high-performance targeted at gamers, but that quickly changed 4-5 years later with expansion into a number of other product lines including gaming laptops, GPUs, headsets, keyboards and mice. But it was about 10 years later that the brand really started to find its identity through innovation.
The ROG Ally is a great example of this as the first mainstream Windows handheld that completely changed the game and pushed the boundaries of what we thought was possible with handheld gaming.
Really though, after 20 years, the ROG Zephyrus Duo might be its most innovative product to hit the market. Normally something you’d see as a concept at CES, this is actually a product that can be ordered right now on the ASUS Store.
It has Dual 3K ROG Nebula HDR OLED touchscreen displays that offer 1,100 nits of peak brightness, a 0.2ms response time, a 120hz refresh rate and 100% DCI-P3 colour space.
The inclusion of dual screens offers improved versatility with 5 distinct operating modes.
- Dual Screen Mode maximises your productivity with double the screen real estate.
- Sharing Mode is great for collaborating when laying the Duo flat.
- Book Mode is perfect for coders, with both screens set up in portrait orientation.
- Laptop Mode is perfect for traditional use cases with its minimal footprint.
- Tent Mode is great for couch co-op by setting the displays in an A-frame.
This is made possible through a wireless keyboard that is just 5.1mm thin and magnetically aligns to the screen so that it can be used like a regular laptop, and it cleverly goes in between both screens when closed too with the whole laptop being 1.9cm at its thinnest point and 2.82kg in weight which is damn impressive given you’ve got two screens and a detachable keyboard.
As far as power goes, there’s up to an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU, the Intel Core Ultra 9 386H processor, and through the likes of DLSS 4, you’ll be able to reach high frames whilst playing AAA games.
ROG Zephyrus Duo AUSSIE ORDER LINKS
- GX651AX-SR004W 16 3K OLED 120Hz / U9-386H / RTX 5090 / LPDDR5X 64GB / 2TB SSD / Stellar Grey ($12,999)
- GX651AR-SR002W 16 3K OLED 120Hz / U9-386H / RTX 5070 Ti / LPDDR5X 32GB / 1TB SSD / Stellar Grey (Arriving June)
It won’t be the laptop for everyone, but the one thing I can always commend ROG for over the last 20 years is always pushing the boundaries of every product, even if it means not having the most mass appeal product. It always feels like it’s ahead of the curve when it comes to innovation and ideas that end up becoming mainstream over time due to how good they are, and I think this will be one of those instances.
The ROG Zephyrus Duo is available to order online via the ASUS Store for $12,999 AUD for the RTX 5090 Version with the 5070 Ti version arriving in June starting at $8,999 AUD.
