[Video Review] ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED UX8402

ASUS already has a lot of experience with extraordinary laptops and while they’ve been looking as an experiment in the beginning, the latest iterations have a solid foundation of time-tested technologies. Chances are that you’ve already seen the double-screen Duo concept. It is even more improved in the new Zenbook Pro Duo UX8402 model and while it looks pretty awesome it isn’t made just for flexing, stay with us to see why.

[INTRO]

As you guess, the Pro Duo is made for creative professionals and you can’t get their attention without a good-looking design. It has an all-metal construction covered with an anti-fingerprint layer, keeping the elegant finish pristine. It weighs just 1.7 kg, and it’s 17.9 mm thin despite the powerful internals and the 76-watt-hour battery.

Displays

Lifting the lid raises both displays. The main screen is the world’s first 16:10 14.5-inch 120 Hz HDR OLED panel, and the second is a 12.7-inch IPS. What we liked is that the tilting mechanism raises the rear end of the ScreenPad Plus positioning it in a way that hides the lower bezel of the OLED panel.

It boosts productivity as a control panel for your apps – it lets you easily change brush size, change saturation, or adjust layer opacity in Photoshop, or scroll through your timeline in Premiere. Or it could just expand the workspace of your main screen. Which, by the way, is gorgeous. It has true blacks, thus an infinite contrast ratio, and a peak brightness of about 550 nits. It also covers 100% of the cinema-grade DCI-P3 color gamut which makes the Zenbook Pro Duo suitable for professional video editing too.

Performance

And there’s a powerful hardware to match, as the Pro Duo UX8402 gets a huge upgrade on the inside, compared to its predecessor. Last year’s model used ULV processors and up to GeForce MX450. Now, the UX8402 comes with up to a full-fledged Core i9 and RTX 3050 Ti. That translates into almost 4 times faster computational performance and almost 3 times better graphics performance. Sounds crazy, right?

Cooling

It is thanks to the improved IceCool Plus thermal system. First, the tilting mechanism of the ScreenPad Plus has one more purpose – it enhances cooling by allowing better airflow to the internals. Also, we now have a dual 12V fan system with two heat pipes, and two heat sinks.

Upgradeability

Here we also see that the new Zenbook Pro Duo works with the ultra-fast Gen 4 SSD drives, for up to 7GBs per second read speed of the storage, while the RAM cannot be upgraded so choose wisely when you order your configuration.

For further info about the teardown process, check out our detailed video in the description.

Conclusion

As you see, the ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 Duo OLED is not just looks. It’s actually one of the biggest generation leaps we’ve seen, like ever. It could be a game-changer for photographers or video editors but it would be a great purchase for the average content enjoyer as well. Or anyone who’d like to have a seriously powerful and super immersive laptop.

A little drawback is the soldered memory and we needed some time to get used to the keyboard and touchpad location. Still, this is one of the most exciting notebooks we’ve tested.