There are few times I can honestly say I’ve been surprised in my job reviewing laptops. Fewer times I can come out and claim I know what I have been missing. My job requires me to use a lot of gear, and most of it is iterative, derivative, or too awkward and pricey to be good for all but the connoisseurs of funky gadgets. So when I came across the newly redesigned Asus Zenbook Duo with the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 flagship chip inside, I found myself amused at my own bemusement—and for once—for all the right reasons.

So let’s get the obvious out of the way. The Zenbook Duo is a dual-screen laptop. There’s an included kickstand that lets you prop up its two 14-inch screens in a vertical format. If you want to be the weirdest guy at Starbucks, the one who cannot turn off work even when they’re sucking down their fifth venti frappuccino, this is the laptop for you. However, I can already tell the Zenbook Duo has spoiled me. This notebook will still run well and for a good long while, even with both screens showing off their pretty pictures.

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The Zenbook Duo isn’t a new idea. Asus showed off a previous dual-screen laptop back in 2024. The same Taiwan-based company is also making a new gaming-centric ROG Zephyrus Duo that adds even more ways to orient the screen. The new version of the Zenbook Duo has significantly reduced the size of the bezels around the twin screens so that you can treat the device as one seamless display—like a foldable, but better. The keyboard that magnetically attaches to the bottom screen feels comfortable whether it’s on the laptop, on your desk, or sitting on your crossed legs. And thanks to the great performance, I don’t feel like I’m sacrificing anything on the altar of novelty.

This laptop also comes with a solid setup of 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. For background, Intel shipped me the Zenbook Duo for review, not Asus. The chipmaker is pinning much of its hopes for consumer products on Panther Lake, the internal code name for the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 chips. This laptop houses the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H, the highest-end Panther Lake chip with the touted 12Xe3 GPU cores. This is Intel’s answer to AMD’s leading Strix Point APUs, aka accelerated processing units, with extra graphics capabilities. The one big difference between Intel and AMD is that “Team Blue” is promising you can get all the benefits of lightweight laptops—namely battery life—with additional GPU capabilities for graphics tasks. Hell, the Zenbook Duo is good for gaming, at least to an extent.

And if you want those extra graphics capabilities (admit it, you do), you’ll need to spend $2,300 for the laptop with the added 12Xe3 cores. A model with the Core Ultra 9 386H CPU, Intel’s top chip without the extra GPU power, costs $2,100. Asus told Gizmodo the company was still ” finalizing schedules” for the eventual release date. The Zenbook Duo is a pricey laptop, though we still don’t know how it will compare to other laptops from this year. More screens will mean a higher price, but with memory prices getting worse every day, you shouldn’t expect to see many cheap machines with any variety of punchy processing power in 2026.

Size does matter, just not as much as you think

I’ve become so used to laptops with slim frames that holding a thick-bodied notebook somehow feels anachronistic. The Zenbook Duo is just over 0.91 inches thick, which in the end isn’t that much. The dual-screen laptop is heavier than most of Asus’ other Zenbooks, especially its incredibly light Zenbook A14. At the same time, frisbee light machines don’t have the kinds of amenities you get on the Zenbook Duo.

Sacrifices are a necessity to fit two screens in a single chassis. Instead of a laptop with little room between its screen and keyboard, the Zenbook Duo adds a little more tolerance, enough to fit the magnetic keyboard in between both OLED touchscreens.

Like all of Asus’ 2026 Zenbooks, the Duo is covered in the company’s “Ceraluminum” texture. Yes, it’s a nonsense word used to describe the anodization process to make these laptops feel more like a piece of pottery than an aluminum behemoth. You’ll feel this mostly on the laptop lid and the Bluetooth keyboard’s palm rests. The individual keys also hold this texture, which has the added effect of making each letter and number feel slippery compared to most other keyboards I’m used to. It’s not like the keyboard is an ice rink or that the keys are more difficult to type on. It’s just a small detail that takes time to get used to.

That detachable keyboard is the linchpin of the entire Zenbook Duo design. It adheres via magnets housed in the bottom screen’s bezels and charges by a set of pins found at the very base of the laptop. The keyboard has a small amount of give if you put enough pressure on either side, where it can shift slightly side to side. The magnets are strong enough; you shouldn’t have an issue typing (I learned the hard way that these magnets tend to stick to any metal table you’re working on). The main reason you get the Zenbook Duo is because the keyboard can come off, revealing the second screen. That’s where this laptop comes into its own.

Larger displays are good, but two screens are even better

Having not one but two 14-inch OLED monitors on a laptop of this size feels luxurious once you compare it to existing options for mobile multi-screen setups. I’ve tried devices like the first-gen Xebec Snap, which includes smaller LCD screens that hook onto the laptop connects via one USB-C port. Portable monitors like the Auro Triple Aero Pro Max are far too cumbersome and ugly to boot.

The Zenbook Duo’s screens are mirrors of each other, though only the bottom screen supports the magnetic keyboard attachment points. To prop the whole thing up for dual-screen mode, you pull out the square kickstand on the laptop’s bottom, which can extend to around 90 degrees. Windows 11 automatically recognized the orientation of the dual screens, which made it seamless to move apps and icons between them. If you’ve never used a vertical screen setup, the experience is eye-opening. For the first time in a long time, you can reach more than one paragraph on screen at a time without an ad sandwiched between; it will make you realize how rough websites have become.

And better yet, that Bluetooth keyboard can sit on your desk or on your lap while you lean back and enjoy the larger screen layout. The Zenbook Duo comes with an HDMI port and two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports if you expect to plug in an additional monitor as well. There’s also a headphone jack, which rounds off the total number of I/O at your disposal. The keyboard has a separate USB-C port for charging when it’s not attached to the laptop. I know the size of the laptop means limited room for ports, but I’ll always wish for more.

Asus promises the hinge is strong enough to survive 40,000 folds. In my two weeks of testing the Zenbook Duo, the hinge proved sturdy enough despite my incessant smushing and extending. There have been attempts at foldable laptops, like the Asus Zenbook 17 Fold or Lenovo ThinkPad X1 16 Fold. The better design for thinner, flexible displays is with devices like Lenovo’s expensive ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable. Despite the novelty of flexible screens, stacking two independent screens on a hinge is an overall cleaner experience with less chance of long-term damage. There’s still a small gap between the screens thanks to the bezels, though it’s not all that distracting even when spreading a single window between the top and bottom. The bigger issue is due to Windows 11. By default, the operating system is desperate to snap your apps to various sizes, which can make dragging windows to your preferred size more difficult than not.

While those older foldable screens could double as a large, heavy, and terrible tablet, you can also hold up the Zenbook Duo like a book and treat it as an odd and awkwardly weighted e-reader. Holding this laptop aloft with outstretched arms is only useful for strengthening your core muscles.

Watch out for any screen reflections

Each screen is a full 3K display (2,880 x 1,800 pixel resolution) with a 48-144Hz refresh rate thanks to VRR (variable refresh rate). With that, you get all the benefits of OLED, namely some amazing contrast to help visuals pop.

As is typical with organic light-emitting diode screens, the Zenbook Duo is not the brightest laptop around. Whatever Asus may say about brightness in HDR, both screens will still look a little dim in direct light. The displays are also glossy, which will enhance visuals in perfect conditions but can lead to a mirror-like reflectivity in some environments. It’s not so bad in direct light that text becomes illegible. In the end, I would prefer a glossy display to something with a more matte finish.

Having two displays on top of each other means you can set up your displays to have a game or movie running on one screen and Discord, a browser, or whatever else you want on the other. It’s the kind of machine for killing two birds with one stone or—more likely—blowing off work while pretending you’re getting stuff done. As for whether this will be your go-to as an entertainment console, it can’t quite be everything to everyone. The laptop comes with a six-speaker system that includes two tweeters and four woofers. That setup will let content blare loud enough to wake your partner on the other side of your apartment. In my experience, the sound came out clear, though a little too flat to truly be called “immersive.” It’s perfectly usable as its own speaker, though don’t expect it to beat a solid pair of headphones or a soundbar.

Intel Core Ultra Series 3 combines portability with power

When Intel first debuted its Panther Lake series of chips in October 2025, it promised us Lunar Lake efficiency and battery life with Arrow Lake performance. In my tests, the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H can meet and even beat the mid-range Arrow Lake CPUs. That’s not to say the new Intel chip is underperforming. Far from it. Intel’s Panther Lake flagship chip is the kind of beast that stalks the forests and pounces when you least expect it to. What’s more, its GPU capabilities are that much more exciting, with this chip promising you have the potential for solid gaming performance without needing to sacrifice battery life when doing other tasks.

Luckily, just before diving into the Asus Zenbook Duo, I had the chance to work on the Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 8. That laptop used a previous-gen Intel Core Ultra 7 255H. It’s one of Intel’s mid-range Arrow Lake laptop chips, and it’s where I can create a point of comparison for how well the Zenbook Duo’s CPU performs. In my tests, the Core Ultra X9 388H overcomes that 16-core Arrow Lake chip with room to spare. In Geekbench 6 tests, the Core Ultra X9 388H hit 300 points more than the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8’s Core Ultra 7 255 in single-core settings and close to 1,000 points better in multi-core settings.

That’s not to say the latest Panther Lake chip is the cream of the crop for lightweight laptops. Apple, ever the king of benchmarks, still has the M5 chip in its latest 14-inch MacBook Pro. That 10-core chip marked a single-core score 1,200 points above the top-end Panther Lake, though it achieved a similar spec for multi-core tests. It’s a similar story for Cinebench 2024 tests, where the Core Ultra X9 388H CPU can match Apple’s smaller ARM-based chip but can’t equal it core to core. Not like that should matter to you as a prospective laptop buyer. The dual-screen Zenbook Duo is snappy and fast for everyday tasks and then some.

For instance, in our Blender test, where we time how long the laptop takes to render a scene on both the CPU and GPU, the Zenbook Duo took nearly 20 seconds less than the MacBook Pro with M5 running on the CPU. It can’t quite match the speed of a higher-end chip, like the Intel Core Ultra 200HX series you’ll find in gaming laptops, but two minutes is not shabby. The GPU was on par with the time it took the ThinkPad P1 Gen 8’s RTX Pro 2000 discrete GPU to do the same test.

Is Panther Lake good for gaming?

Intel’s top-end chipset includes the Arc B380 graphics with the touted 12 Xe3 GPU cores. There’s an interesting bit of silicon running underneath the Zenbook Duo. This single chip uses a die-to-die bridge to communicate between the CPU and GPU portions of the chip. This means Intel could expand the size of the GPU without creating more latency between the two sections of the chip. The X9 and X7 chips all feature the same graphics with their touted 12 ray tracing units and 16MB L2 cache.

In some tests, the Intel Core Ultra’s GPU can match up to some older-generation graphics cards. In my tests, it could beat the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 on an Asus TUF Gaming A14 from 2024 in 3DMark’s “Time Spy” benchmarks. Just before you go over the moon, Intel’s integrated GPU is nowhere close to beating a more modern GPU like the RTX 5070 in recent devices like the Framework 16 in 3DMark’s more intensive benchmarks. It also won’t beat AMD’s more-powerful Ryzen AI Max chips when going toe-to-toe, especially when the Zenbook Duo is only running at a max 45W TDP (thermal design power). A device like the Asus ROG Flow Z13 with the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 can manually clock up to more than 80W TDP.

What gets missed in the hunt for higher frame rates is the sense of whether a game is actually playable on any one system. The Zenbook Duo can hit some frame rates that are impressive for its size. In Cyberpunk 2077, the laptop can get to 50 fps with the high settings preset at 1080p. If you push that to the max resolution of 2,880 x 1,800, you can get 23 fps. Using Intel’s upscaling technology, XeSS, you can make that around 45 fps. That’s perfectly playable, though if you want to make use of Panther Lake’s ray tracing cores, you can squeak out a playable 30 fps with ray tracing on low settings, plus the use of upscaling.

That’s a similar story with games like Black Myth: Wukong, which can hit 37 fps with high graphics settings and ray tracing set to medium at 1200p. In Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, I managed to get 28 fps at high settings and the max resolution without relying on XeSS. With some considerations for upscaling, that makes the game playable and look good to boot.

In a game like Total War: Warhammer III—which is normally a CPU-dependent title—I could net around 30 fps on the ultra graphics settings preset. There won’t be a lightweight laptop with an AMD or Intel chip that can stomach modern, AAA games without upscaling. That’s fine. This GPU is good enough for light to medium gaming if you’re willing to buy into what Intel is selling. Intel made a big deal out of its new multi-frame generation model available to the updated XeSS 3 software available in some games.

Multi-frame generation, also called frame interpolation, essentially sticks multiple AI-generated frames between rendered frames, artificially increasing the frame rate. This normally comes at the cost of occasional graphics glitches and higher latency. Intel promised that “most” XeSS 2 games will get updates to support XeSS 3 with multi-frame generation with a driver override capability.

Whether or not you want to use it is up to each player. My best advice is to only enable frame gen once you already can get at least 50 fps after upscaling. Even better would be 60 fps. You’re not going to notice as many graphical artifacts on a smaller screen like the Zenbook Duo’s 14-inch displays. Just don’t let anybody, whether they’re Intel or Asus, tell you this laptop can hit 60 fps with Cyberpunk 2077 on high settings without help.

What does ‘all-day battery’ mean?

The phrase “all-day battery life” is, in my experience, a complete misnomer. It doesn’t describe how different kinds of on-device activity might drain longevity. So when I say the Asus Zenbook Duo has an “all-day battery,” what I mean is that I could get a full workday’s worth of juice out of this laptop without needing to reach for a charger. That accounts for me and my usual workflow, where I’m mostly using browsers for accessing Gizmodo’s content mangement system and the occasional photo editing app.

What was even more impressive was how long the Zenbook Duo lasted, even with both screens open at once. With both screens open, I managed to eke out nearly 7 hours of battery life before the laptop was begging for the outlet. Non-workaholics who take longer lunch breaks may manage to get the laptop home and away without needing to plug it in.

I won’t stop dreaming of the “everything laptop.” One day, we’ll have a mobile machine that’s great for gaming, productivity, and longevity all at once. I don’t think we’ve ever come closer thanwith the Asus Zenbook Duo. There’s no major fault that I can find with it, except for that eye-watering price tag (and, if I were being honest, the fact that it’s stuck with an ever-more AI-centric version of Windows).

The Zenbook Duo’s graphics capabilities may not sound as exciting as the hype for Panther Lake led some folk to believe. There’s only so much of a power envelope you can stuff inside a laptop chassis before you end up with a three-hour battery and a power adapter as large and heavy as a spoiled guinea pig. For a laptop of this size, the Zenbook Duo offers more than what I thought I needed. Sometimes, it’s good to be surprised.