I need to try Asus' new double-screen gaming laptop – the design finally now makes sense

Asus clearly thinks this CES is going to be a big moment for its dual-screen options – it's launching a pair of high-end Duo machines, and while the Zenbook Duo is a revision of an already existing product, it's the ROG Zephyrus Duo that's really caught my eye. I test a lot of gaming laptops, including some of the very best ones out there, but I've never had my hands on one with two displays.

In fact, as the below press image from Asus immediately illustrates, I think that gaming scenarios might make a more obvious and understandable justification for why you could need two screens (at great cost) than normal productivity does. Why worry about split-screen co-op when you can have dual-screen?

Like the Zenbook Duo, the line between double tablet and two-screened laptop is quite thin here. The ROG Zephyrus Duo's main body is a hinged pair of 16-inch displays, each of which hides some of the main components of the laptop behind itself. At a glance, it looks like a normal laptop, thanks to a magnetically detachable panel that houses the keyboard and trackpad. Underneath that panel is the second display for when you need it.

Neither of those displays will let the team down, either. They're both 3K 120Hz OLED panels with 0.2ms response times that should look amazing regardless of what you're playing. That's augmented by the option of including up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 laptop GPU, the most powerful out there, along with Intel's latest-generation processors.

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That makes for a super-powerful setup, but of course, it might need to be – if you're hoping that you might play games across two screens at once, that's a lot of rendering to handle. That said, I can't immediately think of many games that would actually allow for this, but you could presumably run separate instances of games at the same time to make it doable.

I wouldn't expect developers to really make dedicated double-screen modes just for this sort of laptop, not least since it'll likely be really expensive and therefore not the biggest seller. Still, who knows where the dual-screen market might be in a few years' time. Asus clearly hopes it's going to go from strength to strength.