ASUS ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 2022: Avoid at Any Cost

A 4,500EUR machine with a display defect that ASUS cannot fix

My ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 2022

This is a tragic story of a laptop that had it all, but the severe quality issues made it the worst laptop purchase of my life.

ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 is attractive

The story begins with a feeling of excitement. I indeed was very excited about Zephyrus Duo 16:

1. A laptop with two separate screens! No one else does it! You can have code and browser on the main screen and chat and terminal on the second touchscreen. Having two screens is much better than having one large screen.
2. It comes with the RTX 3080 Ti laptop GPU with 16GiB of memory, which is enough to play around with ML models.
3. I have owned ASUS ZenBook UX32VD since 2012, and I like it.

So I went for it and spent 4,500 EUR on a laptop.

Zephyrus Duo in practice

I have to admit I still love this form factor and think it has potential, but only if ASUS fixes these irritating issues:

1. The main display is a disaster. I had it replaced two times, and still, it doesn’t work on lower brightness levels. See details below.
2. The angle of the second screen is set in stone. For my taste, the second screen is too tilted backwards. So it sits there, facing the sky, and you cannot adjust it so that you actually see what’s on it. I think this is because the second screen covers the main screen when in a comfortable viewing position. As a result, I constantly lean forward to see what’s on the second screen. Moreover, the text is rather small, so the second screen is not a good fit for the apps you continuously look at.
3. The touchpad feels cheap. You can only click it at the bottom, where the two buttons are located, as it was with touchpads in 2010. The precision is not great also. Let’s say the MacBook’s touchpad is 10, and then ASUS’s touchpad is 5 or 6 at best. Besides, it’s very narrow, so you need to get used to it.
4. The NumPad button always gets in the way, and when pressed, it disables the touchpad altogether. Thus, once in 20 minutes, I wondered why my mouse stopped moving. I even managed to accidentally push the NumPad button while writing this sentence! Luckily, ASUS software lets you disable the NumPad button, which means you will not use the NumPad at all. I think the NumPad button should be a physical button instead of embedded in the touchpad.
5. It doesn’t support Linux! You can technically install Linux, but the touchscreen software only works on Windows. Therefore, the only way to run Linux on this laptop is by using a virtual machine.

The darkness has swallowed my screen!

A Video demonstration of the darkness issue

Display: Mini LED 2560 x 1600 pixels, 165Hz, max brightness 1000 cd/m²

The main screen of ROG Zephyrus 16 Duo is its main problem. I expected issues with the experimental touchscreen, but it was okay.

I always set displays to lower brightness levels to preserve eyes, but when I do this to ASUS, the dark stains spread through the screen, swallowing content and my hopes for a bright future.

The problem reliably reproduces on high-contrast content at lower brightness levels.

Interestingly, I first saw this problem after Zephyrus updated its BIOS. Even more, I saw two BIOS updates causing the darkness issue:

1. Update to the 308 version ten days after purchase.
2. Update to the 315 version 3 hours after the second screen replacement.

The BIOS update starts automatically

ASUS Customer Support is not supportive

I contacted ASUS support and reported the issue with dark stains. I stated that I believed the BIOS update caused the issue, so they could fix it remotely by issuing a new update. ASUS support asked me to send them the laptop, which I did since they should know better.

ASUS has replaced the LCD matrix on my laptop. So, naturally, I decided to run the screen through the EIZO monitor test and found that it had significant uniformity issues.

The Uniformity issue of ROG Zephyrus 16 Duo

I couldn’t believe this great laptop had such a poor display that I filed another service request to see if ASUS could fix the uniformity issues. ASUS took the laptop and replaced the LCD matrix again.
Upon receipt, I tested the laptop using the EIZO monitor test. Unfortunately, the uniformity issues were still there, but in addition, the screen had a broken pixel (or a piece of dirt stuck under the glass). That’s what you get for filing too many service requests.

But that was not the end of the story. I had been using the laptop for 3 hours after service repair when it decided to install another BIOS update (315), which, surprisingly, resurrected the problem with dark areas covering the content.

Some stats:

1. The laptop went through two display replacements done by ASUS Service.
2. I couldn’t work on the laptop for 47 days while waiting for the repair or preparing the laptop for the service (you need to wipe all your data).
3. I had 13 days of happy and careless work on this laptop in two months.

As a result of two service repairs, the laptop now has the same issue as when I bought it. Unfortunately, ASUS was not able to fix it.

Conclusion

ASUS has severe quality issues. Whether it’s cheap displays, buggy software, or absent quality assurance processes — I don’t know, and I don’t care. I have seen three (!!!) displays installed on my laptop, all of which had issues. What are the odds of that? ASUS doesn’t know how to fix this issue.

Given that ROG Zephyrus 16 Duo price can reach 5000 EUR, I expected ASUS to pay much more attention to quality assurance processes after manufacturing and service repairs.

Therefore, I can only recommend you to stay away from ROG Zephyrus Duo 16 because the chances are you will have the same faulty display as I have, and even ASUS will not be able to help you.