Stefan Mileschin

Last year ASUS introduced its exclusive ZenBook Pro Duo laptops with a secondary display aimed at creative professionals with performance-hungry color critical workloads. At CES 2020, the company revealed a new iteration of its dual-screen notebook — the ZenBook Duo UX481 — designed for road warriors (or creators in budget) and promising to offer decent performance and battery life in addition to the second monitor.

The ASUS ZenBook Duo model UX481 comes in the company's signature Celestial Blue aluminum unibody and is equipped with a Pantone Validated 14-inch Full HD display with optional touch support and a 12.6-inch auxiliary screen. The latter can be used to run apps designed for the company’s ScreenPad or just extend Windows programs to it and increase useful screen real estate. It will be interesting to find out how significantly will the auxiliary monitor improve performance in productivity applications used by people who work on the go, but at least ASUS believes that this LCD makes sense for the target audience.

Inside the ZenBook Duo machine is Intel’s 10th Generation Comet Lake Core i5-10210U or Core i7-10510U processor (with UHD Graphics) that can be optionally enhanced with NVIDIA’s discrete GeForce MX 250 GPU with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory. The system comes with up to 16 GB of soldered-down LPDDR3 DRAM as well as a 256GB/512GB/1 TB PCIe SSD. Connectivity wise, we have a fairly standard 2020 laptop here, so it has Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5, USB 3.2 Gen 1/2 with Type-A as well as Type-C connectors, HDMI, microSD, and a combo audio jack.

ASUS equipped its ZenBook Duo with a 70 Wh battery, but it is rather hard to make predictions about actual battery life of the notebook given its second screen and applications developed for it. As for portability, being aimed at road warriors, the ZenBook Duo UX481 is relatively compact and lightweight for an aluminum 14-incher (especially when an additional screen is taken into account): it weighs 1.5 kilograms and is 19.9 mm thick.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15377...book-duo-ux481