The dual-screen design once brought new ideas to laptop innovation, but after a small boom, the corresponding products gradually fell silent. And it is not surprising that ASUS has been able to persist to this day is still engraved with innovation in its DNA, because this is ASUS.
Before writing about the ASUS Zenbook 14 Dual Screen, I have been responsible for the evaluation of dual-screen notebooks in recent years, from one and a half dual screens to two full screens to two full screens, which seems simple but there are too many factors to consider. Product design structure, heat dissipation, stability, control experience, interactive experience and the application of adaptation, each link needs to be more finely controlled, and it is precisely in every key link that the extreme is as extreme as possible, which has created today's Zenbook 14 dual screen. Whether you approve of this design or not, there is no doubt that it is the culmination of the development of the dual-screen notebook category to this day, and it is also another milestone in the industrial design of laptops.
It's been nearly 12 years since the release of ASUS's first dual-screen notebook, the Taichi 21, this year. After the screen technology, hardware technology, materials and other factors are more mature, Zenbook 14 dual screen has brought me the ultimate shock.
In fact, before I got this machine, that is, when I went to the United States to participate in the CES2024 at the beginning of January this year, I had already seen and simply experienced this product, and the first thing that was amazing was the shocking visual experience composed of two full-size screens, which was impressive! Now after getting the product and playing with it for a while, I can confidently tell you that dual screens are not gimmicks, but a completely referenced choice.
The dual 14-inch large screen design is unique
The most difficult thing to be satisfied with with dual-screen notebooks is the interactive experience of the lower screen. Isn't it true that when we use our phones, we don't think the touch experience is great, but when it comes to productivity tools like laptops, touch alone has a very obvious drawback – it can't meet the needs of long hours of keyboard typing.
Slipping and dragging on a piece of glass is fine, except for continuous tapping. Anyone who has ever used a virtual keyboard for text input knows that long tapping can be very uncomfortable for fingers, and if the haptic feedback of the virtual keyboard is not in place, the discomfort of this interactive experience will be further amplified.
Zenbook 14 Dual uses a magnetic Bluetooth keyboard to solve this problem, and it has achieved good results. And it is very important that the connection and use of the magnetic keyboard is "non-inductive". The user only needs to pick up the keyboard and put it on, and it can be used directly, but if there is one more connection step in the middle, it will be a failure, and ASUS does not give it a chance to fail.
Zenbook 14 The maximum opening and closing angle of the dual-screen screen is actually slightly more than 180°, and when the two full-size 2.8K ultra-narrow bezel OLED touchable ASUS good screens are stretched out at the same time, the visual impact is instantly full.
At the same time, ASUS has taken into account the inconvenience of placing it flat on the desktop in dual-screen use scenarios, so it has specially designed a large-area metal bracket at the bottom, with a maximum opening and closing angle of about 92°, and the fuselage support is very stable, and can provide a support angle almost perpendicular to the desktop, further amplifying the convenience of use in dual-screen scenarios.
The overall design of the Zenbook 14 dual screen continues the Zenbook series, and the whole machine is made of recyclable magnesium and aluminum alloy materials, which emphasizes low carbon and environmental protection. The understated and restrained style of the matte black lacquer is in stark contrast to the stunning feeling when the dual screens are unfolded, so it will always make a splash for those who are not familiar with this product. During the week's time that the author used this machine, many colleagues were a little unimpressed when they saw the Zenbook 14 dual screen in the closed state, but when the screen was turned on and the moment the keyboard was withdrawn, everyone would sincerely let out an exclamation, and this contrasting design to be honest, it could really bring a lot of satisfaction to its owner.
Interface expansion capability is guaranteed to meet daily needs
The ASUS Zenbook 14's dual-display connectivity is ready for everyday use, with a standard HDMI 2.1 (TMDS) video port and a 3.5mm headset jack on the right side of the body.
The left side of the fuselage is equipped with 1 USB-A 3.2 Gen1 port and 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports (supporting DP 2.1+PD charging).
The Bluetooth keyboard body is designed to be very slim, and it only needs to be connected to the laptop to use it when you take it down. And since it is a Bluetooth keyboard, it can actually be connected to other Bluetooth-enabled devices, just press and hold F10. It also comes with a Type-C charging port.
Ultra-thin bluetooth keyboard feels good and has high input efficiency
Don't look at the slim design of this Bluetooth keyboard, but you don't have to worry about the feel of it at all. The ErgoSense Ergonomic Backlit Silent Keyboard has the same key travel as a regular laptop keyboard at 1.4mm. The key spacing is 19.05mm, the key pressure gram is low, and the feel is soft, which is very suitable for typing. The surface of the keycap has a 0.3mm concave to fit the fingers. When adsorbed on the C-side, its bottom is connected to the laptop through a metal probe and charged.
The power button on the ASUS Zenbook 14 Dual Display is located near the left side axis and is almost integrated into the C-side bezel. There are two status indicators on the left side of the power button, so you can see the status of the power supply and system at any time.
The trackpad area is very large, spanning almost the entire wrist rest area. Measuring 130×74mm, the surface is smooth to the touch and precise to handle. And after taking it off, it is also very easy to control in the case of pure Bluetooth connection, so you don't need to worry about the control experience.
In addition, ASUS Zenbook 14 dual screen also provides a virtual keyboard with a trackpad, friends who know the ASUS dual screen series can probably see that the specifications of this virtual keyboard are the same as the previous Zenbook X dual screen Pro series. As mentioned earlier, the virtual keyboard is no problem with some short-term input, but it is really unbearable to write a review of thousands of words like the author.
·“ ASUS Good Screen" super doubles the experience
ASUS Zenbook 14The quality of the two screens with dual screens is not picky,"ASUS good screen doubled"The experience is naturally the biggest feature of this product。
After the two screens are unfolded, they can reach nearly 20 inches of display area, single screen 14 inches 16:10 ratio, 2.8K resolution + 120Hz high brush, and support VRR intelligent refresh, 0.2ms fast response, passed the DisplayHDR True Black 500 certification, support RGB complete secondary pixel no PPI loss, pixel-level compensation technology anti-burning screen, TUV hardware-level low blue light flicker-free certification, SGS Eye Care eye care certification, Full brightness DC dimming (HDR mode), and anti-flicker mode, coupled with the excellent color accuracy and color gamut parameters of the OLED screen, ASUS can be said to have given the best screen parameters that can be given at this stage, and it gives two pieces at a time.
Let's refer to the test of the spider colorimeter to see what the actual quality of the screen is?
Zenbook 14 Dual Display offers a variety of color gamut modes, including Native, sRGB, DCI-P3, and Display P3, which can be switched between ASUS PC Manager MyASUS without HDR enabled.
First of all, let's look at the screen brightness, which is the underlying foundation of the color gamut and color accuracy performance of the screen. In native color mode, the default maximum brightness of the screen is 387.89nits, which is the average level of similar products (more than 350nits).
After turning on HDR, the peak brightness of the screen came to 658.12nits, which is enough for the high dynamic range of HDR, which can well show the advantages of HDR.
In terms of color gamut coverage, we tested the native color gamut, Display P3, and sRGB modes. The details are as follows:
Native color gamut mode, sRGB color gamut coverage 100%, color gamut volume 178.9%; The P3 color gamut covers 99.9% and the color gamut volume is 126.7%, which is an excellent performance. Display P3 mode sRGB color gamut coverage and color gamut volume and P3 color gamut coverage and color gamut volume are also very good. In sRGB mode, the sRGB color gamut covers 99.2% and the color gamut volume is 103.1%, which is excellent.
Next, refer to the color gamut coverage in the three modes. The color area is the actual performance of the screen,The dotted line is the standard range by default,You can see the native color gamut、P3Color gamut、The coverage of the sRGB color gamut has reached a perfect degree,It shows the performance advantages of this screen。
Native
P3
sRGB
Finally, let's take a look at the color accuracy, which mainly refers to the color accuracy performance in Display P3 and sRGB mode.
It can be seen that the average color accuracy ΔE value of this screen is below 0.7, and the highest value is only 2.03, the color deviation is extremely low, and the color accuracy is extremely accurate. Finally, the color accuracy map in the color gamut mode is attached, and you can see that all the color displays on the map are very accurate, worthy of the concept of "ASUS good screen".
The dual-display design gives the ASUS Zenbook 14 Dual Display more flexible ways to use it, including sharing mode, portrait mode, virtual keyboard mode, waterfall mode, and traditional notebook mode, which goes beyond the four classic modes of flip screen design. In addition, in terms of dual-screen collaboration, this product is unique.
Dual screens bring more flexible ways to use, and ASUS has also officially adapted the functional experience for practical applications, which greatly enhances the practical value of dual screens.
In the sharing mode, the dual-screen design is perfectly highlighted. As shown in the two images below, when two people face each other to view the upper and lower screens at the same time, the direction of the pattern can be directly facing the viewer. Not only is it easy to share pictures, but documents, PPT, videos, etc., can be presented on dual screens from the perspective of the viewer.
Thanks to two full 14-inch screens, Zenbook 14 Dual Screen can now be read vertically and split screen with the help of gyroscopes and the adaptive rotation feature of the Windows system, which is naturally much better than a single screen. Moreover, split-screen reading can often bring significant efficiency improvements to office, study, research, retouching and other applications, which is known to friends who have been practical.
Waterfall mode is also a source of visual stria for dual-screen designs, and it's also a great way to increase efficiency. At the same time, with the Bluetooth keyboard, the experience will be even better. For example, when you have a daily online meeting, it is difficult to view the information while opening the conference software in a single-screen state, and you always feel that two applications will encroach on each other's space, and the waterfall mode puts different applications on different screens to perfectly solve this kind of problem.
The advantage of dual screens is that different content can be presented on two screens at the same time, for example, when writing reviews, in order to avoid some mistakes in details, it is often used to refer to the details of the product sales page by splitting the left and right screens. To be honest, the split screen in one screen is still not comfortable enough,And the experience of the upper and lower dual screens is much better,Reference information on the upper screen,Code words on the lower screen,Efficiency and experience have been improved。
In addition, the ASUS Zenbook 14 Dual also supports ASUS Dial and Virtual Keyboard, which can also significantly improve productivity when performing tasks such as PR video editing and PS/LR image and photo processing.
Its practical use of the popular phrase to describe ASUS Zenbook 14 dual screen is - so far, it has become art!
Equipped with Intel Core Ultra 9 185H top-of-the-line processor
If you look at it from the perspective of users who want to buy ASUS Zenbook 14 dual screen, there is a high probability that they don't pay much attention to performance. But dual-screen notebooks actually need good performance to support more than single-screen notebooks, after all, high-resolution screens themselves will eat up a lot of performance, and if the configuration is insufficient, it will be very stuck to use, which is extremely common on some dual-screen notebooks in the early years.
The ASUS Zenbook 14 Dual Display is equipped with an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor, which is the top-of-the-line model in the Core Ultra family and delivers excellent performance. At the same time, this machine is also equipped with 32GB LPDDR5X 7467MHz memory, 2TB PCIe 4.0 solid state drive, and the GPU is the processor's own Intel Arc core graphics. Let's take a look at the theoretical performance of each core hardware.
According to CPU-Z information retrieval, the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H processor uses 6 performance cores, 8 energy efficiency cores and 2 ultra-low-power cores, with a total of 16 cores and 22 threads. It can reach a maximum turbo frequency of 5.1GHz, has 24MB of L3 cache, and has a base TDP of 45W. This processor is built on the new Intel 4 process technology, which is the 7nm process technology, using Intel's advanced Foveros 3D packaging technology, and for the first time, it uses a separate modular architecture design, let's take a look at its performance.
First of all, refer to the single-core and multi-core performance of CPU-Z. Judging from the test results, the Core Ultra 9 185H has a single-core score of 760 and a multi-core score of 8005.9, which is much higher than the Core Ultra 7 155H, which is also 16 cores and 22 threads, and is indeed the level that the current model with the highest specifications in the family should have.
UNDER CINEBENCH R23 AND 2024 TEST STANDARDS, R23 SCORED 1813 FOR SINGLE-CORE AND 16035 FOR MULTI-CORE, WHICH IS AN EXCELLENT OVERALL PERFORMANCE, WHILE UNDER THE CINEBENCH 2024 STANDARD, THIS PROCESSOR SCORED 107 FOR SINGLE-CORE AND 793 FOR MULTI-CORE.
Under the 3DMark CPU Profile test standard, the Core Ultra 9 185H processor scored 986 for a single thread, 1896 for 2 threads, 3379 for 4 threads, 4895 for 8 threads, 6081 for 16 threads, and 6362 for the largest thread.
The Core Ultra processor introduces a NPU computing unit dedicated to AI acceleration, and we evaluated the AI performance of the NPU module of the Core Ultra 9 185H processor using UL Procyon's AI test, which measured a Float16 floating-point computing power of 279 points. There is no problem in dealing with some low-power AI applications. In fact, the main load of the NPU in the Windows system is low-power AI tasks such as camera noise reduction and background blur, which can significantly save the energy consumption of the whole machine when placed on the NPU.
Arc core graphics card provides a better graphics performance experience
Next, let's take a look at the performance of the Core Ultra 9 185H processor's integrated Intel Arc GPU.
As can be seen in the 3DMark tests, the Arc core graphics score is 3469 on the DX12 TimeSpy graphics performance test, and the DX11 Fire Strike test score is 8826, the overall performance release is higher than that of the Core Ultra 7 155H integrated Arc GPU, and compared with the previous Iris Xe GPU, the overall performance of the Arc GPU has doubled.
In addition, Ruixuan core graphics actually support DX12U, support ray tracing, although it is unrealistic to use the core display to open ray tracing in games, but in fact, ray tracing is not only used in games, film and television, 3D rendering and other creative productivity applications will also use ray tracing. Therefore, it also means that the thin and light laptops without independent graphics cards can actually cover certain ray tracing application requirements.
In addition, thanks to the support of Intel OpenVINO, Ruixuan core graphics can enjoy OpenVINO acceleration optimization, so it can also speed up some AI applications. We tested the AI performance of the Arc Core with UL Procyon, and the Float16 scored 400, which is very good.
Balanced and efficient productivity application platform
In terms of storage, Zenbook 14 dual screen is equipped with a 2TB ultra-large capacity PCIe 4.0 solid state drive, and its Q8T1 sequential read speed is 5224.59MB/s, write speed is 4218.61MB/s, 4KQ1T1 random read speed is 60.51MB/s, and write speed is 85.66MB/s, which is no problem to meet the smooth operation of the system and software in daily use.
Zenbook 14 has a unique dual screen design, but it is essentially a platform focused on productivity applications, so let's take a look at the overall productivity performance of this product, with CrossMark and PCMark10 in the theoretical test and UL Procyon in the application level.
In the CrossMark productivity performance test, it scored 1784 points overall, 1715 points for productivity, 1990 points for creativity, and 1445 points for responsiveness.
PCMark 10 scored 10,519 for basic functions, including web browsing, video conferencing, and application launching, indicating that it had no problems completing these basic office tasks, while scoring 8,952 in the productivity sub-test indicating that it has efficient spreadsheet and document work performance, and 9,024 in digital content creation, indicating that it can complete images, videos, and Graphics rendering, etc., with a comprehensive score of 6790 points, the overall performance is excellent.
In the UL Procyon test, we mainly refer to the photo editing test and the video editing test, the former uses Photoshop and Lightroom for photo processing, which can reflect the real picture editing ability of the machine. The latter uses Premiere for video editing, which can also truly reflect the efficiency of video editing.
In the image editing test, the ASUS Zenbook 14 Dual Screen scored 6675 points, which can bring users a very efficient experience in image editing.
With a video editing score of 3565 points, it is no problem for a GPU model to cope with the editing of 1080p, 4K short and medium-sized videos.
Overall, based on the Core Ultra 9 185H processor, the ASUS Zenbook 14 dual display can bring users a good overall productivity application experience.
Wensheng diagram meets basic needs without stress
The CPU, GPU, and NPU in the Intel Core Ultra platform are all capable of supporting AI computing. The VNNI instruction set in the CPU is dedicated to AI acceleration to provide support for speech recognition and image recognition, while the GPU itself has powerful floating-point computing capabilities, which are extremely efficient for AIGC applications such as text and image generation, and benefit from Intel OpenVINO accelerates, and the efficiency will be more guaranteed, while the NPU is mainly responsible for the low-power AI computing platform at this stage, providing sufficient computing power while ensuring battery life, but although it is a low-power computing module, there is no problem in processing AI applications with large data sets at this stage.
Let's take a look at some practical applications to see how the ASUS Zenbook 14 Dual Screen performs in terms of AI applications.
Since Intel introduced the AI acceleration engine from the 11th Gen Core, the CPU hardware has realized support for AI-related applications. Initially, it was the image recognition and audio noise reduction functions of some cameras and microphones, but after the Core Ultra platform upgraded the Arc core graphics and supported NPU modules, some localized large-scale AI applications were also better supported. For example, Stable Diffusion, an open-source AIGC software that is easy to use, can be used with the Core Ultra platform to bring a more secure and reliable localized AI application experience to some users who need to make Wensheng and Tusheng applications.
The author tried to use the ASUS Zenbook 14 dual screen to generate 5 high-quality images, which took 8 minutes and 48 seconds, and the overall efficiency is still okay in terms of the configuration of the core display.
Excellent heat dissipation performance and good battery life
Finally, let's take a look at the cooling and battery life performance of the ASUS Zenbook 14 Dual Display. Because it is not equipped with a discrete graphics card, we only look at the CPU single copy machine test. This product uses a heat dissipation module with dual fans, dual heat pipes, graphene sheets, and vapor chambers to ensure that the screen life will not be affected.
Under the AIDA 64 Stress FPU CPU single-copy machine stress test, the power consumption of the processor package is stable at around 35W, the core temperature is only 80°C, the heat dissipation performance is excellent, and the power consumption release is OK, because the reliability of the dual-screen design should be considered, so the power consumption cannot be too much.
Finally, let's take a look at the battery life of the Zenbook 14 dual screen. This product is equipped with a 75Wh large-capacity lithium battery as standard, and the battery life is measured to be 13 hours and 17 minutes in the single-screen open state of PCMark 10 office mode at 50% brightness, 30% volume, system energy-saving mode, control software quiet mode, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth full on, 60Hz refresh rate, and PCMark 10 office mode with single screen on.
In addition, this product also supports fast charging, referring to the battery level information of the Windows 11 system, starting to charge from 9 o'clock in the morning at 3% of the power, to about 11 o'clock in the morning, the total charging capacity reaches 85%, and the charging speed is still satisfactory.
Review summary
The ASUS Zenbook 14 Dual Screen is undoubtedly the culmination of ASUS dual-screen notebook design, and after several product iterations and enough experience, ASUS has made the dual-screen notebook no longer a gimmick more than practicality, but a true combination of application and dual-screen design flexibility, thus bringing users a novel and practical experience.
Speaking of the product itself, ASUS Zenbook 14 dual screen is impeccable as a tool for productivity and creativity, from product design to experience, from performance release to heat dissipation and battery life, it has reached a very good level, continuing to show ASUS's extraordinary strength in the industrial design of notebook products.
So, if you want to experience a completely different laptop, then the ASUS Zenbook 14 Dual Screen is definitely the most suitable choice at the moment. Of course, its price has also come to more than 10,000 yuan, but to be honest, it is not as expensive as imagined.
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