CES 2026: Asus' New Gaming Laptop Looks Like a Gigantic Nintendo DS

CES is the time of year for weird computers, and Asus is bringing back an old fan favorite to help fill its unusual form factor quota. Gamers who miss the days of dual screens, get excited: the ROG Zephyrus Duo is returning for 2026, and it's bigger than ever.

Looking a bit like a gigantic Nintendo DS, the new ROG Zephyrus Duo stacks two full-sized 3K OLED screens on top of each other, with a standard laptop hinge in between. It's a lot like the company's existing Zenbook Duo, but that one's geared more for productivity users—the Zephyrus Duo is fully specced out for gamers, with a 120Hz refresh rate on both screens, the latest Intel Core Ultra chips, up to an RTX 5090 laptop GPU, up to 64GB of RAM, and up to 2TB of storage. Plus, it supports 250W fast charging and can play games using up to 125W of power.

New ROG Zephyrus Duo (left) vs. ROG Zephyrus Duo 2023 (right). Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

That's plenty for even the most demanding games, although its price is still an unknown for now. What we do know is how different this is from the last Zephyrus Duo, which came out in 2023. That laptop's lower screen was a simple small angled panel above the keyboard, instead of a full-sized display matching the upper one. It was great for displaying stats at a glance while playing, but not much else.

Instead, the new Zephyrus Duo can display the same game across both screens, mirror them, or pull up reference material on one screen while you play on the other. It's also got a bunch of new ways you can use it: It comes with a detachable wireless keyboard, and you can either use it like a normal laptop with that keyboard covering one of the screens, or get creative.

Credit: Asus

An example photo from Asus show the laptop with one screen above the other, both screens in a side-to-side portrait mode, the whole laptop laid flat on a table (perhaps for head-to-head play), and tent mode. Tent mode is especially interesting—an Asus representative told journalists that gamers could play the same game against each other while sitting across from each other in tent mode, with each display acting as a private screen. He did acknowledge that this might impact performance and compatibility might differ based on game, but I could see it being an especially great option for, say, fighting games.

Again, this format has been used for non-gaming laptops before, but it's seemingly got a lot of potential for gamers, too. There's a reason one of Nintendo's most popular handhelds opted for a dual-screen setup. And hey, maybe you could even play some DS games made on this, too.

The new ROG Zephyrus Duo is expected to launch sometime in Q2 of this year.

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