AMD had announced the Ryzen 9 5980HX during the CES event, where the Taiwanese chipmaker unveiled the latest Ryzen 5000 series APUs for laptops. It was unveiled alongside the Ryzen 7 5800U and Ryzen 9 5900HX, but while the latter two have been featured in powerful business and gaming laptops, the top-of-the-line Ryzen 9 5980HX has been missing in action so far. But not anymore.
LaptopUnderBudget spotted a listing on Newegg that indicates that Asus will be among the first to introduce this elite Ryzen 9 APU in a laptop. And it’s not just any other laptop — it will come as a new upper variant of the ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 SE. The listing corroborates a recent leak of the Ryzen 9 5980HX benchmark score on the UserMark database, scoring a 97% outstanding score.
AMD Ryzen 9 5980HX Powering Asus Zephyrus Duo 15 SE spotted on Newegg
For the uninitiated, the Zephyrus Duo 15 SE is the company’s refinement over its previous dual-screen gaming laptop. It comes with enhanced cooling to accommodate a higher thermal threshold, perfect for high-intensity gaming and content creation. We’ll dive more into the specifications of the upcoming laptop in some time.
Right now, let’s talk about the Ryzen 9 5980HX. There’s not much different from the top-of-the-line Ryzen 9 5900HX that has been ruling the gaming segment in laptops since the beginning of the year. It is an 8 core, 16 thread CPU with a base clock of 3.3GHz and boost clock of up to 4.8GHz built on TSMC’s 7nm FinFET architecture based on AMD’s Zen 3 architecture. The difference is that the Ryzen 5980HX has a higher boost clock of 4.8GHz as compared to 4.6GHz on the Ryzen 9 5900HX. The small boost in the max clock speed is sure to convert into higher frame rates and faster processing, provided the TDP is configured similarly. Both APUs have TDP rated 45W+, and the HX series typically means AMD allows room for overclocking.
Why was such an exciting flagship APU missing in action so far? AMD likely optimized the supply for the Ryzen 5900HX in the first half of the year, and now that the second half of the year has begun, it was time to switch gears and bring a more powerful APU to the market. The ongoing chip shortage is also a reason perhaps for this linear approach to releasing products in the market.
Coming back to the unreleased Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 SE (GX551QM-ES96), this is only one of the variants of the flagship dual-screen gaming laptop. Asus has been at the forefront of the dual-screen form factor for a while now and has laptops serving both creators with the Zenbook Duo lineup and gaming with the Zephyrus Duo series. This one, as the name suggests, belongs to the latter.
Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 SE Specifications and Features
The listing on Newegg suggests the Ryzen 9 5980HX Zephyrus Duo 15 SE sports a 15.6-inch 300Hz IPS LCD FHD display along with another 14-inch touchscreen display. It has the Nvidia RTX 3060 for the company with 6GB GDDR6 memory at 115W (130W with Dynamic Boost 2.0). In addition, there’s 16GB DDR4 3200MHz RAM and 1TB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD, both of which are upgradable to 64GB RAM and 2TB storage.
Now, an APU as powerful as the Ryzen 9 5980HX will require good cooling to ensure there are no thermal bottlenecks, and looking at the thermal design of the Zephyrus Duo 15 SE, it instantly makes sense why Asus chose this lineup to introduce AMD’s flagship gaming APU.
The Zephyrus Duo 15 SE features active aerodynamic cooling. The second screen on the keyboard deck raises the chassis as it opens, allowing airflow directly on the hardware inside for active cooling. It further uses liquid metal from Thermal Grizzly instead of the regular thermal paste and has a vast system of fans and heat pipes to transfer heat away from the components.
Now there are already a handful of variants of the Zephyrus Duo 15 SE launched in the US that feature both the Ryzen 7 and the Ryzen 9, along with a choice of either a 300Hz FHD display or a 120Hz 4K display. The specialty here is the second screen which can be used as an independent display where you can keep apps and Windows open. It can be used to monitor resources as you game, or act as a chat window while you’re streaming a game, or even as a control panel while you’re editing a video. But nothing’s perfect. In the course of putting a second screen on the laptop, Asus had to compromise on the keyboard and trackpad, which got yanked down that leaves little space to rest your palm.
Source: @_rogame, Newegg.com
