Asus Enters the Sidekick Display Market
Aside from pumping out full-sized gaming monitors, Asus has now set its sights on a niche but growing category: the secondary touchscreen display. The company's newly announced ROG Strix XG129C is a 12.3-inch IPS touchscreen built to park beside your primary monitor — a concept Asus itself explored back in 2020 with the dual-screen ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 laptop.
Think system stats, chat windows, a streaming dashboard, or a Spotify queue — all offloaded to a dedicated side panel while your main display stays focused on whatever you're actually doing.
Specs and What You Get
The XG129C runs at 720p resolution, which is standard for this class of display. Asus says it covers 125 percent of the sRGB color gamut and 90 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, so colours should look reasonably vibrant for a panel this size.
One of the more notable inclusions in the box is a one-year subscription to AIDA64 Extreme, a hardware monitoring tool that typically retails for around $65 USD. For a display clearly aimed at enthusiasts who want to track CPU temps and frame rates at a glance, that's a practical pairing.
How It Stacks Up Against the Competition
The most direct competitor is Corsair's Xeneon Edge, which offers a slightly larger 14.5-inch panel at the same 720p resolution. Asus is going smaller and presumably aiming to be easier to fit onto a crowded desk.
Elgato's Stream Deck+ and similar products have dominated the streaming peripheral space, but they don't offer a full visual display — just programmable buttons with LCD icons. A proper secondary monitor opens up considerably more flexibility for power users: you can run any app, widget, or monitoring tool you like without being locked into proprietary software ecosystems.
That flexibility is likely Asus's biggest pitch here. While Elgato's ecosystem is polished and purpose-built for streaming, a general-purpose touchscreen that works with any Windows app has obvious appeal for a wider range of users — from content creators to software developers to competitive gamers.
Who Is This Actually For?
Secondary displays have a reputation for being a solution in search of a problem, but the use cases are real. Streamers can park OBS or Twitch chat on a side screen. Traders and analysts can keep live dashboards visible without tabbing away. Gamers can run hardware monitors or Discord without cluttering their main view.
The touchscreen functionality adds another dimension — tapping to skip a track or accept a call without reaching for a keyboard is genuinely useful in a seated setup.
No pricing has been officially confirmed by Asus yet, but given the specs and the AIDA64 bundle, expect it to sit in the mid-to-upper range for secondary displays when it lands.
Bottom Line
Aside from a few niche players, the secondary display market hasn't been heavily contested — which makes Asus's entry interesting. Whether the XG129C carves out a place on enthusiast desks will depend heavily on final pricing, but the specs and bundled software suggest Asus is taking the category seriously.
Source: The Verge
