Asus TUF Gaming A15 - 15.6" FHD 144Hz, R7-5800H, R

This model of the ASUS TUF F15 - FX507ZE – is the 2022 refresh of the series, and this model specifically ships with the Intel Core i7-12700H, 16Gb onboard RAM, 512Gb SSD and RTX 3050 Ti. Shipping – well packaged in a Russian-nesting-doll of boxes and padding, zero issues with shipping damage at all. Ships with minimal documents/manuals, just a small booklet to cover the basics, but a nice ASUS TUF-branded sticker pack (if you like that sort of thing). Chassis – the design is solid, very little flex or plasticy feel. The outer shell is a nice durable metal, with a stamped logo in the lid. The x-shaped activity light is actually visible when the lid is closed, which is a nice touch. Rubber feet are solid and dampen fan vibration. However, it’s a bit of a fingerprint ... MoreThis model of the ASUS TUF F15 - FX507ZE – is the 2022 refresh of the series, and this model specifically ships with the Intel Core i7-12700H, 16Gb onboard RAM, 512Gb SSD and RTX 3050 Ti. Shipping – well packaged in a Russian-nesting-doll of boxes and padding, zero issues with shipping damage at all. Ships with minimal documents/manuals, just a small booklet to cover the basics, but a nice ASUS TUF-branded sticker pack (if you like that sort of thing). Chassis – the design is solid, very little flex or plasticy feel. The outer shell is a nice durable metal, with a stamped logo in the lid. The x-shaped activity light is actually visible when the lid is closed, which is a nice touch. Rubber feet are solid and dampen fan vibration. However, it’s a bit of a fingerprint magnet, depending on how oily your skin is – while matte all over, it shows darker patches where fingers and palms rest, especially on the palm rest/touchpad area. Screen - screen hinges are solid and smooth. Screen is non-reflective and gets very bright, with good angle visibility. Very small amount of backlight bleed along the bottom edge when showing a black screen, but not noticeable unless you’re looking for it. The 144Hz screen is very nice and smooth, gaming was a dream on this, and you can further tune the screen in Armoury Crate for colour/hue/gamma/FPS. Keyboard – it’s a laptop keyboard, it’s not going to win any awards, but it’s perfectly serviceable. Full size layout is nice. The backlights start in a colour-shifting demo pattern to start, but can be colour/pattern/frequency changed on login. Battery saver turns them off after a few seconds. The WASD key orientation is surprisingly manageable, no wild finger twisting/contortionist poses to make it work. Speakers – serviceable, but not brilliant. Headphones are the way to go. The volume controls as their own dedicated keys, rather than Function + F1/F2 keys, is a nice touch. Bluetooth hooked up nice and easy, and had good range. Fans – Worth mentioning here, this thing gets INTENSE in fan speed and heat. Fan speeds can rack up quite fast, and airflow comes out the rear-right side (next to the numpad) – right where your mouse hand is, if using an external mouse. Sound at max fan speed is loud, but not insane, and not audible at all though headphones. Most of the time, doing normal computing, it barely increased at all. Fan profiles can be tuned in ASUS software and hot-switched using a Function key. I found it automatically switching between Silent and High Performance mode a lot, and occasionally it just maxes out for a minute, then goes quiet again - might have been software tuning or myself accidentally switching profiles with a shortcut key. Overall, it does a good job of keeping temps under control – I didn’t notice a CPU temp over 82 degrees during testing. Software – comes pre-installed with Windows 11, for better or worse. Took about 2 hours for all updates to download, install, restart and be fully ready. ASUS Armoury Crate is the built-in tuning software for the laptop, even with it’s own keyboard hotkey, and it lets you tune things like the fan curves, the performance profiles, the Windows key, lighting, battery and most other things about the laptop itself. Just skimmed the surface on this software, but it does the job, and does it well enough. The biggest minus is that it comes pre-installed with McAfee Antivirus, which is a proven unsafe antivirus suite – thankfully, it uninstalled completely, without any hassles. Graphics performance - The RTX 3050Ti is surprisingly decent for modern gaming. I ran Destiny 2 at locked 60fps (my choice) on battery, with barely any hitches, but that’s an older title. Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga suffered slowdown while on battery power in dense areas and lots of physics, but that may also be poor Day 1 optimisation – generally it was a solid playthough. While technically capable of VR, I doubt it would be powerful enough for very high FPS on anything but the simplest of VR games. In Photoshop, Illustrator, GIMP and Inkscape, it barely broke a sweat – this would be ideal for a visual designer on-the-go who wanted some gaming in their off time. Also worth noting that, when on power, you can unlock a GPU Turbo mode, for the most power delivery. The 2022 model now also comes with a MUX switch, which allows you to switch between two modes – either sharing graphics processing between integrated and dedicated graphics, for better power consumption and efficiency, or completely turn off integrated graphics and get the most grunt out of the RTX3050Ti, at the cost of power – this switch needs a reboot, I believe. Ports - Two USB-A, Two USB-C with Thunderbolt/DP1.4, full HDMI out – great features and more than enough for most. Power cable comes out midway on the left side, which is a bit awkward, but at least it’s not the right side to interfere with a mouse. I’d be careful with putting an external drive out the right side USB-A and leaving it sitting in the path of the exhaust fan, it might get cooked. Inside - The underside comes off with a few screws, and there’s replaceable RAM and a provided 512Gb M.2 SSD, with an empty slot for another M.2 SSD. Little fuss, seems fairly straight-forward. OVERALL - Very satisfied with this model, it’s got power in all the right places, very well designed, software is serviceable, and will serve my needs for years to come. Highly recommended, and especially through PCCG - this is a better price than most other providers, who are flogging the older outdated ASUS TUF F15 models for a higher price than here.

THIS REVIEW IS FOR ASUS TUF DASH F15 (2022) If you want a barebones powerhouse at a fair cost this may be an amazing buy. I purchased this at 999 usd, would rate 3 stars if purchased at full price ($1500 usd). Pros: lightweight without feeling cheap, portable (thin), 3070 graphics card, 12th Gen i7 CPU, ddr5 RAM, affordable Cons: gets HOT. If you play games in bed, your system will likely be consistently over 90 degrees Celsius if you’re running something somewhat demanding (even with fans howlin) Display/ panel: has trouble transitioning between different greys/ blacks (huge issue for me), colors are fine but don’t pop, 144hz refresh rate is good but not great, screen doesn’t get very bright Webcam is meh (720p), no RGB keyboard (if you care), battery dies faster ... MoreTHIS REVIEW IS FOR ASUS TUF DASH F15 (2022) If you want a barebones powerhouse at a fair cost this may be an amazing buy. I purchased this at 999 usd, would rate 3 stars if purchased at full price ($1500 usd). Pros: lightweight without feeling cheap, portable (thin), 3070 graphics card, 12th Gen i7 CPU, ddr5 RAM, affordable Cons: gets HOT. If you play games in bed, your system will likely be consistently over 90 degrees Celsius if you’re running something somewhat demanding (even with fans howlin) Display/ panel: has trouble transitioning between different greys/ blacks (huge issue for me), colors are fine but don’t pop, 144hz refresh rate is good but not great, screen doesn’t get very bright Webcam is meh (720p), no RGB keyboard (if you care), battery dies faster than other laptops (3070 draws lots of power, laptop doesn’t hold much charge relative to some other gaming laptops) mw2 benchmark: 99 avg fps with some cpu bottleneck at (almost) max settings.. Used nvidia’s “optimized” settings, (not quite as close to maxed settings as 1st benchmark) Avg 100fps, no bottleneck, Summary: while this all-business, no-frills gaming laptop does have a 3070 graphics card and 12th Gen i7 processor at a great price, it isn’t designed well enough to experience its full potential. A competitor had a similar laptop on sale for the same price ($999 usd), with a 3060 gpu, 165hz, and liquid metal to help cool the cpu. It benches about 8 avg fps slower than the ASUS TUF DASH F15, both running the same settings, BUT its cpu consistently stays around 10-14 degrees Celsius cooler. For me, a few extra frames isn’t worth the headache/ stress of knowing I’m cooking my cpu. This laptop would probably benefit significantly from undervolting. TLDR; Not much to look at but gets the job done. Buy it on sale and see if you like it.

The Asus TUF A15 is an excellent budget gaming laptop that provides some solid computing and gaming performance for its specs and resolution. TUF isn’t Asus’ top of the line gaming brand, that’s Republic of Gamers, but TUF is a solid lineup of more rugged and versatile products. The A15 is no exception, while it doesn’t look as flashy as ROG, it still has RGB keyboard and lighting for system status and power. The A15 also has a really powerful Ryzen 7 6800H 8core/16thread CPU and Nvidia 3050ti GPU with 4GB VRAM. It also has 8GB of DDR5 system memory which surprised me since AMD desktop CPU don’t support DDR5 yet. Lastly it has 512GB nVME pcie3.0 SSD storage. The RAM and Storage are probably my only real grips on this system. I feel like 1TB storage and 16GB of RAM ... MoreThe Asus TUF A15 is an excellent budget gaming laptop that provides some solid computing and gaming performance for its specs and resolution. TUF isn’t Asus’ top of the line gaming brand, that’s Republic of Gamers, but TUF is a solid lineup of more rugged and versatile products. The A15 is no exception, while it doesn’t look as flashy as ROG, it still has RGB keyboard and lighting for system status and power. The A15 also has a really powerful Ryzen 7 6800H 8core/16thread CPU and Nvidia 3050ti GPU with 4GB VRAM. It also has 8GB of DDR5 system memory which surprised me since AMD desktop CPU don’t support DDR5 yet. Lastly it has 512GB nVME pcie3.0 SSD storage. The RAM and Storage are probably my only real grips on this system. I feel like 1TB storage and 16GB of RAM would’ve been better balanced for a gaming laptop. I was using 6GB of the 8GB basically doing nothing and it definitely seemed to hurt game loading times as things were shuffled around in memory. 512GB storage also isn’t that much as many games are 50+GB in size now. The good news is there are expansion slots on this laptop that you can access with just a screwdriver and spudger (plastic pry tool). Just remove all the screws and work the spudger around the edges of the laptop every inch or two and you will unlatch them plastic snaps holding the case together. Asus’ blog has instructions to do this so it shouldn’t void your warranty. The SSD is actually pretty fast, it’s an Intel p670 that scores 2500MB/s for reads and writes. It looks like this is PCIe Gen 3 so there’s no point in buying a faster Gen 4 SSD. Fastest Gen 3 drives will do around 3500MB/s and Gen 4 around 7000MB/s. For the RAM, you can run a couple of command lines to find out what RAM you have, I’ve already done this and also verified the part if you want to double up your RAM it is: Samsung M425R1GB4BB0-CQK 8GB DDR5 4800MHz SODIMM memory In terms of gaming performance, the 3050Ti matches up really well at 1080p and 144Hz monitor. For less graphics intensive games you will get more FPS and you can run High to Very High in most games. Just watch out for Texture settings for that limited 4GB of VRAM. I’m using it to two-box for Diablo 2 Resurrected and it runs great!!! I also ran 3DMark Time Spy and compared to some of my other PC systems, and while it’s not totally indicative of gaming performance and relative performance I do think it gives a fair impression of relative performance in gaming. TUF A15 with RTX 3050Ti: 6089 HP with RTX 3050: 5224 Asus with 1060: 3981 Custom PC with RTX 3090: 17418 So you can see, this laptop is a solid 16% increase over the 3050 laptop, 53% increase over the 1060 laptop, and about 1/3rd as powerful as the 3090 system. Lastly, the build quality is mostly plastic but does not feel cheap. The top is metal and the keyboard is textured plastic. The keys are a rubberized feel and typing feels consistent and solid. One really nice thing is the laptop feels really light for a gaming laptop, much lighter than my ROG laptop. Lastly, when fully gaming, the fans do ramp up, not overly loud or noticeable especially if you also have a desktop, but it goes from near silent in web browsing to really audible. Overall great entry level gaming laptop, I will probably add some storage and another stick of DDR5 when prices improve.