Asus TUF Gaming A15 laptop
Asus is back with another AMD-powered gaming laptop, but can it really take the portable gaming performance crown three years running?
Asus’s TUF Gaming A15 is back again in 2021 with 5000 series AMD CPUs and RTX 30 cards and the partnership couldn’t be sweeter. AMD has been ramping up its presence in the laptop market over the last couple of years with pretty staggering performance and efficiency margins over comparable Intel products and Asus’s TUF gaming laptops have been some of the first devices to showcase them.
This year the TUF Gaming A15 is fitted with an 8-core 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, 16GB of RAM and either an Nvidia RTX 3060 or 3070 GPU. The former goes for $2,099 locally while the upgraded GPU will add another $300 to that total. Both these configurations come with a 15.6-inch FullHD IPS display that runs at 144Hz, but you can upgrade the RTX 3070 configurations to a 240Hz adaptive sync screen for a total of $2,599. All of these configurations hit the sweet spot for enthusiast and competitive gamers with each offering solid value propositions.
These units are very much performance first, so they’re a little thicker at 2.45cm than your average gaming ultrabook, but this extra space has been used well by the A15 keeping the internals under 92-degrees, while minimising fan noise and ensuring heat is kept away from the keyboard surround. The trackpad is very usable and even though the WASD keys are distinguished, they’re marked in a subdued transparent plastic so that they’re not in your face.
Because this CPU, GPU combo is so new, there’s not a heap of other contemporary devices to compare it against. In general work performance it lines up pretty closely with the Intel Core i7-10870H CPU on an Aorus 15P with twice the RAM (32GB). Even with the RAM handicap the A15 wipes the floor in image rendering and media encoding tasks beating the 15P by between 13 and 45 percent. It even outpaces Intel’s current Core i9-10980HK by about 25 percent, which means it’s beating laptops that cost around $5-6K in processor-heavy tasks.
Graphically this device performed roughly as you would expect, with framerates of a hundred or more on games like The Division 2, F1 2020 and Sid Meier’s: Civilization VI. This means you’ll be putting those high refresh rates to good use if you dial down the settings a little or drive less graphically demanding games.
It was nice to see Ethernet and HDMI ports and while the chassis was definitely made from a lightweight plastic, it felt sturdy and had a cool overall aesthetic.
In addition to top shelf performance, battery life has been one of the main distinguishing features of the AMD laptop processor range, and the A15 doesn’t disappoint in this department. Managing just shy of six hours in PCMark 10 Home Office battery benchmarks and eight hours and 18 minutes in 1080p movie playback, you should be able to get a working day’s worth of battery from this gaming powerhouse, which is still rather remarkable.
Another amazing AMD-powered TUF gaming laptop that is well ahead in performance, price and perks.