Asus TUF Gaming A15

Asus has updated its long-lasting entry-level TUF gaming rig, but has the novelty of this newish range already worn off, or is it here to stay?

We’ve been fond of Asus’s TUF (‘The Ultimate Force’... oh please, Asus) branded gaming laptops ever since they emerged in 2018 with a reengineered fan design that repelled small particles to prevent dust build up and help prolong the life of the unit. This strive for longevity continues today in the TUF Gaming A15 which sees the return of an upgraded version of this selfcleaning cooling system and novel features like an optional 90Wh battery to keep the device running longer, in a day-to-day sense.

Since its primary purpose is to be a gaming laptop, it’s got plenty of powerful components and a few neat perks that help it to go fast as well as far. The first is a 15.6-inch FullHD screen that comes at either 60Hz or 144Hz refresh rates and covers either a 45% or 72% of the NTSC colour gamut. When you consider that 72% NTSC is equivalent to a standard sRGB monitor, your games will not look very vibrant if you opt for the cheaper display here.

The A15 has gone with a choice of three AMD processor options of a Ryzen 5, 7 or 9 for the CPU. The unit we tested had a Ryzen 7 4800H and 16GB of RAM, but you can expand the latter up to 32GB if needed. We took the most powerful option here for a spin.

The CPU on the A15 we tested did surprisingly well getting 5315 in

PCMark 10’s Overall benchmark and 12.9fps in HWBOT x265’s 4K media encoding benchmark, which was within a few percent of the ROG Zephyrus G14 running a Ryzen 9 4900HS and other comparable specs. Onboard storage speeds were first gen PCIe SSD level at around 1750MB/s either way and the graphical performance was where you would expect it to be netting around 45fps on Ghost Recon: Wildlands, 62 on Total War: Warhammer 2 and 66 on Middle Earth: Shadow of War using Ultra 1080p settings.

The unit we tested used a 45Wh battery and managed 3 hours and 15 minutes in PCMark 8 Home Battery, so you should be able to get a full working day if you decide to get the model with the 90Wh battery.

A good value entry gaming PC that should last you a while but could be a little brighter.

Joel Burgess