Wellrounded for work and play
Intel's struggles in the refinement of its chip-manufacturing process have been well documented. Repeated manufacturing problems in recent years have delayed its ability to shrink its chips through several different sizes of process node, eroding its technological lead. This has allowed rivals, chiefly AMD, to leapfrog Intel in both the consumer desktop and mobile processor space.
Which brings us to the ASUS TUF Dash F15, one of the first gaming notebook to come with the Intel 11th Gen Core i7-11370H, a Tiger Lake-based H-series processor. It's also the first gaming notebook to come with NVIDIA's newest RTX 30-Series mobile GPU, the choice of either a GeForce RTX 3070, or the newer but entry-level GeForce RTX 3050 Ti. Having these high-end parts is interesting, because it uplifts the TUF brand.
I've always found the older TUF notebooks to look garish in comparison to the sleeker models from ROG. With the TUF Dash F15 (let's just call it TUF F15), ASUS opted for a complete revamp. It has a
slimmer and more confident look than its predecessors ever had. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the older ROG Zephyrus series of notebooks. The lid is gunmetal grey with a nice and polished feel to it, while the inside is black and made from an allplastic mould.
While the previous TUF A15 sported an odd backlit orangered colourway for it “WASD” keys, the ones on the TUF F15 sport a more neutral greenish-white colour. The effect is more subtle than it seems and can be turned off or the brightness adjusted. It's actually kind of cool to see the light shine through the transparent WASD keys. The keys themselves feel good in terms of feedback, and I was able to quickly get used to typing on the TUF F15 since the keys are well spaced out.
For cooling, the TUF F15 comes with exhaust vents on the back and sides. With the vents taking a fair
bit of space on the left and right sides, the I/O ports have been moved further down. These are standard ports including an Ethernet, USB Type-A, USB-C, HDMI ports and a mic combo jack, which should cover your connectivity adequately.
The TUF F15 review unit I got comes with a 1080p IPS-panel and 144Hz refresh rate, along with Adaptive Sync. While not quite speedy as displays that comes with a faster 240Hz or 300Hz refresh rates, 144Hz is fluid enough for most professional esports players. What's really worth noting is that the display offers good colour and contrast performance with 100% coverage of sRGB, which is somewhat of a rarity for notebooks of this class.
ASUS also trimmed the side and top bezels of the screen, but that has come at the expense of a built-in webcam. In the current “new” normal where most of us have adapted to a work-fromhome arrangement, I thought this was a curious miss by ASUS. At least with the 2021 ROG range of notebooks, most of which also comes without a built-in webcam, an external (and a pretty good one) webcam is bundled instead. Not so for the TUF F15 though. You're pretty much left to your own to purchase one separately.
Comparisons these days can be a little lopsided as configurations become more diverse. The TUF F15 for example, is our first gaming notebook built with Intel's 11th Gen Core i7 processor alongside an NVIDIA RTX 3050 Ti. So, we try to pit the TUF F15 with an equal mix of Intel, AMD, GTX 1650, RTX 2080 and RTX 3080 notebooks just to see where it fits in your particular upgrade cycle.
The TUF 15 has performance is comparable to an RTX 2060 and therefore most suited for 1080p gaming with medium to high detail settings. The RTX 3050 Ti is not sufficiently powerful enough to enable ray-tracing, but the available Tensor cores can be used for DLSS support in some games.
In terms of batterylife for a gaming notebook, the TUF F15 achieving more than 8 hours of battery life in MobileMark is impressive.
The notebook's 76Whr battery capacity and GPU's low TGP (60W under normal load) certainly helped too. That should give you more than enough time to get productivity related and even content creation work
EXCELLENT BATTERY, GOOD PERFORMANCE, POLISHED BUILD QUALITY. AN ALL-ROUNDER FOR SURE.
done while on the go.
The TUF Dash F15 is an interesting offering by ASUS. Our review model comes with a price tag of $2,198, and the most apt way for me to describe it is a highend notebook in the budget-level category. And I say this with a tinge of fondness because I don't think there's another competitive notebook in the market now that offers as good a balance between performance and portability. The TUF
F15 is easy to carry around, has an impressive battery life, decent gaming performance, great productivity performance and actually feels kind of premium too. I've never looked at the TUF series with disdain (God bless me), but I've always thought that past TUF models' designs were too unrefined for my liking. The TUF F15 though, has got my attention.