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Asus TUF F15 review
Asus is back with its latest series of TUF gaming laptops and it’s called the TUF Dash F15. It’s the company’s new series of gaming laptops focused on casual and budget gamers.
It’s also the company’s latest model in the affordable gaming laptop segments this year which is a heavily competitive and concentrated segment.
Build and Quality
Asus TUF Dash F15 comes in a full hard plastic built with a metal finish on top. Asus claims military-grade toughness which can successfully survive a rigorous battery of MIL-STD-810H tests, although we have never tried it in our office. It has less to almost no flex on its lids and chassis, feels sturdy, and is beautifully designed. It has some real cyberpunk gaming vibe to it, which might seem cool or annoying depending on the person. We liked it and thought it’s a step up among all its rivals in this segment.
Ports, I/O and Connectivity
The ports are spread across the two sides of the laptop, there’s 1x 3.5mm Combo Audio Jack, 1x HDMI 2.0b, 1x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A1x RJ45 LA port, 1xThunderbolt™ 4 support DisplayPort™ / power delivery on the left side, and 2x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A with a Kensington lock on the right side with air-vents on either side of the laptop.
Input Devices
Keyboard-The keyboard on the Asus TUF F15 has a chicklet style keyboard with very good clicks and feedbacks. The keyboard felt good to type on although it’s not a full-size keyboard. It comes in a single color backlit instead of RGB backlit, which might turn off some buyers, but we didn’t mind it at all and it looked beautiful on the chassis.
Mouse-The mouse on the Asus TUF F15 is made up of plastic is not accurate and precise as compared to the glass pads. The buttons melt mushy while clicking on it as it does not have separate mouse click buttons, rather the whole touchpad acts like one button. As a midrange gaming laptop, we can overlook it as everyone’s going to use a mouse at the end of the day.
Display
The base model of the gaming laptop comes with a 15.6-inch,FHD (1920 x 1080) 16:9-anti-glare IPS-level display with sRGB:62.5%,Adobe:47.34% and Refresh Rate:144Hz while the top model comes with 15.6-inch,FHD (1920 x 1080) 16:9-anti-glare IPS-level display with sRGB:100%,Adobe:75.35% and Refresh Rate:240Hz.
The higher model with sRGB:100%, Adobe:75.35%, and Refresh Rate:240Hz is simply stunning and is a delight to the eyes to game with. While the lower model with 144Hz is enough for playing some competitive e-sports titles.
Performance
The performance on this laptop is either hit or miss depending on the person.
The base variant comes with an Intel® Core™ i5-11300H Processor 3.1 GHz, 4 cores (8M Cache, up to 4.4GHz) and the top variant comes with Intel® Core™ i7 11370H Processor 3.3 GHz, 4 cores (12M Cache, up to 4.8GHz) coupled with an NVIDIA RTX 3051,3051ti,3060 or 3070, with RTX 3070 in an 8Gb DDR6 configuration operating at 80 w with turbo boost up to 85 W.
Though a 4 core i7 processor coupled with 80W RTX 3070 is not that pretty impressive and is sure to give bottleneck issues, we think it’s sufficient enough for casual gaming and also some e-sports titles with decent 100+fps in most modern-day titles.
It surprisingly remained very cool throughout the gameplay and did not throttle at all thanks to the extra vents under the laptop at the sides. A mistake that costed Asus heavily in the previous year’s TUF model, which was basically a gaming toaster.
Also, it’s a very compact laptop which might explain the underpowered CPU and GPU.
Storage
These two storage options in the Asus TUF F15, with the base model coming with 512GB M.2 NVMe™ PCIe® 3.0 SSD and the top model coming with 1TB M.2 NVMe™ PCIe® 3.0 SSD. Though not much, after-market solutions are always an option.
Memory
The laptop comes with either an 8GB DDR4 or an 8GB DDR4 on board+8GB DDR4-3200 SO-DIMM memory.
Our suggestion will be the later one with 16GB of memory as most modern titles and programs require a huge amount of memory.
Speakers
The laptop comes with a 2x2W speaker under the chassis at the side and also a built-in array microphone. It also has DTS software, in case you want to enhance your listening experience.
For us, the speakers were ok with decent volume and pretty clear trebles considering a gaming laptop, good enough for zoom meetings and calls.
Battery Life
Asus TUF F15 comes with a 76 WHrs,4SIP,4-cell Li-on battery, which gave us 6-7 hours of battery backup depending on the task ( i.e., surfing, watching videos, zoom meetings, etc). If you play games on battery mode then the backup will drastically reduce to 2-3 hours. The laptop also supports USB type-c charging as it comes with a Thunderbolt™ 4 port. 180-200W AC adapter will be provided depending upon the model.