ASUS TUF Gaming A15 Gaming Laptop, 15.6” 144Hz FHD IPS-Type, AMD Ryzen 7 4800H, GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, 16GB DDR4, 512GB PCIe SSD, Gigabit Wi-Fi 5, Windows 10 Home, Metal, TUF506IU-ES74

I bought this strictly as a gaming laptop and mainly to be used for sim racing. I would have gone with a PC build but I live in a small apartment so I don't have space for a dedicated setup. I'm typically a Mac user because I work in software development so I was pleasantly surprised by the build quality. Certainly not the best and not on the same level as more premium gaming laptops but TBH I was expecting something much cheaper feeling. I was also happy to find that it really isn't as bulky as I was expecting, it's really not that much heavier or bulkier than the 15 MacBook Pros I have for work and personal use. I used to be a PC tech about 10 years ago and worked at Circuit City and Best Buy and I was expecting the behemoth gaming laptops of old. Same goes for the charger, really not that bulky and totally reasonable to carry around. Overall I've been impressed with the performance I've gotten. Been running iRacing at around 120 FPS. Have yet to run ACC or Race room but I'm not expecting any issues there. The only thing that's been a little strange is early in gameplay the processor will spike and I get a quick freeze. I think that has to do with hardware modes switching to be more performant so that's really just something I need to investigate but I don't think it's a real issue. People have mentioned that the screen color is off and that's definitely true. But that said, I didn't buy this to do photo editing and it really isn't that noticeable for gaming. I have this side by side with an AOC 32 inch monitor and the colors are different, but outside of that I don't think I really would have noticed too much. My observation is that the colors are less bright. so a pure green moves closer to a darker forest-y green. I gave battery rating 5 stars but honestly I don't really run it on battery. That said, I have had it on battery during light use for a whole day without it needing a recharge when I was setting it up and downloading games. So it does seem capable of being your every day computer on the go while also giving you very solid gaming capability. Overall, for the price, I couldn't have expected a better laptop. I was on the fence between this and something equivalent with an Intel processor instead of the AMD and I feel quite happy having gone this route. Again, this isn't the end all be all of gaming laptops, but if you want something in the mid-range that feels like it can punch up a bit, I'd say this is for you. I'm quite picky with these sorts of things and I don't normally write reviews so take from that what you will.

This is an impartial review with pros and cons after one week of practical use, and having researched the entire market before taking the decision to buy this little gem. Pros: - Unbeatable hardware for this price range - Flawless communication between BIOS, manufacturer software, and Windows OS - Insanely fast in both productivity tasks and gaming, 16 GB RAM at 3200Mhz and good/beefy SSD makes this thing run faster then Usain Bolt - Sturdy MIL-STD-810H build - No flex whatsoever in keyboard area even though the chassis is brushed plastic and it does a great job at hiding smudges/finger prints - The screen is perfectly fine, if you are not a content creator that needs accurate color reproduction for video editing etc. - Chassis never heats up although CPU/GPU can get to 92/86 degrees celsius respectively Cons: - Light indicators for Power/Memory Use/Hard Disk are placed at the top of the chassis above of the keyboard, which unfortunately results in a bit of light polution while you are trying to watch a movie on it in a completely dark room (Power button as well has a fixed red light). I am stating this because it affects the immersive experience while watching movies with the laptop on your lap. You get used to it after a while though - Keyboard layout is a bit odd but you get used to it after some time using the laptop - Yes, the screen does indeed have a response time of 22ms, which means there is a TINY bit of ghosting... YET, trust me, you will not notice a thing, unless you are a pro esports player that needs to play Apex Legends or CS:GO at 144 fps. I'm a "casual" gamer, and so far I've had no issues. Everything from COD Warzone, BF1, Rocket League, and LoL, runs silky smooth with high fps while at highest graphic settings - Fans do get a bit loud under heavy loads, but that is completely normal for gaming laptops. When the computer is on battery or you want to use it for productivity tasks, just remember to go to the Armoury Crate and select the Windows or Silent profiles, it will now stay nice and quite while you get your things done. CONCLUSION: I can not recommend this laptop enough, seriously. Stop listening to all the idiots out there saying the screen is crap. Any other laptop with these specs would cost you an additional 400 USD, if not more. Taking that into consideration, you can just buy an external monitor with G Sync, 1440p, 32'', hook it up to the USB C port which is directly connected to the NVidia Graphics card, add a wireless mouse/keyboard, and BAM for the price of getting a laptop with a better screen, you have now created a bawler docking station which allows you to have a desktop set up while at home, quick unplug and WOOSH take your tuf laptop anywhere you need to be. Before getting this unit I purchased a Dell G7 17 7790, returned it due to wobbly track pad, coil whine and CPU overheating crashes. Seems like Dell quality control is slipping big time, but thanks to that... I now have the best laptop on the market for 1,200 USD.

I bought it when it was at $999 USD, and bought a 2TB SSD for the second SSD slot and 32 GB of RAM. This is the version with 90Wr battery and 2 M.2 slots. The laptop is the best buy you can make at this time. Period. I researched for about 2 months and I even watched the YouTube video "Do not buy Asus TUF A15" and you know what? The plenty of good and critical reviews helped decide even more to go for it. What can I say? The AMD Ryzen 7 4800H is a powerhouse that is rated 2.9 GHz but it goes from very low consumption at 1.4 GHz and 5W consumption checking with HwInfo and the GTX1660 Ti consumes about another 5W in idle condition. This beauty consumes about 10W in idle, and with the 90Wr battery and if you lower the screen brightness enough, it will last for about 10 hours! When it comes to power, the CPU will go up to the rater 45W TDP and while having all cores at 100% you won't get the full 4.3GHz al the time, it will be sitting around 2.9-4 GHz on ALL cores. The GPU will consume 80W and the cooling is enough, never saw thermal throttling very high temps or things like that, it sits at 75°C under full load which is just fine for a GPU. Rock stable, I work on it more than 10 hours a day without any hiccups and gaming on it is quite enjoyable. It will play any current game at 1080p with all settings maxed out at 60+ FPS. I'm used to the fan noise (my previous Asus also did a similar noise on load, even more than this one at low load). At low loads, it outperforms my previous laptop and it remains very quiet in the Silent profile, or even the Performance one. The three performance profiles (Silent, Performance, and Turbo) are perfect for what you need (Silent for work, Performance for a balanced setting and Turbo for heavy usage and max cooling). The 144 Hz 45% NTSC screen is just fine, I can't notice any difference with my main monitor that it 75% NTSC. The antigloss screen is very well done and it's a joy to look at. This little beauty has all I need and more, rock stable and I could easily upgrade it without any issues. Loved the fact there is no hard-soldered RAM, you can change both RAM sticks and both SSDs if you like. Also, having an Ethernet network port freed me up a USB port (I had to use a USD to Ethernet adapter before). What else can I say? Get one and you will enjoy it for a long time. Trust me! And if you also want to add Ray Tracing joy, go for the one with RTX 2060. PS: I think the cooling is just fine, I saw the other video of the guy that wasn't recommending to buy it and the only thing I got is that if you mess with the cooling design, probably you will get lower temperatures on main components (CPU and GPU) but other components as SSDs will work at higher temps. The cooling is well designed to cool ALL components inside (CPU, GPU, RAM, SSDs). Asus has done a great job building great laptops for a great price. That's why they are completely sold out! Sure, there are many laptops that could be even better but this is the best bang for the buck and it is hard to find such a great combination of good things in another laptop of this price.

From a hardware perspective this is an excellent laptop for gaming, and work with it's only major shortfall being the display, otherwise this laptop is content creator's or designers dream, on the other hand the software needs work esp. on AMD's part. Okay to start let's talk about what this laptop does right. At it's core it contains the powerful AMD Ryzen 7 4800h which just destroys all but Intel's most extreme laptop processors and those of Intel's most expensive processors are commonly found in machine twice this one's price and at best can only give the 4800h a run for it's money in everything except some games. This 4800h also contains AMD's Vega 8 graphics for it's integrated GPU, which are on par with Nvidia's MX250 which are discreet graphics and can be used in most games at medium settings faster than any competing CPUs contain, having a GPU this fast as the integrated graphics allows for all sorts of multitasking potential, as in programs such as blender, you can be rendering with your 2060 and creating with the Vega 8, this also allows the ability to run graphically intensive programs in VR without tanking your performance, this can be useful if you would prefer to get your work done in VR rather than the online world. The RTX 2060 in the model I selected while not the best value for gaming as it is only ~5% faster than the 1660ti available in lower end models, it is a great value in productivity workloads that support RTX acceleration such as Blender and Solid works, and with it's full 90 watts it strikes at near 2070 territory. . Now onto the battery, you did not misread, this laptop contains a 90 Whr battery which improves your ability to use this machine for both work and play as it can survive a day of browsing the web and watching videos as long as you aren't me with 10 billion tabs open, this laptop contains impressive battery life. Now onto the bad stuff: First let's start with what creators probably consider the most important the display, which is rated to 48% NTSC meaning that your colors are washed out and this laptop is near unusable for content creation in it's current state. Now while you can install a new display for ~$100 not everyone wants to tear down their new and beautiful laptop and risk destroying it, it would be nice if some etailers would sell laptops with upgraded displays. Drivers are mess, alright first -*DO NOT DOWNLOAD ADRENALIN for 4800h as at the moment you will need to have a separate display to recover the laptop, unless you feel like using safe mode to recover your laptop.- (edit 1/3/2021 Adrenalin for 4800h now works) 2nd the Vega 8 graphic really don't like handing games over to the RTX 2060 esp. if said game run on **DX11 or Vulcan and many games like Warthunder will crash if you try to force them to run on the RTX 2060. One last annoying thing, it is a pain in the neck that ASUS does not include the ability to create custom fan profiles in Armoury Crate, and the default profile are slow to ramp the fans. *[edit if you wish to control the IGPU setting download Radeon Settings Lite available on the ASUS driver support page, also if you wish to update the driver you can install the new chipset driver from that same page.] **[This is mostly fixed]

I would like to note, I purchased this laptop before the silicon shortage, so I paid a significantly lower price than listed at the time of this review. I also purchased the RTX 2060 model. With that out of the way, this laptop is a beast for the money. It goes head to head in performance with my desktop when it comes to CPU, and in lighter workloads the battery life is nothing to sneeze at (I was able to work 4-5 hour shifts at my IT job in a web browser, on battery only). This laptop is also shockingly easy to open and repair, I swapped out for higher speed 32GB memory later, and it comes with an open NVMe slot, so I installed a second 1TB SSD. The chassis is VERY rigid for a laptop and the display hinge is attached to a piece of metal that runs the length of the deck, not the crappy plastic standoffs that manufacturers use a lot. The heatsinks on the back of this thing are massive, and it has no trouble keeping itself cool when running the most demanding games. I would beware putting anything heat sensitive behind this laptop while doing so though, as its strong fans and heatsink dumps A LOT of heat out of the back. For Linux users: I dual booted KUbuntu and Windows and ran a lot of games on Proton using this laptop. I had amazingly little compatibility issues, and most drivers just worked for this laptop. I usually have a headache trying to install the proprietary NVIDIA drivers on other computers, but that was not a problem here. I had some weirdness with some Bluetooth earbuds a few times, but that seemed to be more related to the headphones themselves and not the machine. 3.5mm and USB headsets work perfectly of course. My only complaint is that I feel there are too few USB ports on it for a gaming laptop, but that can be easily resolved by a good dock or USB hub. Otherwise I think ASUS did an amazing job with this model, and I hope they keep upgrading it for new hardware so I can just buy a new model when this one gets too old.

It's honestly irritating to see one of the top reviews (the one with all the pictures) complaining about the panel. It's kinda like buying a pickup truck then saying it's not as fast as a sports car. I'll just call it as it is - you're an absolute idiot if you think that this laptop could have the best processor, graphics, display, and battery for only $1k. If this laptop were $3k, I would say the concerns were warranted. It's not. This laptop is an absolute steal for its value proposition. The processor is mind blowing. The battery life is better than you could find in even thin and light form factor laptops from years ago - in a gaming laptop. The video card plays basically anything I can throw at it, and the display is far better than anything on the market just a few years back. It manages to do all of this for only $1200. Yes, I have seen some ghosting when looking for it. Yes, my 144hz desktop monitor has better response times. Yes, my color calibrated 60hz dell desktop monitor I got specifically for video editing has far better color accuracy. In the end though, does that matter? Would you rather have had those things and paid $2-3k for this? When a laptop with this level of value is no longer an option in future release cycles, people will only have themselves to blame. I challenge anyone saying this laptop sucks to find something better for the same price.

For as light and petite as this laptop is, it's monster scary fast. Armed with AMD's recently released AMD Ryzen 7 4800H, an NVidia GeForce RTX 2060, and 16 GB of 3200Mhz RAM, this thing will push some serious processing — it absolutely tore up GIMPS/Prime95 testing (hitting regular 4.12 GHz peak CPU output); Unigine Heaven 3d benchmark; and Unigine Valley 3d benchmark. It even performed pretty respectably on Unigine Superposition 3d benchmark, which requires a LOT of firepower. The 144Hz screen is mesmerizing; I hadn't owned a screen with this high of a refresh rate before. Windows reports that this refresh rate is correct (last model reported 120Hz). The screen lacks a bit of the color vivacity of my desktop IPS panels, but hey – it's a laptop screen, not a 2-inch thick, 120v desktop monitor, and it's still gorgeous. Battery life is respectable, of course it diminishes a lot faster if you're gaming. It lasted impressively long playing one of the less-intense game I own, and will go for hours on "business" usage (from a full charge). It would've been nice to have a 4th USB port, but I knew this going in, so that's on me. Things to watch out for: 1. The fans can be loud. Sometimes even in low usage settings, like browsing and business use. There is major power under the hood, and in such a small/light form factor, the fans really need to slave to keep it all sufficiently cooled. You CAN change the fan mode using a Fn+Command key combo to put it in one of three modes: Silent, Balanced/Performance, or Turbo. On battery, Turbo (the highest) is not available. If you use Silent or Balanced/Performance fan mode, expect that the laptop WILL throttle heavy computations (CPU and GPU) to save on heat output, since it will try very, very hard to respect your fan speed choice. And it doesn't want to melt itself. 1a. Do ***NOT*** uninstall the "MyASUS" app that comes preinstalled on the computer. YOU NEED THIS. Without it, you'll have NO idea what fan mode you're in, and if you put it in silent accidentally and try to game, your game will coming screeching to a halt mid-play once the heat starts pumping out and your framerate will crash through the floor. If you uninstalled "MyASUS" already as of this reading, all hope is not lost. Go to the Microsoft Store app and search for MyASUS – that should get you fixed up. 2. Occasionally, the machine will get "stuck" on restarting (specifically using "Restart" from OS, not power off then power on). I spoke with someone who has the previous release model of this same laptop, and they have the same issue – it seems it never caused any big problems. You just force-power-off and wait a few seconds, then turn it back on again. My own ASUS ROG G751J actually had this same thing happen occasionally as well. Easily avoided by simply not using "Restart" too much. 3. Soon following taking it out of the box, you'll want to grab NVidia's latest game-ready driver. Mine had some odd graphics quirks in 3d games until I did this, which were fixed once I got the driver installed. 4. Touch pad is occasionally a little fidgety about two-finger scrolling, you may want to play a bit with your touchpad config in the Settings app. I feel like I need to give this a 4.5, just in light of some of the non-major issues above, but that's not and option and 4.0 feels like too much punishment, so 5.0 it is. 👍👍👍👍👍

Given the option, I would not purchase this computer again. The good, when it doesn't interrupt me.. it does rock as a gaming laptop. I like the build, its solid, I like the keyboard feel and the backlit keys. The screen hinge is solid and the so far, no pixalation. The bad - Random black screen. In use, not in use, it doesn't matter. Different program, games, web browers... it doesn't matter. The screen goes black and I can can do nothing to get it to come back on except, hard power off and reboot. I have even tried all the fixes on tech forums. Read the forums, I am not the only one with this issue. I don't believe this is a windows or GPU driver issue, I believe it is a hardware issue or an Asus overlay issue. Not as frequent, but I have blue screened 4 times in 60 days and not on the same program. My windows 10 on a self built machine has never blue screened. I have tried to get ahold of Asus support, but something always seems to come up that I have have drop the hold 45-60 minutes in. So, perhaps if I can ever get ahold of someone, they might be able to fix the issue, however, I don't see anything on their support web site, so I am not holding my breath. Update in Mar 2021 - The Blue Screen issue seems to have disappeared. The frequency of the black screen has reduced but not gone away completely. Instead of black screen 3-4 times a day, it is only happening about 1-2 times a day now. I still believe this is an ASUS overlay software issue and not a GPU or Windows issue. I may soon do a complete wipe of the OS and install a fresh copy of windows and not the ASUS version soon, the problem is that the ASUS overlay has features that are not built into windows or the GPU drivers. Update Jun 2 - System was sent back to ASUS warranty on May 10. No communications from the company except when I check the status on the website, it says that it was fixed and sent back. Still waiting for the system to be returned. Update fall 2021 - sent laptop in for a 2nd service, this time they replaced the motherboard, hasn’t locked up since. Frustrating that is took hours on tech calls and having to send it in twice, should have been fixed the first time

Two months in use: The laptop is very specific and not for everybody. The main market is the casual gamers with a need for mobility and heavy programmers especially ones who play with AI. Pros: USB-C allows to connect a docking station. Low noise for office tasks (rare fan activation). I am not a pro or addicted gamer but I play COD a bit. The laptop serves the purpose well but I use 32' screen for that. Cons: Heavy. The sound is complete crap. But having Bluetooth I am using a sound system or a headset. No reasons to set a low rating for that. If you want to watch movies you will get no pleasure with in-built sound. Wake up from sleep is slow for some reason. All my other win10 laptops wake up almost immediately. This one takes some time (5-20 seconds). No serious issues so far. I had to update all drivers to make it work.

I bought this laptop primarily for gaming. I have been very pleased with it. I primarily run Overwatch and Microsoft Flight Sim 2020 and though the screen is a bit on the small side, it runs these titles flawlessly at high end graphics and respectable frame-rates (personal mileage may vary). I have a gripe with this laptop though, and it bothers me way less than it originally did, but the fan noise is loud and the heat generated from this thing is pretty intense. But after 100 hours of dedicated gaming use I have to say this is a winner.

After weeks of run around, headaches and missed sales the laptop finally showed up. Worked great. As the return was valid until feb 1st I decided to send it back to get the 3060 version for the same price. Laptop goes out along with a set of headphones. Both items show up. Later that day the laptop no longer is showing as received. Headphones still are. It has reverted back to the 1st stage of the return process, its now been several days with no change to the status of the laptop. Something tells me they're attempting to burn out time until after the 1st to deny the return. Frankly the laptop was great but the ridiculous behaviour of the seller right from the word go has ruined the whole thing.

Si vous voulez un ordinateur performant et versatile, c'est le produit qu'il vous faut. C'est excellent pour le gaming occasionnel, je dis occasionnel car quand on joue de façon prolongée, ça chauffe beaucoup. Mais pour le reste c'est rapide efficace et très solide. Très mince aussi pour la puissance!

after removing boost cloaking and bloatware on it. i get 61-71 temps on high setting at 120-144 fps on most recent game ! i dont know why everyone make asus look bad. Very happy with the product. Screen could be better but i had a 60hz acer for 10 years so i dont complain at all.