ASUS TUF A16 FA608WI 16.0' WQXGA 165Hz Gaming Laptop (AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070, 32GB RAM, 1TB PCIe SSD, Windows 11 Home)

So quick, so much ram, that processor + a 4070 gpu its is awesome and I got it around £200.00 cheaper in the black Friday sales

This is my first ever gaming laptop. It's nice and seems to be very fast. I really dislike the keyboard. The font used on the keys is awful and I find it difficult to type properly. I guess given time I could get used to it. My current laptop is 5 years old and sits nicely on an adjustable stand. This laptop does not have a flat surface except when all of the 'feet' are touching a table or whatever (part of the button on one side is raised). I need to have one edge of the laptop on the edge of the stand to be able to have no wobble. I am now aware of new 50 series desktops and laptops being released this month and early April and I would expect some higher spec laptops to go down in price. I am going to return this 4070 and check out some 4090 on Amazon later in March. It would not be appropriate to use this laptop until them so it shall be returned subject to Amazon's approval. I have not really tested the laptop too much but I'm still confident I can make a better purchase although it will cost more.

Great laptop for a price (got it with 18% discount). It's 3 times faster than my previous Dell G5 having same RAM and SSDs. (Novabench) Here are the issues I found: The keyboard is old style with linear switches. It means not very tactile. If you're not used to it, it's easy to mis-type and getting the wrong key. You've to be accurate when typing. The keyboard's backlit makes the keys not clearly visible in day light (especially the function keys) and the keys WASD are completely unreadable with backlit. You've to go by memory, press and pray. All the rest is good, including fans, ports (fast) and noise levels (silent in performance mode), speakers and webcam. I've added a Crucial 1Tb M2. SSD for a total 2Tb, and bear in mind the 32Gb Ram is soldered on the Mboard (therefore not expandable).

I was very positively surprised by this "gaming" laptop. Thanks to its powerful HX 370 processor which has a very good iGPU, I actually keep its 4070 discrete GPU disabled most of the time. It is completely silent and has a good battery life. The first thing I did was to immediately format the PC and reinstall with a fresh win11 USB. Despite having disabled armoury crate in the BIOS beforehand it still installed some Asus services, which I disabled. No software bloatware though after the reinstall though. Be aware that the driver for the wifi chip on this model is not included in the win11 install USB media. You need to download it from Asus and put it on the drive or use Ethernet. I then installed g-helper. It is immensely useful. I set the CPU mode to silent, and GPU to ECO which disables the discrete GPU. The PC is silent most of the time and I expect around 9 hours of battery life in normal usage. There is plenty of power in reserve if needed for more complex tasks. The screen is good. I keep it at 60hz to maximise battery life. As with the rest of the system, its ability to do 165Hz can be useful when needed. I did not install any Asus software, but I did install the AMD tools. With it one can allocate RAM to the iGPU. I set it at 8GB leaving the rest of the system at 24GB. I wish it was completely seamless. It is great that it has a second port for NVMe drives, which I am planning to use. Some issues: * BIOS update seems to not work with bitlocker encryption. As Bitlocker encryption is desirable and enabled by default, I am surprised Asus did or could not design its BIOS updates with this in mind. * It is a bit heavier than I would have preferred but I am happy with this purchase. * Would have been a nice gesture to include a 100W USB4 charger with such an expensive PC. There is a large 200W power brick with its special port, which would be needed for intense use. For daily use and travel a USB-C charger would be a good purchase.