Why is EVERYONE Buying this Budget Gaming Laptop? - ASUS TUF F15 Review

So you’re on the hunt for a new gaming  laptop, but they can be expensive, and you don’t want to waste your money.  So you go to Amazon and search by highest rated and best price to find the ASUS  TUF F15 listed as Amazon’s choice. But why is everyone buying  this gaming laptop? Well, it’s budget friendly coming in under  $700 USD, and with over 1800 reviews and a 4.5 out of 5 star rating, it  seems like the community has spoken. So I bought the TUF F15 to take a closer  look and see what all th

e hype is about. This laptop has an 11th gen Intel Core  i5 processor with 6 cores and 12 threads, Nvidia’s RTX 2050 graphics,  and a 1080p 144Hz screen. It’s got an all black plastic finish on  both the lid and interior, with a design that screams gaming laptop. There wasn’t too  much flex considering the plastic build, the quality feels much nicer compared to most other  laptops at this price point, like MSI’s GF63. The laptop alone weighs under 4.7lb or 2.1kg, increasing to almost 5.7lb or 2.

6kg with the  relatively small 150 watt charger included. It’s a little thick compared  to more expensive laptops, but it’s still quite portable  all things considered. The keyboard works quite well, the  presses have a nice clicky feel. It has one zone of RGB backlighting with  limited effects, but it looks way better compared to most alternatives at this price range. The touchpad felt a little small, as it’s  got physical left and right click keys, so the touchpad itself does not click  down.

I prefer not having these buttons, but these days you only really  see them on budget laptops. Most of the ports are on the left  hand side towards the back - good news for right handed mouse users, as  the right only has one USB Type-A port. The screen is an area where cheaper laptops  have to sacrifice. The colors look ok enough when playing a game, and realistically you’re not  going to get better than this in a gaming laptop at this price point. It’s a bit dim, ideally 300  nits at full brig

htness is a nice sweet spot, but the TUF was a little below this. The  screen response time wasn’t great either, at almost 17ms. Once we get to 20ms, even I,  a filthy casual, start noticing blurriness on the screen in fast paced games. But again, it's  quite similar to other similarly priced laptops. There’s a 720p camera above the screen. Here’s how the camera and  microphones look and sound, and this is what it sounds like  while typing on the keyboard. Cheaper laptops like this usually come

with one  stick of memory installed in single channel, so you could upgrade with a second  stick in future to boost FPS in games with dual channel. Otherwise there’s  a spare M.2 slot for a second SSD, a removable Wi-Fi card under the installed SSD,  but it only has a small 3-Cell 48Wh battery. The TUF is also available with  a larger 4-Cell 90Wh battery, which would use up that empty space, but that’s  only found in more expensive configurations. The small battery results in just 3 hours and  1

2 minutes of battery life in the YouTube video playback test, one of the worst results  out of any laptop tested. To be fair, other laptops that cost a similar amount of money  aren’t that different. But then on the other hand, ASUS’s ROG Ally goes for about $700 too. That  lasted way longer despite the smaller battery, and that’s because AMD Ryzen based devices tend  to last longer than Intel options in this test. The installed 512 gig SSD performs quite well  for a PCIe Gen 3 drive in a cheape

r laptop. The speakers sound ok, but aren’t  anything special. They get the job done, but they’re a bit tinny without any bass. The ASUS Armory Crate software lets us change  between silent, performance, and turbo modes. The keyboard felt surprisingly cool when running  Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p medium settings. The cooler inside is doing a good job, and the  fans don’t run super loud compared to most other laptops, which are usually more  than 50 decibels - here, have a listen. But is it actually

any good at  gaming? Let’s put it to the test! Hogwarts Legacy was running around 40 FPS on the  RTX 2050 graphics at 1080p high settings. A gaming laptop with the more expensive RTX 3050 wasn’t  that much faster, while the 2050 was 38% faster compared to the cheaper GTX 1650. The problem  with the GTX 1650 is it doesn’t have DLSS support. That's only available to RTX 40 graphics. When we  set DLSS to balanced mode the RTX 2050 in the TUF F15 is closer to 60 FPS - a nice boost. The more  expens

ive RTX 3050 laptop was very close here too, but if you’re able to save an extra $100 for an  RTX 4050, then it might be worth it. The 4050 was 11% faster in FPS for 15% more money, but the RTX  4050 can offer even smoother gameplay with frame generation in supported games like this. Only  RTX 40 series graphics support this feature. Most games don’t have frame  generation support though, but even without it the RTX 4050 had a fairly big  lead over the 3050 and 2050 in Call of Duty. In this case

the 4050 was almost 50% faster,  not bad at all for an extra $100 or so. Generally speaking, the RTX 2050 in the  TUF F15 performs very closely to the more expensive RTX 3050 in multiple games,  but the 2050 usually costs less money, so spending more on the 3050 may not be worth it. This puts the F15 in a nice sweet spot in terms  of price to performance. In Call of Duty it’s better value compared to the GTX 1650 and RTX  3050, but the more expensive RTX 4050 was able to provide better value. Y

eah the 4050 costs over  $100 more, but the FPS boost makes it worth it, if you have extra money at least. It varies by  game though. The 4050 still offered the best value in Hogwarts Legacy, but by a smaller margin,  and the cheaper GTX 1650 was much worse here. It’s definitely possible to boost FPS in games  a bit by installing a second stick of memory, as that gets you dual channel. There’s no  MUX switch, but connecting a monitor to the Type-C port will also boost FPS in games, as it  bypass

es the optimus and the integrated graphics. Based on the performance in games, for  around $700 the ASUS TUF F15 isn’t too bad. The build quality and design is way  nicer compared to others like MSI’s GF63. And honestly, I don’t think that it’s worth  saving a little bit of money by going for the lower tier GTX 1650. In 2023 that just  kind of seems like it’s a bit too old these days. Unless it’s not possible for you to get  any more money, and you don’t mind playing games at minimum settings an

d not having DLSS,  which is a nice feature to boost FPS in games. The RTX 3050 on the other hand isn’t really worth  paying more money over the 2050. But if the 2050 and 3050 are about the same price, then yeah sure,  might as well go for the 3050. Technically it is a little better. But if you can spare an extra  $100 or so, and push the budget up to $800, then I think it’s worth going for the  RTX 4050. Not only is it a higher tier GPU offering more performance, but it has 6  gigs of VRAM comp

ared to 4 gigs in the 1650, 2050 and 3050. And it also has frame generation  supported games. Which again isn’t a whole lot of titles just now, but in the games where  it is supported, it does definitely help. With a good sale though, it is possible  to find the RTX 2050 for closer to $500, like in this HP Victus at Best Buy. This  was such a good deal that we instantly added it to the gaminglaptop.deals  website. Sales change every day though, so make sure you check the link below to  save mone

y on your next gaming laptop. And honestly, if you can find that HP Victus  with RTX 2050 for $520, well that’s a $170 saving compared to this ASUS TUF F15, and it  should perform quite similarly as it has the same GPU. But we’re kind of comparing apples  to oranges because the TUF isn’t currently on sale. So it’s possible that it could also have  a really good price at $500 in future. So when we’re comparing at full prices without sales,  the ASUS TUF F15 does look quite attractive. So I can se

e why so many people have  bought it from Amazon and mostly left positive reviews. But if you prefer gaming with  a handheld console rather than a gaming laptop, well ASUS’s ROG Ally actually  costs the same price as this gaming laptop. So check out this video next  to find out if you should buy a gaming laptop or the ROG Ally for the same amount of  money. I’ll see you over in that one next!