Asus TUF Gaming A15 review

Frame rates

1920×1080, High preset, upscaling off. Averages 117fps across the 5 core benchmark games.

Measured on this machine. Source: Notebookcheck, 2024-07-20.

In use

The short version

The TUF Gaming A15 in this configuration is one of the more honest machines in our RTX 40-generation data, and the reason is a detail most buyers overlook: its panel and the benchmark resolution are the same. The measured figures were recorded at 1920x1080 and the screen is 1920x1080. There is no gap between the numbers on this page and what the machine will do on its own display — no upscaling assumed, no resolution penalty to mentally apply, no caveat about the panel outrunning the graphics card. Very few gaming laptops in this generation can say that, and it makes every judgement below more direct than usual.

What those figures show is a competent mid-range machine with a clearly defined ceiling. GTA V at 168fps, Dota 2 at 149fps, Baldur's Gate 3 at 96fps, X-Plane 11 at 92fps and Cyberpunk 2077 at 83fps — the five games in our scoring suite — average 118fps. The full thirteen-game set stretches from 213fps in Strange Brigade down to 40fps in Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, and that last number is the one that tells you where the limits of this hardware are.

The specification is an RTX 4060, a Ryzen 9 8945H, 16GB of memory, a 512GB SSD, a 15.6in 144Hz IPS panel and a 90Wh battery, in a chassis weighing 2.122kg. That is a coherent set of choices for a mid-range gaming laptop: the GPU is matched to the resolution, the refresh rate is achievable in a decent proportion of the library, and the weight is manageable without being remarkable.

One structural note. This page carries no score, and that is entirely because we have no confirmed UK price for this exact configuration — nothing about the machine is at fault. The benchmark suite is complete, all five scoring games are present, and it ranks normally on the frame rate leaderboard. But value accounts for 30% of our score and cannot be computed from a blank, so the score is withheld rather than fabricated. We are not going to speculate about what it costs.

Buy it if you play at 1080p, want the numbers on the page to be the numbers on your screen, and are comfortable using upscaling in the heaviest recent releases. Look elsewhere if you want a higher-resolution display, if you play the most demanding new titles at native resolution, or if you need substantially more headroom than an RTX 4060 provides.

Performance

The power limit our record doesn't hold

Before the frame rates, the standard caveat, and it applies with particular force to the RTX 4060 because that GPU is configured across a wider band of power limits than almost any other part in the generation. Our record does not hold a TGP figure for this machine. We hold one for some of the machines it is compared against, and the examples in our data span the full width of that band, from heavily restricted configurations to ones being run about as hard as the part allows. The difference between the ends of it is large enough to reorder the results table.

We are not going to estimate a figure. What can be said is that a 2.122kg 15.6in chassis is a mid-sized design with reasonable cooling volume — considerably more than a thin-and-light, considerably less than a 17in desktop replacement — and the measured results are consistent with a GPU being run competently rather than either throttled hard or pushed to its limit. That is an inference from the numbers, not a specification, and it should be treated as such.

If you are cross-shopping specific TUF listings, the power limit is worth chasing, because Asus has historically shipped the same model name in configurations with different TGPs across regions and revisions. The frame rates on this page describe the unit Notebookcheck measured.

The top of the chart: where the processor sets the ceiling

Strange Brigade at 213fps is the fastest result in the set and it is a game specifically designed to run well — a lightweight engine used widely as a benchmark precisely because it scales cleanly. At 1080p on High it does not ask enough of a modern GPU to keep it busy, so the number is bounded by the processor and the engine rather than the graphics card.

F1 24 at 170fps and GTA V at 168fps sit almost together. GTA V is a scoring-suite game and 168fps is a strong showing in it: comfortably above the panel's 144Hz refresh rate with enough margin that busy scenes will not drop below it. F1 24 being a modern racing title at 170fps is also a good result — racing games tend to be well optimised and this one is clearly not troubling the hardware.

Dota 2 at 149fps is where the first useful piece of analysis appears. Dota 2 is among the lightest games in the entire test set. A machine with a top-tier desktop-derived processor will run it a great deal faster than this. This one manages 149fps. That is not a GPU result — no graphics card is the constraint in Dota 2 at 1080p on High — it is a statement about the platform. The Ryzen 9 8945H is a mainstream mobile part rather than one of the HX-class chips derived from desktop silicon, and in titles where the processor is doing the work, that shows.

The practical consequence is narrow but worth stating: if your library leans heavily on competitive titles and you want to feed a very high refresh rate panel, the limiting component on this machine is the processor, not the graphics card, and buying a higher GPU tier in the same chassis class would not fix it. Fortunately the panel here is 144Hz, and 149fps in Dota 2 clears it.

Alone in the Dark at 144fps is a neat coincidence — it lands exactly on the panel's refresh rate — and it marks the boundary of the machine's comfortable high-refresh territory. Everything above this line saturates the display. Everything below does not.

The middle: the range most of the library sits in

Final Fantasy XV at 101fps, Baldur's Gate 3 at 96fps and X-Plane 11 at 92fps form the band where this machine spends most of its time, and it is a healthy place to be. All three are meaningfully above 60fps, which means the experience has margin: a game averaging 96fps can lose a third of its frame rate in a demanding scene and still be near 60.

Baldur's Gate 3 at 96fps is worth dwelling on because it is a scoring-suite game and because it is the sort of title people buy a machine like this to play — a long, heavily played, mechanically dense game rather than a technical showcase. Ninety-six frames per second at native resolution in it is a genuinely comfortable result, and one that will not degrade badly in the game's more demanding later areas.

X-Plane 11 at 92fps is the suite's processor-bound entry, and its position relative to the others tells the same story as Dota 2: this machine's frame rates in CPU-heavy work are respectable rather than exceptional. Flight simulation loads the processor with work no graphics card can offload, which is exactly why the title is in the suite — it prevents a laptop from looking uniformly fast on the strength of its GPU alone.

Cyberpunk 2077 at 83fps is the most useful single number here for judging the hardware. Cyberpunk has become the industry's default yardstick for heavy rendering, and 83fps at native 1080p on High with upscaling disabled is a solid mid-range result. It is above the threshold at which a high-refresh panel starts to feel worthwhile, and it leaves room for the frame rate to fall during dense street scenes without becoming uncomfortable.

The bottom: where an RTX 4060 runs out

The First Descendant at 79fps, Ghost of Tsushima at 77fps, Dragon's Dogma 2 at 60fps and Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 at 40fps.

The first two are unremarkable — high-seventies at native 1080p in recent titles is what a mid-range GPU should deliver, and both are comfortably playable. The last two are the results that define the machine's ceiling and they deserve careful reading.

Dragon's Dogma 2 at 60fps is exactly on the line. That game has a documented reputation for being processor-heavy in populated areas, and a 60fps average on a machine with a mainstream mobile processor is consistent with that. It is playable, but there is no margin: an average of 60 means a substantial fraction of the time is spent below it.

Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 at 40fps is the lowest figure in the set by a wide margin and it is the single most informative number on this page. That game is an Unreal Engine 5 showcase built to push rendering technology harder than almost anything else released in its year, and 40fps at native 1080p on an RTX 4060 is the honest cost of that. It is not a failure of the machine — the game brings much more expensive hardware to its knees too — but it is a preview of where this class of GPU stands against the heaviest end of modern development.

This is where upscaling stops being optional. Every figure quoted on this page was measured with upscaling switched off, which is the only defensible way to benchmark hardware, because it measures the silicon rather than the reconstruction algorithm and because upscaling implementations vary between titles. But it is not how anyone will play Hellblade 2 on this machine. DLSS is available on this hardware, it works well, and turning it on would raise that 40fps figure substantially. We hold no measurement of by how much and will not invent one. The point is that a native-resolution figure of 40fps in the hardest game in the set is a floor with a known remedy, not a verdict.

What the shape of the distribution tells you

Thirteen games running from 213fps to 40fps is a spread of better than five to one, and it is wider than most machines in our data. That width is a function of the test set including both very light titles and one genuine Unreal Engine 5 stress test, and it is more useful than a single average.

Group the results and the pattern is clear. Five titles clear the panel's 144Hz refresh rate or match it. Four sit in the eighties, nineties and low hundreds — the comfortable middle where the frame rate is well above playable but below the display's ceiling. Two are in the high seventies. Two are at or below 60fps.

That is the profile of a machine correctly matched to its screen. A 144Hz 1080p panel does not demand triple-digit frame rates in every title to be worth having; it demands them in the titles where high refresh rates matter — competitive and fast-moving games — and those are precisely the ones at the top of this chart. In heavy single-player games the refresh rate is largely irrelevant and 83fps or 96fps is a good experience.

The mean across the five scoring-suite games is 118fps, and unusually for the machines in this batch, that figure is directly comparable to every other scored laptop on the site, because the suite is complete. The number is real and the ranking it would produce is valid. What is missing is the price, and therefore the value component of the score, which is the whole reason this page shows no total.

The screen

A 15.6in 1920x1080 IPS panel at 144Hz. On paper this is the least exciting display in the comparison set. In practice it is the best-matched one, and that is a more useful property than it sounds.

Why the resolution match matters

Most gaming laptop reviews carry an implicit warning that the benchmark data was gathered at a resolution below the machine's own panel. A 1440p or 1600p screen driven at 1080p in testing produces figures that flatter the real experience, sometimes badly — a 1600p panel asks for close to double the pixels of a 1080p one, and in GPU-limited games that difference lands squarely on the constraint.

Here there is no such gap. The measured figures are native-resolution figures for this machine's own display. 83fps in Cyberpunk 2077 means 83fps on the screen in front of you, at the settings tested, with nothing enabled to help. That is worth a great deal when you are trying to decide whether a machine is fast enough, because it removes the largest source of uncertainty in reading benchmark tables.

It also means the GPU and the panel are properly matched as a design. An RTX 4060 driving 1080p is a sensible pairing; the same GPU driving a 1600p panel is a machine that assumes upscaling from the start. Neither approach is wrong, but the first one is easier to reason about and easier to live with, and it is the reason this specification hangs together better than several more expensive ones.

144Hz, and which games reach it

Five of the thirteen measured titles clear or match the refresh rate: Strange Brigade at 213fps, F1 24 at 170fps, GTA V at 168fps, Dota 2 at 149fps and Alone in the Dark at 144fps. The other eight fall below it, five of them below 92fps.

So the panel is fed in roughly a third of the tested library, which is a reasonable outcome for a mid-range machine and a far better ratio than the higher-refresh panels fitted to similarly powered laptops manage. A much higher refresh figure on hardware like this would be almost entirely decorative. At 144Hz, the refresh rate is achievable in the games where it matters — fast, competitive, well-optimised titles — and in the heavy single-player games where the machine sits in the eighties and nineties, variable refresh support smooths out what the panel cannot show at full rate.

This is the correct specification for the hardware, and it is a quiet point in the machine's favour. Manufacturers frequently fit refresh rates their GPUs cannot use, because the number looks good on a retail listing. Asus did not do that here.

IPS, and what our record doesn't cover

The panel is IPS. In a gaming laptop at this level that is the sensible choice: dependable viewing angles, no burn-in risk from static game HUDs or taskbars over years of use, and no local-dimming behaviour to manage. It will not match an OLED for contrast in dark scenes, and it will not match a Mini LED for peak brightness in HDR content — but neither of those technologies appears at this end of the market, and a mid-range machine fitted with a good IPS panel is not compromised.

What our record does not hold is any measurement of this panel's brightness, contrast, colour coverage or response time. Those vary enormously between IPS implementations and the label alone tells you very little. If you intend to use the machine for colour-critical work, or outdoors, or in a bright room, check the specific listing — we have no data to offer and are not going to describe a display we have not seen measured.

Build, size and portability

2.122kg for a 15.6in gaming laptop with a 90Wh battery is squarely mid-range, and that is the right assessment of it: not light, not heavy, entirely usable.

Context helps. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 in the comparison set below weighs 2.935kg — over eight hundred grammes more. Thin 16in machines in this generation reached around 1.8kg. The TUF sits between them, which means it is a machine you can carry to a friend's house, take on a trip or move between rooms without it becoming an event, but not one you would want to carry across a city every day alongside books and a charger.

That weight also buys cooling volume, and cooling volume is what turns a GPU specification into a frame rate. A 15.6in chassis at this thickness has room for fans and heat pipes that a 1.8kg machine does not, and while our record holds no thermal or acoustic measurements to prove it, the comparison data below — where this machine holds level with a laptop carrying a higher-tier GPU — is consistent with a design that is not throttling itself into the ground. The TUF range has historically been built around durability rather than thinness, and the weight is part of that trade.

The 90Wh battery is close to the largest capacity airlines generally permit in cabin baggage, so on paper this machine should manage decent runtime in light use. We hold no battery-life measurement, so we will not tell you how long it lasts. What is true across the category is that gaming on battery is not a serious proposition on any machine with a dedicated GPU of this class: the power draw under load exceeds what a battery of this size can sustain, and performance will be reduced substantially when unplugged.

The 512GB SSD is worth flagging as a practical constraint rather than a specification. Modern games routinely occupy 80 to 150GB each. After the operating system, a 512GB drive realistically holds three or four large installations at once. That is not unusual at this price point, and most machines in this class have a spare M.2 slot — though our record does not confirm whether this one does, so treat that as something to verify rather than assume. Budget for an additional drive if you keep a large library installed.

Our record holds no dimensions beyond the screen size, no keyboard or chassis assessment, and no noise or surface temperature data. Noise is the gap most likely to affect daily use, since a mid-sized chassis running a GPU near its limit is not a quiet object, and we have nothing to offer on it.

How it compares

The rival set is drawn from the same GPU generation and compared only on games both machines hold. It contains something genuinely instructive: two RTX 4050 machines with completely different outcomes. That contrast is the most useful thing in the comparison data and it is worth working through carefully.

Against the MSI Thin GF63 — RTX 4050 — ahead by 41fps across five games

Five shared games is a substantial sample by the standards of these comparisons, and an average lead of 41fps is a wide, unambiguous margin. This is the RTX 4060 doing what a higher GPU tier should do against the entry point of the generation, measured across enough titles that the result is not an artefact of which games happened to overlap.

Forty-one frames is visible. It is the difference between a game sitting comfortably above a refresh rate and struggling to reach it, and in the heavier titles it will be the difference between a good experience and an acceptable one. If your alternative is a budget RTX 4050 machine, this comparison is the argument for spending more.

Against the Dell G15 5530 (i5-13450HX) — also an RTX 4050 — ahead by one frame across four games

And here is the puzzle. Another RTX 4050 laptop, and across four shared games this machine is ahead by an average of a single frame. Statistically that is a tie.

Two RTX 4050 machines, and against one this laptop wins by 41fps while against the other it wins by nothing at all. Both results are real. The explanation lies in what is being compared rather than in any inconsistency in the measurements, and there are two factors doing the work.

The first is which games overlap. The MSI comparison spans five titles, the Dell comparison four, and they are not the same four. At 1920x1080, the lighter titles in any shared set are limited by the processor rather than the graphics card — the GPU finishes each frame before the CPU has prepared the next, so the frame rate settles at a ceiling the graphics card has nothing to do with. A four-game sample weighted towards those titles will show a small gap between machines whose graphics hardware genuinely differs. That is not the benchmark failing; it is the benchmark accurately reporting that in those particular games, at that particular resolution, the GPU was not the constraint.

The second factor is the Dell's processor. That machine carries an i5-13450HX, an HX-class chip derived from desktop silicon rather than a mainstream mobile part. In exactly the CPU-bound titles that compress GPU differences, an HX processor has a structural advantage over the Ryzen 9 8945H in this machine. So the Dell comparison is measuring a laptop with a weaker GPU and a stronger platform against one with a stronger GPU and a weaker platform, in a set of games where the platform matters more. A near-tie is the entirely predictable outcome.

The lesson for a buyer is not that an RTX 4060 is no better than an RTX 4050. The MSI comparison, over a larger sample, demonstrates that it plainly is. The lesson is that a shared-game average is only as good as the games it shares, and that a four-game comparison against a machine with a much stronger processor is measuring something other than the graphics cards.

Against the HP Omen 17-db0079ng — RTX 4070 — level across four games

A machine one GPU tier above this one, and across four shared games the two are indistinguishable — the average difference rounds to nothing.

The same reasoning applies, and it applies in this machine's favour. Four shared titles at 1080p, weighted towards games where the processor sets the ceiling, will not separate an RTX 4060 from an RTX 4070. The RTX 4070 is genuinely faster hardware; this comparison simply does not contain the conditions under which that would show. If the shared set included Hellblade 2, Dragon's Dogma 2 or Cyberpunk at higher settings, the gap would open.

That said, the result is not worthless. It tells you something practical: in the kinds of games where this machine runs at high frame rates anyway, paying for a 4070 buys you nothing. If your library is competitive titles, racing games and older releases, the GPU tier above this one is money spent on frames you will not see. The 4070 earns its premium in the heavy titles at the bottom of the chart, and only there.

Against the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 — RTX 4090 — behind by 63fps across three games

The top of the generation, and across three shared games this machine is 63fps behind.

Note what this does to the argument above. Three shared games — a smaller sample than the four-game comparisons that produced near-ties — nonetheless produced a sixty-three frame separation. So small samples at 1080p are not incapable of distinguishing machines. They compress differences, but a genuinely large gap survives the compression and shows up as a large gap.

That is the evidence that makes the near-ties meaningful rather than suspect. The methodology can produce a 63fps separation and a 41fps separation when the hardware genuinely differs by enough. When it reports a tie, the tie is a finding about those games on those machines, not a failure of measurement.

The Scar 17 is not a realistic alternative purchase. It weighs 2.935kg to this machine's 2.122kg, carries a 17.3in chassis, and sits at the top of the generation's pricing. The comparison is calibration, not a shopping suggestion.

Reading the spread as a whole

Ahead by 41 against one RTX 4050, level with another, level with an RTX 4070, and 63 behind an RTX 4090. That is the profile of a machine sitting solidly in the middle of its generation, with performance that is genuinely differentiated from the entry level and genuinely short of the top.

The useful conclusion for a buyer is about where the money goes. Between an RTX 4050 and an RTX 4060, the measured evidence supports spending more — 41fps across five games is not marginal. Between an RTX 4060 and an RTX 4070, our shared-game data does not show a difference at all, which does not prove there is none but does suggest the upgrade is worth less than the price gap implies unless you are specifically buying for the heaviest titles. And the jump to the top of the range buys a great deal of performance at a great deal of cost, in a much heavier machine.

Who it's for

The buyer who plays at 1080p and wants to know exactly what they are getting. This is the strongest case for the machine and it rests on the resolution match. The figures on this page are native-resolution figures for this machine's own panel. There is no interpretation required, no mental adjustment for a higher-resolution screen, no assumption that upscaling will be enabled. Cyberpunk 2077 at 83fps, Baldur's Gate 3 at 96fps, GTA V at 168fps — that is what the machine does on the display it ships with.

The buyer with a broad, mostly-not-cutting-edge library. Nine of the thirteen measured titles run above 79fps and five clear the panel's refresh rate. For someone who plays a mix of competitive games, older favourites and the occasional recent release, this machine will not be the limiting factor in their enjoyment for some years.

The buyer who wants a machine that is portable enough without being fragile. At 2.122kg this is not a featherweight, but the TUF line is built around toughness rather than thinness, and the weight buys cooling volume that shows up in the comparison data. If the laptop is going to be moved regularly but not carried daily, and it is going to be used rather than curated, that is a sensible set of priorities.

The buyer who is comfortable using upscaling. The bottom of the chart — Hellblade 2 at 40fps, Dragon's Dogma 2 at 60fps — is where this hardware runs out at native resolution. DLSS is available and it is genuinely good on this generation. Someone who treats it as a normal setting rather than a compromise will find the machine's practical ceiling considerably higher than the native figures suggest.

Who should buy something else

Anyone who wants a higher-resolution display. This is a 1080p machine and it is a 1080p machine deliberately. If you want the sharpness of a 1440p or 1600p panel, or a screen good enough for colour work, look at the machines built around that — and accept that their frame rates at native resolution will be lower than the ones on this page, because they are pushing far more pixels with comparable hardware.

Anyone who plays the heaviest new releases at native resolution. Hellblade 2 at 40fps is the honest warning. If your interest is in the graphical showcase titles as they release, and you dislike upscaling on principle, an RTX 4060 is not the right tier and no amount of settings tuning will change that. Buy more GPU.

Anyone whose priority is very high refresh competitive gaming. Dota 2 at 149fps is the number to look at. That is a good result against a 144Hz panel and a poor one against a very-high-refresh ambition. The constraint here is the mainstream mobile processor, not the graphics card, so the fix is a machine with a desktop-derived HX-class chip rather than a higher GPU tier.

Anyone who needs a lot of local storage. A 512GB drive holds the operating system and three or four modern games. If you keep a large library installed and do not want to manage it, budget for a second drive from the outset or buy a machine that ships with more.

Anyone who carries a laptop every day. 2.122kg plus a charger is a real load over a long commute. The thin 16in machines in this generation weigh several hundred grammes less and the difference is noticeable. You will give up performance for it — that trade is visible elsewhere in our data — but if the machine has to travel daily, the trade may be the right one.

What we hold, and what we don't

Our record for this machine holds a full specification — GPU, processor, memory, storage, screen size, resolution, refresh rate, panel technology, weight and battery capacity — and thirteen measured game results from Notebookcheck at 1920x1080 on High with upscaling disabled, including all five games in our scoring suite.

It does not hold a GPU power limit, a confirmed UK price, any battery-life measurement, any display brightness or colour data, and no thermal or acoustic measurements.

The benchmark side of the record is unusually complete for this batch, and that matters: unlike several machines in the same comparison set, this one has a full five-game suite average that is directly comparable with every other scored laptop on the site. The frame rate ranking is valid and the performance judgements above rest on it. What is absent is the price, and with it any assessment of whether the machine represents good value — which is a question the figures on this page cannot answer and the listing in front of you can.

How it compares