The Asus TUF Gaming F15 (2022) offers good gaming performance at a competitive price. It has fairly standard features and specs for an upper mid-tier gaming notebook. The military-inspired design is low-key, and doesn't draw attention to itself, while the build quality is decent. I daresay you won't have any complaints about it. The F15 is nothing but competent, even if it's unlikely to wow anyone.

To get its TUF badge, Asus says the F15 has passed certain military-spec tests such as surviving drops, and extreme temperatures. This TUF logo — on the lid — is actually the F15's main decorative element. There aren't any LEDs besides the single-zone keyboard backlight, so the F15 should blend into an office setting. The chassis itself is on the chunky side (around 2.2kg), but it feels sturdy enough. There are air vents at the rear and the sides. Except for a single USB Type-A port, the other ports — and there are a good number here, including Ethernet and Thunderbolt 4 — are on the left side. This arrangement would seem to favour right-handers who have their mice on the right.

Trending

Ulti Aura RGB Monitor Arm review: Nice bling

Like many gaming notebooks in this price bracket, the F15 has a 1080p IPS screen with a 144Hz refresh rate. It's a fairly standard display in terms of brightness and viewing angles. I like the F15's lid design. It has a slight protrusion that helps you open the notebook. This also means extra bezel space for the webcam. However, this 720p webcam is fairly noisy, and images look soft. It's usable, but I suggest getting a better webcam. This webcam doesn't do face recognition, and there's no fingerprint sensor either. While I wasn't expecting biometric features on a gaming notebook, some newer models do include them. The keyboard has decent key travel, but it feels cramped with a numeric keypad. There are useful shortcut keys for volume control, and to mute the microphone. The touchpad is plenty large, but it probably won't see much use in games.

My review set comes with an Intel Core i7-12700H, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 graphics chip. It's an upper mid-tier gaming PC similar to the Gigabyte Aorus 5. You'd expect it to breeze through games with all the eye candy turned on. In Performance mode — you can toggle between power modes in the Asus Armoury Crate app — the F15 produced 68fps at Ultra setting in Watch Dog: Legions. It managed 58fps with ray tracing enabled (RTX profile) in Metro Exodus. These numbers, though, were several frames lower than the Aorus 5. The Asus laptop also suffered from some thermal throttling, with benchmark scores deteriorating gradually over time. Temperatures for the CPU hovered around 85 degrees Celsius. However, the bottom of the laptop stayed comfortably cool throughout. The area above the keyboard, though, was really warm.

Like the Acer Predator Triton 300 SE, the F15 has a MUX switch (Ultimate Mode) that disables the integrated graphics, and switches to the dedicated Nvidia graphics chip. Doing so gives the laptop a slight performance boost (5 to 10%), but you'll have to restart the computer every time you switch to Ultimate mode. At S$2,695, the Asus TUF Gaming F15 is slightly cheaper than the Aorus 5 (S$2,849). Both gaming laptops will put in a good shift, and satisfy all your gaming needs, though I prefer the Asus' design. Get the F15 now from the Asus Store, Lazada, and Shopee.

See Also

Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection (PS5 & PC) review: Adventuring once again

Note: Review unit provided by Asus.