ASUS – TUF Gaming A16 16″ 165Hz Gaming Laptop FHD-AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS with 16GB DDR5 Memory- Radeon RX7700S 512GB PCIe SSD – OFF BLACK

I’ve had a lot of gaming laptops in the past 5 years and I’ll admit I did take about a year off from gaming so this is the first one I’ve bought since my hiatus. I’ll get straight to the point and give you a brief summary of my thoughts on the ASUS TUF Gaming A16 Laptop. Later, I’ll give you a little more detail for those who are interested. The laptop has a 16″ 165Hz screen and a really polished design. It’s about 14x10x1 so it’s slim and lightweight. There’s almost no keyboard flex, adequate cooling vents, and a nicely thought out keyboard layout. It has an all AMD setup. I ran the computer through multiple benchmark tests and games, and it ran through all without a hitch. The computer is more powerful than I expected. There are 2 memory slots and 2 m.2 slots for an extra SSD. The FPS and temps were stable, cooling was adequate even when I pushed it. I believe the advantage here with AMD is the efficiency. It keeps the temperatures low and the battery charged. I’ve used Armoury Crate in the past and had issues like most, but this time I had absolutely no problems and I loved the interface and options available. I would advise you to try it out first before you listen to anyone telling you to uninstall or use something else. Gaming I ran Cyberpunk 2077 in Ultra Graphics and I was hitting between 80 and 90 with cars and people everywhere, and as high as 90 to 100 FPS in less busy scenes. CPU temps were 78 to 84 and GPU ran about 68 to 73 degrees. This was Ultra Graphics, with Armoury crate set to Turbo Mode for maximum performance. I ran A Plague Tale: Requiem in Ultra mode too because I heard it’s a graphically intensive game. It ran between 60 and 65 FPS in Ultra, CPU temp was around 73 and GPU peaked at 74 degrees. I didn’t know much about the 7700s before purchasing. I’ve previously had the 6700m (MSI Delta great little machine BTW) and the 6800m (Asus A15 advantage) and I do realize that they have one Asus laptop out currently with the 7600s. The easiest comparison to me is to jump on 3DMark and get a Firestrike Graphics score for DX11 followed by TimeSpy Graphics for Dx12. This gives me an idea of the graphics power. The DX12 TimeSpy Graphics score was right there slightly below a 3070ti and right above a 4060. The 7700s on Turbo Mode (armoury crate) scored an impressive 10,357 (turbo mode) on Time Spy Graphics. For comparison a 3070ti scored a 10,462. A 4060 is right below the 7700s at 10,299. A 3080 only scores a 10,836. A 4070 scores a 11,957 so as you can see it’s more of a 4060 than a 4070. Firestrike which guages DX11 performance (older games), it scored a combined score of 25,569 (and a very impressive 29,652 graphics score. In Firestrike Graphics, it would tie with a 4070, and beat a 4060, 3070ti, 3080,and 7600s, but we are talking DX11 here too. I’ll give you an idea of the power of this machine. A couple years ago I had an Alienware with a 2080 Super that I loved and it scored right around 9155 on TimeSpy and 20000 on firestrike so this laptop blows that out of the water. The AMD 7735 HS 8 core processor draws 35 watts of power. It has a clock speed of about 5GHz, 8 physical cores and 16 logical cores built on the 6nm tech. I scored a 12716 on MultiCore and 1477 on SingleCore. It gets the job done without any lag. The keyboard feels like your typical gaming keyboard, nothing special, no RGB, white backlit that offers 3 modes: solid, strobe, and breathing. I do really like the 4 keys at the top left of the keyboard on a little island, that give me access to volume, mic and a hotkey for armoury crate. There are a set of number keys as well with a small calculator on enter, available with the function key. The F1 through F12 have the usual useful options but a few unique ones as well where you can quick switch the performance mode, change keyboard brightness or pull up the aura menu. The battery is 90 watts with a 280 watt power supply. The battery last about 4 hours, it does switch you over to silent mode when you’re running in battery. I wouldn’t recommend gaming on any laptop without being plugged in because it will drain fast and performance will suffer. There are silent and eco modes if you’re just doing basic web browsing, watching a movie, schoolwork, or anything that doesn’t require performance or cooling. All of your ports are covered. There’s a USB-C that will allow up to 100 watts and also a USB-C for Display Port hookup to an external monitor. I hooked it up to my 34″ monitor and it worked great. You can use your Fn+F9 key to set to 2nd Monitor only. There is an HDMI 2.1 port and RJ-45 port for ethernet/network cables and a 3.5mm headphone jack if needed. There is also one USB 3.2 Type A port on the left, and one on the right (for your gaming mouse or peripheral) The CPU temps idle around low 50s, while GPU idles around 45 in Turbo mode, slightly higher on performance mode. When you’re gaming the bottom half of the laptop from the spacebar down is cool, while keyboard and top half can get a little hotter, but this is fairly typical for gaming laptops. The back was fairly easy to remove and you can see the efficient cooling system all the way down to the memory and M.2. cards which are insulated nicely. The memory is Samsung DDR5 4800 so it’s really fast. The wifi 6 is standard, and you’ll see about 6 cooling vents. They did well with the cooling here for a gaming computer although Lenovo still does that particularly well. You have a 16″ 165hZ WUXGA IPS monitor that you can v-sync if you would like. Even though it’s 300 nits it’s absolutely bright enough unless you walk out into the sun. I’ve had a 500 nit monitor and 300 nits is all you need when gaming indoors. The only distinct difference I’ve seen on a laptop is when I had the 400 nit 4K LED monitor, and you don’t want to game on the 4K LED 60Hz. The webcam is your basic 720p webcam, nothing special but it does the job. It takes photos and videos with options on resolution and timers if you’re taking a photo. It does have an array mic so you should be sounding good too. External speaker Sound is good, no distortion, although external speakers have no bass. I would always recommend using headphones if you can. For the price class this is an exceptional value, it runs cooler than my other Asus with an Intel 12700 and Nvidia 4070, and is also a little bit more stable with FPS. It has the graphics power to run any AAA title and most of them in ultra. The design of this computer was well thought out giving you the ports you need, the monitor, high refresh rate, an exceptional CPU and graphics card, a thoughtfully designed keyboard, no bloatware (MyAsus and Armoury crate or the only add-ons and they’re actually useful.) You can’t beat the value of this laptop and you will also be surprised by the build quality. ASUS TUF line has come a long way. I would highly recommend to anyone that wants a high performance machine on a budget. AMD has entered the race.