Asus TUF A15 review: Strong hinge design, staid looks, can run graphic-intensive games very smoothly

Get it for: Rs 62,990
Highlight: Strong performance

Gaming laptops have a niche but loyal audience. To cater to them, Asus has launched the new TUF A15 FA566. The new gaming laptop from Asus comes powered with an AMD Ryzen 7 4800 processor, coupled with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660Ti graphics card. It has a default memory of 16GB and comes with up to 1TB of storage and sports a starting price of Rs 62,990.


It has a very solid hinge design, the sturdiness of which continues all the way up to the full-HD display, making the display panel uniform in thickness from top to bottom.

The back of the display has a steely, professional look, that says gamer without screaming. The chassis, especially the right side of the keyboard area, remains very slightly warm when the laptop is used for both gaming and other applications. The laptop comes with four USB ports, one of which is a Type-C one.

There are four modes to operate the laptop: Windows, Silent, Performance and Turbo. The first is meant for activities that don’t require performance load on the CPU and GPU. The remaining three are the gaming modes.

We played Crysis 3, Shadow of The Tomb Raider and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt at the maximum possible graphics settings possible on both Performance and Turbo Mode. While for the first two, the 144Hz display of the laptop handled the challenge without any tear or stutter and very less frame rate fluctuations, the Witcher 3 proved more challenging at the highest possible settings that included turning on Nvidia Hairworks also.

Heat dissipation is quite effective and you won’t notice heating of the top right part of the chassis until you touch it (after about 3 hours on Turbo mode). Fan noise at Turbo mode could be an issue for some.

Watching video content at 1920 x 1080 pixels resolution was a pleasant experience, with accurate and vivid colour reproduction. The audio is okay for watching films and some soft music. The battery life of the laptop, when not gaming, can go on for an average of 2-3 hours.

Barring the noise of the fan, which can be exasperating at times, the TUF A15 delivers competent performance on all fronts: strong hinge design, staid looks and can run some graphic-intensive games very smoothly. It delivers the strongest in the most important factor: Smooth gaming.

The writer is with gadgetsnow.com