so the last AMD notebook that I remember checking out was the asus rog g14 it was
a spectacular machine that had excellent performance because it was one of the
first laptops to hit the market with an eight-course 16 third processor from AMD
the Ryzen 9 cpu it had a really unique design excellent battery life the
performance really did put some of the intel notebooks to shame and the price
was also a steal considering what you were getting it honestly was an awesome
laptop by the way if you're interested in my full review you can check it out
right over here now what I have in front of me is the Asus TUF A15 it's a
slightly more affordable option than the G 14 but what's really interesting is
the specs between the two are pretty similar but this laptop does cut corners
and build quality i/o and a few other things on paper when you compare this to
the G14 really the only difference is a CPU and GPU well sorta
so you're getting an 8 core 16 thread Ryzen 7 4800H that has a higher TDP
than the Ryzen 9 4900HS on the G14 also the base and boost frequencies are
lower on the rise in seven CPU the GPU on the top notebook is in RTX 2060 on
max Q versus max Q variant on the G14 the rest the specs are basically the
same however the price difference is pretty significant this top laptop is
250 dollars cheaper than the G14 which is actually a lot the starting price of
this laptop is $700 and for that you get a Ryzen 5 CPU a gigabytes of RAM and a
gtx 1650 you can configure it up to the specs that I have on my sample right
over here but watch out for a few SKUs that asus is offering some of them have
a smaller battery along with a dedicated two and a half inch hard drive bay so
with that out of the way let's get into the physical aspects of this laptop then
get into performance compared to the G14 and find out if it's worth getting
over some of the other options that are currently in the market
starting with exterior impressions and I'm just going to say that I'm in love
with this sleek sandstone matte grey finish asus is calling it fortress grey
it's an Lumina lid with plastic bits on the
inside so it doesn't feel as premium as a g14 but it is a day and night
difference compared to the GFI what did to you that I checked out last year from
Asus which was also an AMD based notebook they're also offering a bonfire
black design which also looks cool but I personally like the gray you just get
this utilitarian vibe but when you look at this thing especially with that tough
logo engraved on the center along with some other design cues that just
complete that stealth look I really like it the webcam is located at the top with
a small bump on the lid the nice thing about this is that allows you to easily
open the laptop with just one hand nice touch racers the hinge
unfortunately wobbles a lot so definitely watch out for that when you
have this on your lap typing up something it does get quite distracting
I was also surprised by the fact that this hardly showed any fingerprints so
that's definitely a bonus there is a bit of flex on the lid particularly in the
center and I expected that because this ain't a unibody design that would cost
you more money things do take an interesting turn around when you open
that lid because this interior space just does not reflect the low profile
look from the outside it just screams gamer II and I'm not a fan of it
I think Asus was trying too hard to compensate for the plastic materials
being used here by going with a brushed texture
I actually prefer these sandstone finish on the rog gfld you
in fact the interior looks way better on that versus the stuff laptop you're
getting a full-size keyboard with our G fonts on the key caps the arrow keys are
miniscule compared to the rest so it might be a problem for people with
larger hands the keys themselves feel good they do have a bit of travel
distance but feel a bit mushy I'm not sure if it's due to the plastic body but
it's certainly not as good as a g14 the Oise keys are translucent which is kind
of unique because you can see the switches underneath but it just kills
the consistency I assume gamers appreciate this set Federation RGB
lighting has made its way into the keyboard the elimination with the Oise
keys do look a bit weird especially when compared to the rest of the keyboard
it's bright enough to get you through those night gaming sessions honestly I
just wished if they were all the same but let me know in the comments down
below do you guys prefer having a separated wast key layout versus the
other way around I'm curious to know the trackpad is surprisingly really good for
the price point it is a smooth plastic finish which really helps navigating
through Windows easily it's actually better than the arrow series on gigabyte
laptops which was surprising to me it's not a glass surface like what you'll
find on more expensive premium notebooks out there but it gets a job done
it also has support for Windows precision drivers which is nice and
something that this notebook reminded me of is just how amazing dedicated primary
left and right buttons where we're slow he's trying to see integrated ones but
this has dedicated buttons and they're awesome I mean just take a listen for
yourself I can just do this all day I would totally do this all day if that
was my job I would do it though that would be pretty boring but I would still
do it so this is the webcam test on the top 15 the video quality is obviously
not the greatest but the microphone sounds pretty good you will notice a lot
of compression with my voice but it does a pretty good job isolating the
background noise so that's nice the speakers are bottom facing but Asus
pulled a really smart move by adding cutouts on the side resulting in twice
the sound output compared to previous generations and I've got to say these
sound pretty amazing the bass is deep because the sound
bounces back to the chassis especially when you have it laid out
flat on a desk the highs are nice and detailed but they do tend to become
harsh sometimes but for casual or general listening
purposes this thing will exceed your expectations it's actually better than
my played 15 port selection is decent but there are a few questionable choices
most of them are on the left-hand side starting with power in LAN port HDMI 2.0
to USB 3.0 chin one type a ports a type c 3.2 gen 2 that also supports
DisplayPort 1.4 with g-sync and an audio jack switching over to the right you get
a single USB 2 port that's right I don't know why I'm not sure if it's even legal
to ship notebooks in 2020 with a USB 2 port also keep in mind that those two
type-a ports on the left-hand side are five gigabits per second versus
tingler's per second which is the updated spec I mean I guess this is an
area where Asus had to cut corners so it is what it is
we ought to display it's a 15.6 inch IPS level with 144 Hertz that also supports
adaptive sync unfortunately it isn't the most color accurate screen because it
only covers 64% srgb 48 percent Adobe RGB and 47 percent DCI p3 so if you're a
content creator or a photographer you should probably stay away from this
notebook the viewing angles are nice and there is good contrast I didn't
experience any back beat on my sample and the screen only gets his brightest
300 nits so other visibility will be a bit challenging but with that being said
the gaming experience on the TUF A15 was absolutely amazing and that's thanks
to the 144 Hertz refresh rate if you're a hardcore gamer you wouldn't
necessarily prioritize color accuracy what really matters is that you get a
smooth stutter free experience and this thing delivers upgrading is super easy
on this laptop all you have to do to get inside is use a Phillips head
screwdriver to undo the custom pop open screws and bam you've got easy access to
two RAM slots supported maximum capacity is 32 gigabytes the nvme SSD is right
over here and there is an additional m2 slot for expansion which is very
thoughtful of Asus to include the SSD that comes with this notebook is not the
fastest that I've seen but interestingly enough it edges of the G14 perhaps the
most exciting feature of this tough notebook is the battery life because it
just blew all of our minds away it is absolutely insane Mike dmitri and
myself we were just in awe looking at the numbers because it just it's magical
you see ASUS crammed a 90 watt hour battery inside this thing and as we all
know the power efficiency that comes with AMD Zen 2 architecture is an
engineering marvel so on our light load test this laptop last should be longest
among our other gaming laptops including the G14 I mean more than 10 hours of
light use is ultra low category which is just nuts switching over to our heavy
load test running real bench on a loop this just surpassed our expectations
finally let's get into the meat and potatoes of this video performance and I
think you're in here for surprise now just like every of the notebook we did
test the TUF A15 with its built-in performance
enabled and as we ran our synthetic tests to set a baseline we noticed that
the Ryzenn 7 4800H was noticeably faster than the Ryzen 9 4900HS on
the g 4 it was pretty clear on a multi-core test like Cinebench r15 and
r20 it also goes to show how far behind intel is even with their eight cores
sixteen thread offerings meanwhile single core saw both AMD based systems
tied and as usual this is an area where Intel takes the edge but before again to
real-world tests I do wanna explain something really quickly like we saw in
our temperature and frequencies over time along with Cinebench results the a
15s thicker body basically allowed us to cram in a really really good cooling
solution that means the Ryzen 7 4800H is able to consistently hit higher
frequencies in multi-core loads than the 4900 HS in these efforts g14 basically
that should mean it'll gain a performance advantage by sacrificing
weight and size versus g14 in most cases but not every time now in order to
see how this noble behaves when it comes to clock speeds let's look at Maya
render using every core at 100% over the course of 10 minutes as you can see
temperatures climb up to around 88 degrees Celsius before falling off a
cliff and stabilizing over 70 degrees why is this happening well you can see
some hints as we add clock speeds to this so basically it looks like this
4800H boosts high for the first two minutes and 30 seconds of the test at
3.6 gigahertz but then aim these algorithms step things down to 3.1
gigahertz that's still a really respectable clock speed but it didn't
change no matter how much cooling we throw at it this is probably because it
reached a power threshold moving on to gaming and here's where things get
really interesting since do maternal puts in multi-core but
not full core load on the CPU the power limit gets avoided so temperatures are
able to remain pretty high this is also because the GPU is working at full load
so every internal components get impacted unlike the Maya test this
situation means a gradual decrease in clock speeds rather than them
falling off a cliff for this game it translates to about three point three
five gigahertz has a constant after 10 minutes or so which is pretty
respectable as for GPU temperatures well they were really kept below invidious
throttling thresholds throughout the test this also goes to show how good
Asus is cooling assembly is and moving on to the actual clock speeds those
leveled out at about fifteen fifty megahertz which is actually well above
invidious stated boost clock of twelve hundred megahertz for this graphics card
what that means is that there's thermal Headroom that's being taken advantage of
allowing the RTX 2060 to hit higher than these spec frequencies so let's
jump into the real-world tests and yeah man this rise in seven CPU just loves to
flex its muscles it's honestly not funny at this point Zen's capabilities with
its increased IPC and blistering fast multi-core performance ace this blender
test in record time the same story goes with DaVinci Resolve the higher TDP on
this price and seven CPU does allow to maintain higher clock speeds for longer
which results in faster exports versus G14 I also want to mention that this
is a very GPU focused render so the rtx 2060 is at a disadvantage versus the
rtx 20 70's and the 2080's the Intel machines we have come with it's also why
the a 15s non max-q version takes the edge in the AMD vs. AMD comparison
switching over to premiere with the new update leveraging Nvidia and AMD GPUs
export times have become faster so now the AMD systems are really competitive
but Intel takes the edge here and the reason for that is pretty interesting
even though the new premier update leverages GPU horsepower
it doesn't use both the discrete in video card and Indies integrated
graphics alongside one another meanwhile on the Intel system it still uses Quick
Sync and the discrete card to boost performance even further if you use
handbrake for transcoding this Ryzen CPU is fast will certainly faster than Intel
by a longshot and wrapping things up with our compression test using WinRAR
it lines up with our expectations basically the CPU is super impressive
guys and it can keep up with anything and everything you throw at it whether
if it's compiling code rendering you name it gaming also favored be tough No
when compared to the g14 as you can see with Tomb Raider Far Cry 5 Rainbow six
siege and overwatch be sustained high clock speeds on the CPU along with the
non max-q rtx 2060 pushed out frame rates that were much higher than the g14
at 1080p set to the high settings but let's also not forget the g14 is
significantly smaller than a tough notebook and is thinner too so the frame
rates that it yields are also respectable it'll be certainly
interesting to see where things fall if or when amy notebooks are even paired
with higher end GPUs but for now they deliver an awesome combination of 1080p
performance with really good pricing now moving on a bit I decided to also test
the performance with Asus turbo mode enabled and the increase was very
minimal over the standard performance mode versus the epic amount of noise it
produced honestly I just stick to the standard mode and not even venture into
turbo because it just sounds like a jet fan surface temps are okay under heavy
gaming sessions the only area you need to watch out for is the top right hand
side because it does become a hot spot and that might be an issue if you're
gaming for longer sessions with an external mouse so I think it's time to
conclude my thoughts on the TUF a15 gaming laptop and guys I've got to give
it to Asus for delivering a really fast machine for $1200 the performance is
absolutely amazing it just puts some of the most expensive offerings from Intel
to shame when it comes to CPU intensive workloads that Ryzen 7 CPU it's a
loss to flex man is fast it's that's the only thing I can say it actually is
faster than the Ryzen 9 4900HS on the G14 but that's also because Asus was
able to cram in a really good cooling solution and also you are of course
sacrificing on the weight and size compared to that laptop now when it
comes to gaming it's certainly not the fastest machine out there especially
when it compared to notebooks with higher-end GPUs that RTX 2060 does come
at a disadvantage but it still gets job done at 1080p for the most part I just
really wish to see higher-end GPU is paired with AMD CPUs I'm not even sure
if that's gonna happen anytime soon but if it does that would make history I
really like the exterior design of the a15
as I mentioned earlier it looks utilitarian which obviously
goes along with tough branding but the interior design man it just kills me it
looks gamery it doesn't really it doesn't really align with the exterior
design of this laptop and if you're willing to get over that that's okay you
can definitely pick this up it's a great option you are compromising a few things
like build quality because for the most part it is a plastic chassis except for
the lid the hinge is not quite strong it does wobble a lot and the display is not
color accurate so if that's something that you value you should probably look
elsewhere though given that this is geared towards gamers if you look it
from that perspective this thing delivers because of that 144 Hertz
refresh rate finally the i/o it's not up to spec you're not getting the fastest
USB 3.0 gen to the fact that it has a USB 2 port these are certainly some
things to keep in mind and finally I should mention that this does not have a
Wi-Fi 6 modules so it really depends on how you value that as well
but overall for the price I'm impressed I'm seriously impressed I think the
performance is what is the most exciting thing about the TUF a15 it's the fastest
machine that we've ever encountered compared to the Intel offerings that we
have which is kind of awesome so on that note thank you so much for watching let
us know what you think of the a15 from Asus and if you're shopping around
for a laptop within this price range would you consider this let me know in
the comments down below I'm you bear with hurricane axe that gets much
watching stay safe my friends and spend responsibly because that's more
important right I'll see you guys in the next one