The ASUS TUF Dash F15 is a thinner and lighter gaming laptop, but just how well can a quad
core CPU hold up in 2021, and does it bottleneck the RTX 3070 graphics?
Let’s find out in this review!
My model has Intel’s 11th gen quad core 11370H processor, Nvidia RTX 3070 graphics,
16gb memory and a 1080p 240Hz screen, but there are also other configurations available.
You can check out other configurations of this machine as well as updated prices with
the links down in the description.
Mine has a clean black finish with metal lid and plastic interior, but there’s also an
all white model too.
The laptop alone weighs about 2kg or 4.5lb, then we’re looking at 2.7kg or 6lb with
the 200 watt power brick and cables.
It’s on the smaller side for a 15 inch laptop, coming in under 2cm thick, something I don’t
think we’ve seen before from the TUF series.
The 15.6” 1080p screen has alright colour gamut and contrast ratio, there’s no MUX
switch so no G-Sync, but it does have adaptive sync.
Brightness is able to get above 300 nits at maximum, but this is just for the 240Hz panel,
expect different results with other options.
The ASUS Armoury Crate software, the control panel for the laptop, gives us the option
to enable or disable panel overdrive, which affects screen response time.
With overdrive off we’re looking at a 7.7ms average grey-to-grey response time, then with
it on this lowers to around 5.8ms, so not quite under the 4.16ms needed for transitions
to occur within the refresh window.
It’s not too bad when compared to others, not the worst result for a 240Hz panel, but
clearly not the best either.
Backlight bleed wasn’t bad, a little imperfection on the top but not something I noticed during
regular use, but this will vary between panels and laptops.
Unfortunately there’s no camera here like many others from ASUS.
It does still have microphones though, and this is what they sound like.
The chiclet keyboard has a single zone of RGB backlighting.
It’s got 3 levels of key brightness and all keys and secondary functions are illuminated,
plus the WASD keys are clearly marked in case you had any doubts about this being a gaming
laptop.
Typing felt a little clicky with 1.7mm of key travel, I had no problems using it other
than my personal annoyance with smaller arrow keys.
The power button is separate to the keyboard, so no need to worry about an accidental press.
There are also additional buttons on the left for changing volume, muting the mic and opening
the Armoury Crate software.
There also appears to be some air vents back there too.
The precision touchpad clicks down anywhere and works fine, it’s making use of the available
space and isn’t too small, nothing to complain about.
On the left from the back there’s an air exhaust vent, the power input, gigabit ethernet
port facing the preferred way so you don’t have to pick up the machine to remove the
cable, HDMI 2.0b output, USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A port, a Type-C Thunderbolt 4 port which can
be used to charge the laptop and a 3.5mm audio combo jack.
The right has two more USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A ports for 3 in total, an air exhaust vent
on this side too, and a Kensington lock right up the back.
Now although that Type-C port does offer DisplayPort 1.4 support, it connects directly to the Intel
integrated graphics, so if you’ve got a VR setup that requires DisplayPort that connects
to the Nvidia GPU then you’re out of luck here, however the HDMI port does connect directly
to the Nvidia GPU, and I’ll show you later how this offers a speed boost in games.
The back just has two air exhaust vents towards the corners, and you can see the status LEDs
on the back with the lid closed too.
The front has a subtle indentation so you can get your finger in and open the lid easily.
There’s a little flex to the lid, but it is metal and feels fairly sturdy.
The plastic interior has some flex if you go out of your way to push down, but it felt
fine otherwise during regular use.
Fingerprints show up pretty easily, but the smooth finish is easy to clean with a microfiber
cloth.
The bottom panel is plastic too with air ventilation holes directly above the intake fans, otherwise
quite clean, and as you can see here those vents aren’t covered up, air can get through.
Getting inside requires removing 15 phillips head screws, there are three different sizes
so keep track of them, and the one down the front right doesn’t come out and instead
helps you open the laptop, which I found easy to do with the tools linked in the description.
Inside we’ve got the battery down the front, WiFi 6 card above on the left, two PCIe Gen3
M.2 storage slots to the right of that, and a single memory slot.
Like a lot of other laptops from ASUS you can get either 8 or 16 gigs soldered to the
motherboard with just one slot for upgradeability.
As long as there’s a stick installed it will run in dual channel, but I’ll note
the Samsung stick that came in my unit is the slower type found in the Lenovo Legion
5 Pro and ASUS Strix G15 Advantage.
The speakers are underneath on the front towards the left and right sides.
I thought they sounded average, there’s a little bass and they’re clear enough at
higher volumes, and the latencymon results weren’t too bad.
The F15 has a 4-Cell 76Wh battery, and it was lasting a similar amount to two other
ASUS laptops with the same sized battery one spot above and below it, so about as expected,
8 hours is an above average result in this test.
The panel power saver option is enabled in the Armoury Crate software by default.
With this enabled, when you unplug the laptop from wall power the screen will flash black
while it automatically drops down to a 60Hz refresh rate and disables panel overdrive
to save battery, then it will automatically change back when you plug back in - an excellent
feature that I wish other brands would implement.
There’s also the option to set iGPU mode to on which basically disables the Nvidia
discrete graphics to help boost battery life.
You don’t have to do this as optimus will generally take care of you, but this way random
applications can’t attempt to call the RTX 3070 as it’s simply not available.
Let’s check out thermals next.
The Armoury Crate software lets us change between different performance profiles, which
from lowest to highest are silent, performance and turbo.
There’s no manual mode for customizing fan speed and power limits like the higher end
ROG models, though turbo mode does apply the following overclock to the GPU.
The idle results down the bottom were a little warm given it’s doing nothing.
I’ve run stress tests with both the CPU and GPU loaded up to represent a worst case,
as well as playing an actual game.
No thermal throttling was happening at all, and even in the worst case we’re in the
low 80s here, so great results from a temperature perspective, however if this comes at the
expense of lower power limits then we may be looking at lower performance compared to
others, if not then it could be that a 10nm quad core just doesn’t create a whole lot
of heat.
These are the clock speeds from the same tests.
The quad core i7-11370H has a 4.3GHz all core turbo boost speed, and this was being hit
in this particular game in turbo mode, and we’re a little behind this maximum in the
combined CPU plus GPU stress test.
When looking at the power levels we can see the CPU is capped to 35 watts, which is why
these quad core chips are referred to as H35, this is the Intel spec so it’s running as
it should, meanwhile the RTX 3070 is running at 80 watts, which is the lowest in the range
for the 3070.
In a GPU only stress test dynamic boost could boost the GPU up to 85 watts when the CPU
is idle.
Here’s how an actual game performs with these different modes in use.
There’s no major change between performance and turbo mode, while we can boost average
FPS 7% simply by connecting an external monitor to the HDMI port, as this bypasses optimus.
Here’s how the different modes perform in Cinebench R23, so again not that big of a
difference between performance and turbo modes, especially in single core performance, at
least compared to silent mode which is lower comparatively, but as you’ll hear soon,
it’s quieter too as per the name.
Here’s how the F15 stacks up compared to others in CPU performance, now it is a lower
result as it’s a quad core processor, but at the same time it’s the best multicore
score I’ve got from any quad core so far and it’s only slightly behind the 6 core
Ryzen options from last generation, while also offering one of the highest single core
scores I’ve seen.
The single core performance hardly changes when running on battery power, however multicore
drops back a bit, we’ve now got two other quad core laptops that are outperforming it
while running on battery - but hey it’s still beating the 8 core MSI GE76 just below
it.
The keyboard sits in the low 40s when idle, higher than the regular 30 of most others,
not hot just warm.
It gets to the higher 40s towards the back of the keyboard with the stress tests going.
Performance mode is similar, warmer than most others in the center but the wrist rest and
sides are cool.
It’s similar in turbo, unfortunately the cool spot is just off to the side of WASD,
but WASD isn’t uncomfortable.
Based on the internal temps I was expecting a cooler exterior, let’s have a listen to
the fans.
The fan was audible when idling, but it kind of kept turning on and off which may be annoying.
It wasn’t too loud in silent mode even when under load, performance mode was louder, then
turbo was a little louder still, and that’s as loud as it can get as there’s no user
fan control.
Now let’s find out how well this configuration of ASUS TUF Dash F15 compares against others
in games, but use these results as a rough guide only as they were tested at different
times with different drivers.
I’ve tested Battlefield 5 in campaign mode at ultra settings, and the F15 is highlighted
in red.
MSI’s GL65 with RTX 2060 is one spot above it in terms of average FPS, but the 1% low
from its last generation 6 core with higher power limit is much better, in fact the 1%
low from the F15 is on the lower side out of this selection of laptops, presumably as
a result of the quad core processor.
Other RTX 3060 laptops such as MSI’s GS76 or even ASUS’s own smaller G14 are coming
out ahead of the F15, and those are 8 core Intel and AMD options respectively, so yeah
it’s looking like the quad core chip could be holding it back.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider was tested with the games benchmark tool with the highest
setting preset, and the F15 was again hitting the same average FPS as the RTX 2060 in the
MSI GL65.
Now that laptop does have a higher power limit, but it can’t disable optimus either.
Seeing a 3070 struggle to beat a 2060 doesn’t seem right, again it’s likely owing to the
quad core processor in the F15 along with its lower power limit.
Far Cry 5 was also tested with the games benchmark tool at max settings, and this is more of
a CPU heavy game compared to the other two.
It’s also a game that tends to favour Intel laptops, but even with that advantage the
F15 is down quite a bit compared to all of the other laptops, only beating the 5500M
and 1650 laptops with last gen 6 core AMD processors.
Here are the results from 3DMark for those that find them useful.
Now for some creator tests.
Adobe Premiere was tested with the Puget Systems benchmark.
Unlike the gaming results the F15 was offering one of the better results, so perhaps the
quad core is less of an issue in some of these creator tasks.
Adobe Photoshop generally depends more on processor performance, and the quad core isn’t
doing too bad here either, granted I think this test benefits from single threaded performance,
and as we saw earlier in Cinebench it does at least have that on its side.
DaVinci Resolve is more GPU heavy, and the 3070 isn’t doing too badly here, but I’ve
got a lot of lower specced laptops on the graph, it’s still coming in below the 3060
in the GS76 just above it with similar wattage, as well as other 3070s.
The F15 is only a little ahead of last gen 1660 TI models here.
I’ve also tested SPECviewperf which tests out various professional 3D workloads.
The 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD in my unit was doing well for both reads and writes.
Although Intel H35 should in theory support PCIe Gen4 storage, both M.2 slots are listed
as Gen3 on the motherboard so I’m guessing it’s only Gen3.
The BIOS is pretty much the same as all of the others from ASUS, just the usual basic
options that you’d expect to see.
I booted an Ubuntu 21 live CD to test Linux support.
Out of the box the touchpad, keyboard, wifi, ethernet and speakers work.
The keyboard shortcuts for keyboard brightness, screen brightness and volume controls also
worked fine, but I wasn’t able to change performance profiles with the F5 shortcut.
Now let’s discuss pricing.
This will change over time, so check out those links in the description below for updated
prices.
At the time of recording, the TUF Dash F15 with the same specs I’ve tested here is
$1770 USD on Amazon, though there are also cheaper options with RTX 3060 graphics too.
I’m actually working on the review of the new ASUS Strix G15 Advantage Edition right
now, and that laptop is meant to be $1650 USD and for that you get an 8 core Ryzen 9
5900HX processor and Radeon RX 6800M graphics, which are a little behind Nvidia’s RTX 3080.
Honestly just between the Strix G15 which costs less money compared to this, I would
go for the G15, it just seems like a better deal for me compared to spending more for
a quad core model.
Sure the F15 is smaller and lighter, but at what cost?
Personally I would take a little thickness for extra performance gains, but that’s
just me, granted this does also have some other features like Thunderbolt 4, so at the
end of the day it depends on what you’re after.
This is clearly a thinner and lighter model, but at the same time ASUS also have other
options under 2cm thick with much more powerful 8 core parts, though those Zephyrus models
do cost more.
I suppose this seems like ASUS’s way of offering a thinner and lighter machine at
a lower price point compared to the Zephyrus lineup, but as we’ve seen it does come at
the expense of performance.
If you’re just doing lighter tasks then you might not necessarily need 6 or 8 cores,
and a quad core might be perfectly fine, just don’t be surprised to see lower specced
options beating it.
At least a result of those lower power limits is also lower internal temperatures, though
the exterior did still feel a little warm to the touch when under load, but at least
the battery life is pretty good.
One memory slot isn’t ideal for future upgrades, but is likely a tradeoff for the thinner chassis,
and lack of camera in the days of work from home and zoom meetings will be enough for
some to look elsewhere.
Let me know what you thought of the ASUS TUF Dash F15 down in the comments, get subscribed
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