I did it. I finally found a gaming laptop that is stupidly easy to recommend, especially to students who can’t break the bank but don’t want to compromise. I’m talking about the Asus TUF A16 Advantage Edition of course. The TUF A16 is very affordable,1080p gaming machine that’s built to military grade standards and has a battery that can actually last you an entire day of productive work.
The TUF A16 can be found for as little as $1900 here in Australia which isn’t necessarily dirt cheap but is definitely one of the best bang for buck gaming laptops right now. The TUF A16 sports an 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS APU with integrated graphics as well as an AMD Radeon RX 7600S dedicated GPU for more intense gaming and performance tasks. This comes with the advantages(pun intended) of AMD Smart tech that makes for some truly excellent performance and battery life efficiency.
This is one excellent package and easily one of the best laptops I’ve reviewed in a long time.
Asus TUF A16 Advantage Edition review
One of the first compromises I see with ‘budget gaming laptops’ is in the design and build quality. Cheap, flimsy plastics, poor display hinges, subpar keyboard and gaudy gamer aesthetics. Not here though. The TUF A16 is a handsome, almost business-like, thin gaming laptop built with military grade standards of TUFness(more puns to come) with rust and corrosion resistant finishes.
The chassis is a combination of plastic and anodized metal designed for tough environments such as the desert but more likely, a students backpack. This year, Asus introduced the utterly beautiful Sandstorm colour way that makes the TUF A16 look like it came out of Operation Desert Storm. Heartbreakingly, I didn’t get that one for my review unit which was just the normal black finish. That said, the black model will blend so much better in an office or classroom than the bombastic Sandstone. Still, the heart wants what it wants, hey?
The new TUF A16 is a pretty thin measuring just over an inch at its thickest point. It’s a little bit heavy at 2.2 kilos and I felt its heft in my backpack on a recent trip to Sydney. But the weight is also reassuring of it’s build quality and makes it feel like a more premium laptop.
The overall design is clean with minimal and tasteful TUF branding on the lid, and touchpad with no crazy RGB strips in sight; thank God. On the underside is a bright orange, triangular rubber foot in the centre of the laptop that’s cute but also, maybe pointless since you’ll barely ever see it?
The TUF A16 has a good spread of IO ports with most of them set on the left hand of the chassis. you get a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, 2x USB 3.2 Type-C; one with DisplayPort and Power delivery support up to 100W for a clean, single-cable desk setup. You also get an RJ45 Ethernet port and HDMI 2.1 out, a 3.5mm audio combo jack and a AC power port. On the right side of the chassis is a single USB Type-A.
I’m okay with the positioning of the ports but if you run a laptop/ desk setup, it means you are forced to keep the laptop on the right of your monitor for the cleanest cable management. But going cableless is also a breeze thanks to a Dual band 2*2 Wi-FI 6 and the very latest Bluetooth 5.3 which is handy if you use low-latency wireless earbuds. Wi-Fi connection is solid with great reception and range.
Open up the lid and you are presented with a newer, taller 16-inch, 1080p display with a 16:10 aspect ratio that’s all the rage these days. The display covers an impressive 90% screen to body ratio so there’s barely wasted space on chunky bezels. Spec wise, the display is an IPS-level panel with 100% sRGB and 75% Adobe RGB coverage so not the most colour accurate but perfectly fine for gaming, watching YouTube and working on documents.
Gamers will be more than satisfied by the displays 165Hz refresh rate and 7ms response time and AMD FreeSync Premium. It works beautifully and I never experienced any ghosting or tearing in fast paced games. Now, while you might hit 165 fps in Valorant or CS GO, most AAA games won’t get that high with this hardware anyway but the FreeSync keeps everything smooth.
Embedded into the bezel above the display is a 720p webcam that is fine but I still can’t understand why in 2023, laptops don’t have 4K webcams when even cheap $300 smartphones have them. Anyways, it will get the job done for your video calls but don’t expect to run a stream off it. Also, don’t expect Windows Hello, not at this price point.
Turning to the keyboard, the TUF A16 comes with a full compliment of keys including the home and number pad key sets. Something different from last years models is the missing translucent WASD keys the TUF laptops were know for which I honestly found quite gimmicky. Additionally, the keyboard uses standard chiclet keys and not mechanical. They don’t feel mushy though, with good response when typing and gaming. The keys are also backlit with single zone backlighting so no fancy RGB here. That’s okay too as it probably shaves a lot off the price and the backlighting is still very clear and the fonts on the keys very readable.
You also get dedicated volume and mic mute and the Asus Armoury Crate shortcut keys above the function row. Beneath the keyboard is a nicely sized glass touchpad with a TUF logo etched into the top right. It’s nice and responsive to my swipes and pinches but as usual, you’ll be using an external mouse for most things. It’s still one of the better touchpads on a gaming laptop thanks to its good size and great anti-palm rejection when typing.
Underneath the laptop are two bottom firing speakers that sound okay; you’re typical laptop affair. They are tiny and cold but will suffice in a pinch. However, Asus hasn’t compromised on the internal audio hardware, giving the TUF A16 support for Dolby Atmos and Hi-Res audio via the 3.5mm jack. It’s also got a AI noise cancelling microphone array which is supposed to help reduce background noise when you are speaking but in my experience ended up greatly distorting my voice as it struggles to cancel background sounds. Here’s a sample:
Gaming and performance
The combination of the all AMD hardware works really well in getting the TUF A16 to crunch some numbers. Combining a the Ryzen 7735HS, a 95W Radeon RX 7600S, 16GB of DDR5-4800MHz RAM and a very fast 512GB NVMe M.2 SDD yields some excellent results in my tests. The SSD is a tad too small in 2023 where games are averaging well over 100GB in size but it is upgradeable to 2TB.
The new Ryzen 7 processors can’t match Intels HX processors for raw speed but what the TUF lacks in raw power, it makes up in spades with clever power management. The all AMD architecture allows the TUF A16 to use AMD Smartshift that intelligently allows the CPU and GPU to automatically manage power on the fly for greater sustained boosts of performance.
Add on AMD Smart Access Memory and you greatly reduce the latency and improve performance. But that’s not all, there’s also AMD Smartshift RST which allows the 7600S to render frames at lower resolution and then upscale the frame using the integrated graphics to improve framerates. It’s like a weird, frankensteiny graphics bridging.
All that’s to say it works beautifully in games with non of my tests failing to hit a smooth 60fps at 1080p and the highest settings. The only place that the TUF A16 fails to deliver a decent performance is anything to do with Ray-tracing. That is unfortunately, Nvidia’s hill to command at the moment. Additionally, AMD FSR 2.0, just isn’t as good as Nvidia’s DLSS 2 at improving games performance. Sure, it makes a good difference but not as much as DLSS does.
In my review of the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16, even a low powered RTX 4060 can perform wonders thanks to DLSS 3 and Frame Generation, seeing almost a doubling of framerates. That said, I can’t really fault the TUF A16’s performance for a budget gaming laptop. I was more than happy with the way games looked and felt on this machine and I doubt anyone who buys this will bemoan the fact that they can’t play CyberPunk 2077 with path Ray-tracing.
But framerates alone don’t make up the whole story here either. Thermal performance on the TUF A16 is very impressive. I measured peak gaming load temperatures of around 70-73C which is great given the size of this laptop. But even more impressive is how quite the fans are. Sure you can hear them but they are far from the screaming jet engines of gaming laptops past. It’s so quite in the performance mode that I often had to check to make sure it was in the right mode.
Usually, I don’t pay any attention to companies over hyped jargon about their new cooling solutions and improved airblades but this year, Asus has clearly made some impressive gains. Asus says the new exhaust vent, heatsink design and improved ArcFlow fans allows the TUF A16 to run at just 48dB in Turbo mode. While I didn’t have a measuring tool, my ears that have been tuned by years of experience reviewing gaming laptops immediately noticed the massive difference.
The Asus Armoury Crate offers you a number of fan profiles for different use and you can easily cycle them using the Fn+F5 shortcut. Additionally, the software allows you to tweak GPU power saving modes or even pick between the iGPU and dGPU thanks to a MUX switch. This part can be a little finicky as you have to set things up in both Armoury Crate and Radeon Adrenaline Software which can be irritating. I do wish the Armoury Crate could just handle everything.
That said, once you have the TUF A16 in the right power mode, that is where you discover what was the biggest surprise for me – battery life. With the MUX switch set to the iGPU and Eco Mode in Armoury Crate, the TUF A16 managed a whopping 10 hours and 13 minutes in the PCMark10 battery rundown test. I usually set this test to run at night when I’m in bed and never have I woken up to find any gaming laptop still running in the morning except the TUF A16.
Colour me truly impressed but this thing is a battery champ unlike any gaming laptop I’ve encountered to date. To make things even sweeter, Asus has included fast charging for 50% battery in just 30min and support for 100W charging over USB-C which is perfect for those one cable laptop setups. So, with the right monitor, you can just plug a single USB cable into the laptop to deliver video and power to the laptop.
This battery performance alone makes the TUF A16 a winner compared to every other gaming laptop I’ve reviewed in the past that can barely manage 3 or 4 hours on a charge. For a student who needs to use their laptop in class all day, such battery life is the highest need and the TUF A16 delivers in spades. I would love to see this battery life in the more expensive laptops from Razer or Alienware.
Verdict
I think its safe to say that the new Asus TUF A16 Advantage Edition is an easy recommendation. There are a lot of powerful gaming laptops that will easily outstrip the TUF A16 in sheer performance but what is the point if it costs twice as much and can’t even last half as long on battery? I simply can’t abide the trend of gaming laptops costing well over $4000; it’s simply not good value for your money. With that same $4000, you can buy the TUF A16 for your on the go use and still have plenty of money to buy an properly powerful desktop for home. Win, win.
In my mind, the TUF A16 is perfect for high-school and university students who can’t afford to break the bank but also want a serious laptop that they won’t easily break either. More serious content creators and professionals who can make proper money from their laptops can justify spending more to get something like the Razer Blades or MSI Stealth which have higher performance components but still fall far short in the battery life department.
For everyone else though, the Asus TUF A16 is definitely worth the money.
