Review Summary
Expert Rating
When it comes to budget gaming laptops, the ASUS TUF series is usually at the top of everyone’s recommendation list. Both the A-series and the F-series, powered by AMD and Intel processors respectively, offer excellent value for money, making them the go-to choice for many shoppers. With that in mind, ASUS recently put their latest TUF F15 FX506HF model on sale in India.
I know I said “latest”, but, an 11th-gen Intel Core i5 processor paired with an RTX 2050 seems quite outdated, to be honest. Then again, the laptop retails for around Rs 50K mark, so the combination is to be expected. Add to that, the sweet price tag puts it in the limelight of most shoppers looking for their first budget gaming laptop. But should you be opting for it? We decided to put the laptop through its paces to see how it fares in our tests, both in games as well as real-world usage scenarios. Read on to see how the ASUS TUF Gaming F15 FX506HF fared in our in-depth testing and review.
Table of Contents
Design and Display
Starting with the design, not much has changed from the previous generations of ASUS TUF, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The Graphite Black laptop is made mostly from plastic, with a brushed metal finish on top. There’s a decent amount of flex to be seen, both under the keyboard, as well as the display, but nothing too alarming about it. ASUS claims that the laptop does come with military-grade toughness, which is always nice to have. However, I do wish the laptop passed the one-handed opening test.
Packing in a 15.6-inch panel, the laptop is a chunky boy, despite minimising the bezels to reduce the chassis size. Speaking about the display itself, the hull HD panel comes with a smooth 144Hz refresh rate, making it a lot more focused for gamers. I say that because outside of the gaming realm, the panel is a bit washed out, and not super bright either. On top of that, with just 45 percent NTSC coverage, I wouldn’t recommend any sort of creative editing on this laptop, unless you plug it into an external monitor.
There’s no support for HDR here, and the colors look quite dull. Additionally, while it is an IPS panel with excellent viewing angles, I wouldn’t suggest watching a lot of movies on this display. Especially ones that have a lot of dark scenes in them, since the contrast ratio isn’t great either.
Thankfully, sticking to gaming, the panel is quite responsive, and most eSports titles work well on the laptop’s hardware to utilise the high refresh rate display.
Ports, Audio and I/O
At 2.3kgs, the weight is about what you’d expect from a decent gaming laptop. On the positive side, ASUS has made good use of the bigger chassis to offer an extensive collection of ports. On the left side, there’s the DC power port, an Ethernet jack, a full-sized HDMI 2.1 port, dual USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, a Thunderbolt 4 port, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. There’s another USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port on the right side.
It’s worth noting that the Thunderbolt 4 port supports Display out as well. While there’s no support for USB Power Delivery here, that’s not too surprising considering the overall package and the price. Additionally, while I usually prefer having a full-sized SD card reader, considering that the laptop’s panel isn’t equipped for creative needs, I wouldn’t make a big fuss about it.
Moving on to audio, the laptop’s speakers don’t pack in enough power, and their downward-firing position doesn’t help the cause either. They should be fine for the occasional calls or watching a YouTube video, but I’d strongly recommend investing in a good pair of gaming headphones for a better gaming experience. The laptop also comes with a 720p HD camera up top, which is average at best. The HDR is mostly a miss, but it should suffice for basic office calls.
Keyboard and Trackpad
The ASUS TUF Gaming F15 comes with a full-sized keyboard, complete with a numpad. The keys are well-spaced out, and the layout is fairly easy to adapt to. It’s just the arrow keys that feel a bit out of place, due to their sizing. A part of me wishes that ASUS opted for a split up-and-down arrow key design. Alternatively, if they wanted to offer full-size keys, then they should have done that properly, rather than opting for these miniature versions. Either way, the arrow keys are the only bit of a letdown in an otherwise excellent-to-use keyboard.
There’s single-zone RGB lighting underneath as well, which can be customised using the Armory Crate app. There aren’t a lot of effects to choose from, but it’s still better than having just a single colour lighting.
Below the keyboard is the touchpad, which can be best described as functional. It works well for all gestures and offers good palm rejection. However, the buttons don’t provide great feedback, nor is there anything fancy about it. Then again, most folks would anyway use a gaming mouse with this, so I understand ASUS not focussing much here, and just ensuring that the basics are done right.
Performance and Battery Life
Under the hood, the ASUS TUF Gaming F15 pairs the Intel Core i5-11400H processor with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2050 GPU with 70W of Max TGP. The base variant comes with 8GB of DDR4-3200MHz RAM, though we strongly recommend opting for at least 16GB, similar to our review unit. The good news is that the laptop comes with dual DDR4 SO-DIMM slots, so you can expand the RAM down the line as well. The same goes for storage, with the F15 offering dual M.2 NVMe SSD slots.
Regarding performance, the laptop is designed as an entry-level gaming laptop, but the combination works relatively well. In synthetic benchmarks, the laptop scores 86 and 538 in Cinebench’s R24 single-core and multi-core test runs. Those are some solid numbers for the price you’ll be paying. Similarly, the laptop secured 6197 and 6679 scores in PCMark 10 and PCMark 10 Extended test runs, respectively. That’s about what you’d expect from the 11th-gen processor.
Speaking of which, I also tested a bunch of titles on both Ultra presets and a balance of High and Medium settings for a more realistic gaming experience. Most AAA titles can easily be enjoyed in medium-high settings with a 1080p resolution. Some games, however, require you to dial down the settings a bit. For instance, with Cyberpunk 2077, the laptop needs to run on low and medium settings to hit a stable 60fps frame rate. Titles like Forza Horizon 5 and Hogwarts Legacy could easily breach the 60 fps mark on a combination of medium and high settings, with occasional drops here and there. As for competitive gaming, Apex Legends easily averages over 113 fps on High settings. Though, you will have to fine-tune a couple of settings to hit the 144fps spot which is in line with the display’s peak refresh rate.
The laptop also does a decent job in terms of heat dissipation. The dual 83-blade fans setup coupled with a trio of heat pipes works well, and in our testing, the laptop’s chassis never felt too hot to the touch. It does get warm, sure, especially when the CPU’s temperatures are around the 90-degree mark, but nothing too alarming.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the battery life. It’s common knowledge that gaming laptops don’t generally offer excellent battery backup, but for ASUS to include just a 3-cell 48WHrs battery was never going to work. The laptop lasted a little over three hours in our battery drain test, which is quite underwhelming.
Also, for charging, you will have to carry the beefy power brick, as the laptop doesn’t support USB Power Delivery.
Verdict
As configured, the ASUS TUF Gaming F15 will cost you Rs. 53,000 here in India. Couple that with some bank offer or pick it up during one of the many sales, and for nearly 50K, the F15 isn’t a bad deal at all. The display and battery life do leave room for improvement, but for this price, the laptop offers excellent performance, and plenty of ports, and the 70W TGP RTX 2050 works very well. As such, it will not disappoint gamers shopping on a budget.
Editor’s rating: 7.5 / 10
Pros:
- Good gaming performance
- Durable design
- Ample connectivity options
- Easy upgradability
Cons:
- Slightly washed out display
- Battery life could have been better
- Average webcam