Topic: Asus Tuf A15 Ryzen 5 4600H GTX 1650 TI Review Budget Gaming Beast
Gaming has become portable with the arrival of gaming laptops.The next-gen gaming laptops are capable of high-end gaming.
Most of the modern gaming titles are playable on high, ultra, or even in 4k, in next-gen gaming laptops.The most popular gaming laptops are from ASUS.
They are providing the best-in-class gaming laptops.ASUS has its most popular ROG series when it comes to high-end gaming.
The ASUS TUF series has made it possible for budget gamers to play all the modern AAA titles on budget.
The ASUS TUF Gaming A15 Ryzen 5 4600H GTX 1650 Ti laptop is a beast. It holds a great design, solid components, and decent ergonomics.
To squeeze every penny out of your small budget, you can choose ASUS TUF A15 Ryzen 5 4600H as it is a better choice.
The machine holds different specs and prices for different countries, but it comes with an Nvidia GTX 1650 Ti for the US.
Furthermore, it has AMD’s best new Ryzen mobile chip, which is Ryzen 5 4600H. For further details, please have a look below.
Asus Tuf A15 Ryzen 5 4600H GTX 1650 TI Review
Design and Build Quality
The best and boldest part of the ASUS TUF A15 gaming laptop is its unique and stylish design.
It has a vibrant electric blue finish with a huge TUF logo in the middle and has a black brushed plastic interior. Like most of the TUF series laptops, it has a military-style accent.
The metal lid feels noticeably nicer while the plastic did make it feel a bit cheaper, however, it doesn’t have any sharp edges or corners.
A15 is available in 2 different color variants, and apart from the blue color, it comes in the grey color model.
At the back, it has large air vents for ventilation. The interior of A15 is a little messy, but that is completely okay for most users.
Here’s what the internals look like. We can see that the AMD Ryzen 5 4600H 1650 Ti configuration has fewer heat pipes and heatsinks, presumably as the lower tier specs don’t require as much cooling.
The Asus TUF A15 laptop weighs around 2.3 kg, and the thickness is around 24mm. The weight is comparatively low, due to fewer metal heat pipes and heatsinks inside, and also for good quality plastic.
The A15’s screen bezels are quite thin about 8.5mm. Despite the thinner bezels, the 720p camera is found above the display in the center, with no Windows Hello support.
So basically, it has a robust exterior that comes with a gorgeous design. This laptop is very much similar to its rival, the Dell G5 15 gaming laptop.
The Backside: The back has some air exhausts towards the left and right corners. The front has a slight extrusion in the center, so you can quickly get your finger underneath to open the lid.
Below it has small air intake vents, though they aren’t directly above the fans.
Asus Tuf A15 Ports
For connectivity options, on the left side from the back, there’s the power input, gigabit ethernet port facing for easy access to the cable without the need to raise the machine, HDMI 2.0b output, two USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A ports, USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C port with DisplayPort 1.4 support and 3.5mm audio combo jack. On the right, there’s just a USB 2.0 Type-A port and Kensington lock towards the back.
The HDMI port goes through the Radeon Vega graphics first, however, the Type-C port’s DisplayPort is lined up directly to the Nvidia GPU to access the performance boost.
Asus Tuf A15 Display
The ASUS Tuf A15 comes with a Full HD IPS panel with a refresh rate of 144 Hz. You will be able to play most of the mainstream games smoothly and fast on this display. Single-player titles and esports games can be easily handled by A15 as well.
The A15 display can hit 278 nits of brightness which is fine and gets the job done outdoors. However, the color levels of these laptops are underwhelming.
The display shows 54.5% of the sRGB color gamut, which is low, though all options should have FreeSync.
The panels aren’t great but acceptable for most esports and mainstream games. It has an average grey to the grey response time of 19 ms.
The laptop backlight system never disturbs me while viewing darker content. The laptop is created for gamers but the response time is not so great compared to other models but also I didn’t notice while playing.
Asus Tuf A15 Keyboard & Trackpad
When it comes to the keyboard, then the A15’s chiclet keyboard has 2 mm of key travel, which is more than other laptops, but the keyboard layout is solid as it holds a dedicated Numpad.
The keyboard has a zone of RGB lighting, which looks cool in the dark, with some built-in effects, and all keys and secondary key functions are illuminated.
There are three levels of key brightness that you can adjust by holding the function key and pressing the up and down arrows. Typing with the keyboard was fine, the presses were a little clicky.
The trackpad of A15 is fine and doesn’t click down with decent positioning and width physically separating left and right-click buttons, but some users have faced issues with the trackpad and its drivers.
Overall, the keyboard and the trackpad are better than its competitor G5 15. The ASUS Tuf A15 keyboard delivers a good typing experience, and the keys are comfortable and consistent.
Performance
The ASUS Tuf A15 is equipped with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Ti with 4 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. The base frequency of the GPU is 1350 MHz, and the boost frequency is 1485 MHz.
Furthermore, the laptop mounts the Ryzen 5 4600H over it, which has six cores and 12 threads and a max boost clock speed of 4 GHz.
The laptop can easily perform day-to-day tasks, and you can play all the modern AAA titles in 1080p.
ASUS aims at the budget gamers with TUF A15 as they have their ROG series for flagship users. Even though it is not a flagship laptop, it outperforms all its competitors.
Thermals: The ASUS Armoury Crate software allows you to select three different performance profiles, from lowest to highest these are silent, performance, and turbo modes.
During thermal testing, the ambient room temperature was 21 degrees Celsius. The result is all normal during gaming the 1650 model is not so hot, this will definitely vary with the game and settings.
Clock Speed: These are the clock speeds of all Asus Tuf A15 variations. The 1650 TI system reached the highest processor clock speeds according to the blue bars due to having fewer cores.
Average power: During the stress test we find the 4600H is efficient of using more power, maybe the GPU doesn’t require that much power as other higher specced models need.
Temperature: As for the external temperatures where you’ll actually be putting your hands, the Asus Tuf remains relatively cool to the touch, even during heavy work or gameplay it only got warm at best, it may be because of the plastic build that definitely conducts less heat than a metal finish.
Internally the A15 gets hot when under heavy loads, maybe due to the fewer air intake vents on the bottom panels.
But no worry despite the machine may run hot but the performance is still there, and it performs very well for the money.
Fan Sound: The Asus Tuf A15 sound is not disturbing, though turbo mode sounds pretty much compared to any other mode that’s okay a high spec laptop will deliver that much sound.
CLEANING: Fingerprints and dirt show up in the black plastic interior as well as the lids.
The metal lid was easiest to clean as it’s smooth, the rest could be a little harder as the black plastic has subtle grooves.
BATTERY LIFE: You can expect much from a gaming laptop when it comes to battery life.
The ASUS Tuf A15 holds a lithium-ion battery which can easily last for 5-6 hours while performing normal tasks, and for gaming, it can only last around 3-4 hours at 150 nits of brightness.
I never notice any battery drain during any of my gaming or stress testing.
Software experience: The Asus Tuf A15 in terms of working is okay especially if you are required to install updates.
You will have two locations in the armoury crate software for updates and to the Microsoft store and another one to the MyASUS software.
It will show all the packages that exist but don’t show the installation version so the feature is not so useful.
Asus Tuf A15 Processor
The best part of TUF A15 is its chip from AMD. The laptop mounts AMD’s Ryzen 5 4600H which is the best midrange chip for budget gamers.
Gaming and editing are a piece of cake for this processor. The Ryzen 5 4600H has six cores and 12 threads which makes your gaming and editing buttery smooth.
You can edit small 4K clips, and you can play modern games at 1080p. Some games are easily playable at 1440p if you add an 8 GB stick to the laptop.
Asus Tuf A15 Storage
For storage, the ASUS Tuf A15 comes with a 512 GB PCIe SSD. You will get Windows 10 Home edition installed on the NVME SSD and 8 GB of DDR4 RAM, clocked at 3200 MHz. The 3200 MHz RAM makes multitasking super smooth.
In Tuf A15, you will get three additional slots. You can add an HDD and an additional M.2 NVME SSD.
Furthermore, you can add an extra RAM stick of up to 8 GB which is a cherry on the top as it can drastically boost the performance in FPS games and minimize the stutters and lag.
Crystal Disk Mark storage testing has been done. It has the NVMe M.2 SSDs, 512GB Kingston drive. Overall I think the prices are quite competitive in terms of the hardware inside that you’re getting.
Asus Tuf A15 Speakers
The speakers of Tuf A15 are punchy and have plenty of volume with good clarity. Moreover, the speakers have some bass as well.
You will be fine while consuming media on the device, but a headset will be recommended for gaming.
Gaming Performance
The ASUS Tuf A15 aims at budget gamers, and when it comes to the laptop’s gaming performance, it performs well but does not do magic. The Tuf A15 is a good bang for the buck, but you are not getting something extra.
You will get 16 GB of RAM in the US model, whereas, in the UK model, you will only get 8 GB of single-channel memory.
You will get good FPS in the US model due to dual-channel RAM, but the UK model drops the FPS drastically.
In Battlefield 5 the Asus Tuf performs decent but not up to the mark of RTX 2060 and GTX 1660 TI. But for me, the results are decent enough.
Let’s see the results from Shadow of the Tomb Raider with the built-in benchmark at fullest settings. Again the 1650 TI holds the average position.
In comparison to 1660 TI and RTX 2060, the 1650 TI is far behind. But for me that’s okay in actual gaming I didn’t find any type of performance failure.
If you like to know more gaming benchmarks check the data provided below where I’ve tested 8 games at all setting levels.
Overall the gaming performance with the 1650 Ti model is average, at least the laptop is not to play at higher settings.
So it depends on you what type of performance level you’re searching for and under what budget as at this budget it is the best gaming laptop to pick.
I’ve also started using the Puget systems benchmark for Adobe Photoshop. Here are the results from those programs.
Here are the results from SPECviewperf, which is used for testing multiple professional 3D workloads, and as expected, better GPU equals better score.
Pros & Cons
Good
- Good for 1080p gaming.
- Latest AMD processor.
- Good value for money.
- Cool Design and premium build.
Bad
- Screen quality is average.
What I Think About Asus Tuf A15
A major drawback is the screen’s low color gamuts, and brightness is under 300 nits. Whereas the A15 has some excellent positives like the CPU and GPU power, battery life, and speakers for the price point.
Now it all depends on you that can you manage the issues, mostly the high internal temperatures and slower screen.
Whereas I didn’t personally have any gaming issues with the laptop, but those who are more sensitive to this want to look elsewhere. You can check out Acer Nitro 5 Gaming Laptop.
So, now here I conclude our article Asus Tuf A15 Ryzen 5 4600H GTX 1650 TI gaming laptop Review.
I nearly tested all the aspects of this excellent gaming laptop and put in Asus Tuf A15 Ryzen 5 4600H GTX 1650 TI gaming laptop Review so that you can select that as per your demand.
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Bishnu is a multi-talented professional with years of experience as an editor and marketer. He loves to buy the product online and moreover he holds some deep knowledge on technical terms. In his free time, he likes to play games without any disturbance and traveling the globe.
