With my son heading off to start his college career this fall, I was looking for a budget-friendly laptop that would both serve to keep him well equipped to tackle all of the tasks his studies and classes demanded, and give him an outlet to get online and hit pick-up games with his friends once classes were done. He is an avid gamer with a pretty decent desktop build currently at home, but we aren’t sure what type of real estate he will have in the dorms, and need to presume for now that the portability of the laptop will have to suffice.
We both love gaming and desktop building, and ASUS products have been the backbone of both of our most recent builds- the Maximus X Code ROG motherboard is the foundation of my rig, and a ROG Strix motherboard at the heart of his. The brand has been core to our builds over the years and hasn’t disappointed yet- a streak that continues with this latest laptop offering.
The ASUS TUF Gaming F17 laptop seems to hit the perfect balance of build quality, aesthetic, power and value. There are a lot of cool features and touchpoints that channel that gaming feel, starting out of the box with a chassis that follows the classic TUF formula – that cool industrial design with angled edges all around, and topped with a fingerprint-resistant matte-grey metal lid sporting a bold ‘TUF’ logo across a third of the surface. Definitely more substantial feeling than many of the sleek/slick razer thin laptops. The underside has a cool honeycomb design with some visible venting (in addition to some top and side vents) to provide airflow for heat-dissipation. The sides are equipped with a few USB ports, power connection, ethernet connection, an HDMI port, a Type C USB thunderbolt port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. It is all plastic outside of the lid, but that is expected at the price point, and doesn’t detract from anything.
Open the lid, and you are greeted with a 17.3” full HD 144Hz IPS panel providing a great viewing experience at 1920 x 1080. Colors are really vibrant and the picture is vivid, whether streaming high resolution video or gaming, with pretty decent viewing angles and a warmth that isn’t overly bright or hard on the eyes. The deck itself holds your standard keypad setup with separate number pad, as well as the touchpad and left/right buttons all awash in single-zone RGB which can be controlled using both the Aura Sync and Armoury Crate software. I love the keys in particular as I am a huge fan of low-profile keys that run in stealth mode (no tactile clicking). These deliver fantastically, with clear-capped WASD keys and an overall grip to the key surface that feels comfortable and quick at the same time. Power button is up and away on the right, which will please anyone who went for the F12 button and mistakenly shut down the machine mid-game.
At the heart of it all and driving the bus is an Intel 11th gen Core i5-11260H processer, capable of 3.9GHz, and n NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050Ti discrete graphics card. It is a pretty strong setup for the money, and can handle. My son plays a lot of different titles that span the graphical gamut, from indie 8bit titles to most of the current triple A titles. Not kidding, Minecraft will be on for an hour, and he dives into Warzone or Apex Legends. You will have to tweak some of your settings depending on how demanding the title is, but you can achieve pretty consistent FPS of 50 or better on the more intensive games with stock settings, and can get it up to anywhere between 80-100 FPS if you dial down some of the graphic settings. Through a few bench tests with games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Warzone and some of the Halo suite, FPS kept up well and north of 55 in the mid-range settings. Depending on the game, I could dial it up a little higher with a tweak here or there. All in all, the laptop absolutely delivers a great gaming experience at the price point.
The only real improvement I could ask for at the cost is memory. The DDR 3200 speed 8GB stick it comes with is more than fine for browsing, streaming or desktop work, and it can manage gaming okay….but you remove any doubt of throttle and really raise the ceiling of the unit if you bump it up to 16g of dual channel RAM. At current memory costs, it’s a no-brainer to make this upgrade yourself, as the laptop is equipped with dual slots that can accommodate up to 64g total. Speaking of expandability, the laptop as configured comes with a 512GB PCI-e SSD, as well as additional slot for an additional PCI-e drive, and what looks like an open bay for a SATA SSD as well. I personally have already thrown the new RAM in, and dependent on how my son wants to manage his storage (remote or internal), there are plenty of solutions for him to grow there as well.
ASUS remains the standard-bearer in our house for computing, very excited about how this newest member will help my son grow (and have fun) as he starts his new chapter in the fall.